MLB’S owners to blame for endangering season
It’s appalling that they’re expecting players to shoulder the losses during the lean times
I covered the last World Series, so it’s starting to feel like I might have witnessed the last Major League Baseball that will be played for quite some time.
It was, broadly, a compelling series, one that went seven games and included some late-inning comebacks.
It was also a tepid slog. Two nine-inning games lasted more than four hours. Only one took less than three-and-a-half hours.
The long contests are a direct result of strategic evolutions in the game that have brought more pitching changes and more pitches per batter. That is, MLB has been confronted by a crisis: The games have become increasingly boring precisely because every team is trying to win the same way. It’s a bottle that cannot be uncorked.
Or perhaps baseball has found the solution to boring baseball: no baseball at all.
While it has seemed for weeks now like MLB and its players’ union would eventually hit on a satisfactory number of games for a shortened 2020 season, even as they kept exchanging proposals that the other party summarily ignored, commissioner Rob Manfred said Monday that he’s no longer confident there will be baseball this year.
This is quite an adjustment from just days ago, when the commissioner said he was 100 per cent certain that games would be played in 2020.
Manfred has properly taken no end of crap for this reversal, although the context of his comments matters. He declared that baseball would come back last week while at the MLB draft, a televised event that was naturally full of good vibes and optimism. By Monday, with the MLBPA having said on the weekend it was done exchanging proposals and that it was up to MLB to set the terms of the upcoming season, the league was down to the only move it had left: threatening no baseball at all unless the players agreed to waive their right to future legal action.
So, when Manfred was asked during an interview on an ESPN special about the prospects for his sport in 2020, he couldn’t very well sound hopeful again. After all, his lawyers had just told the union that the season was about to be cancelled unless they agreed to the league’s terms.
An empty threat? Maybe. A stall tactic? Possibly. The longer this stretches on, the more likely that MLB will be able to proceed with its preference to play as few games as possible — and to pay its players for as few games as possible — while still having a season. It’s quite something that amid all of the challenges that baseball has faced in recent years, from a fan base that skews older to a lack of African-american stars, from the length of the games to cheating scandals that have undermined the integrity of those games, Major League Baseball has still managed to take the opportunity to fill a gaping hole in the sporting calendar and blow it up quite so spectacularly.
And it is Manfred and his bosses in the owners’ suites who deserve the vast majority of the blame for what has taken place so far.
At the risk of repeating myself, it’s the teams that are billion-dollar enterprises wrapped up in multibillion-dollar corporations, and are thus positioned to absorb whatever losses they might incur in a pandemic-affected season. There are, of course, many players with giant contracts who will elicit little public sympathy on salary givebacks, but there are many more with relatively modest salaries, and more importantly, short careers. The average player who makes it to the majors won’t last even five seasons there, and career length has also been trending down as teams look to replace veterans with cheap rookies.
But the part that’s most appalling about MLB’S position is the idea that it’s up to their employees to help make up for the lost revenues of a 2020 without fans in seats. These teams make no attempt to share the extra profits of a good season with their players.
Consider that World Series again. The Washington Nationals went from a cursed franchise that couldn’t get out of the first round to a team of destiny marked by thrilling comebacks and also Baby Shark. The city was mad for the Nats, and the ballpark was awash in red jerseys, as was the surrounding part of D.C. before and after the games there.
The team had just lost slugger Bryce Harper in free agency because it didn’t want to get into a bidding war for his services. He was replaced in the outfield by Juan Soto, who led the Nationals in hits, home runs, and RBIS in the World Series, during which he turned 21 years old. He made US$578,000 last season. After those post-season heroics, as one of the best young hitters in the game, he was scheduled to make US$629,400 this year.
But that’s the system. Players may outperform their contracts for years, but they can make it up at the back of their career. A young player like Soto may help his team make vast sums of money — and he surely did — but the team has no obligation to share more of it.
The owner assumes the risk of owning the team in its lean years, and it gets all the spoils in the good times. That’s the deal.
At least, it was the deal.