San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Character test for baseball owners
Of this you can be certain: At the Old Sportswriters Ranch where we are put to pasture, there is no chatter about the businesses we ran, the people we hired, the tough financial decisions we made or the stress of seeing the bottom line turn red.
We are not entrepreneurs. We do not know how to run a successful business, and most of us still in newspapers don’t work for one anymore.
So it’s hard for us LCDstained wretches to understand the calculus that majorleague owners have computed during the pandemic that seems heartless from the outside, such as furloughs of loyal and trusted scouts, cuts in modest stipends for minorleague players and, in particular, the recent firing of more than 1,000 wannabe bigleaguers.
Loyal readers know I have no issue with capitalism. When fans bellyache about the Giants letting go this player or not signing that one, I routinely argue that they are a business. If you don’t like their product, don’t buy it.
Even majorleague franchises that have the ability to print money want to run their businesses like, well, businesses. The owners hand down budgets to every department, including baseball operations. The Giants give Farhan Zaidi a budget. He knows what he can and cannot spend.
But the recent culling of up to 50 minorleaguers per team just seems too pennywise during a global pandemic.
This is the rare time to say these owners have wealth, and during extraordinary circumstances, they need to ignore their old Wharton textbooks and spend a few more dollars that will mean so much to the hired help, even if they need to dig further into their own pockets.
We present the Washington Nationals, who won the 2019 World Series, which brought their owner significant prestige and a rise in revenue that, granted, will be more than
The Twins and Royals, neither of whom have the Giants’ revenue or market value, opted against similar cuts, which only underscores that all bigleague teams have the means to keep these players on retainer.
consumed by the money lost because of the coronavirus.
The Nationals last week trimmed the $400 weekly stipend they have paid their minorleaguers by 25%, to $300, then were shamed into reversing course after closer Sean Doolittle revealed he and his teammates would use their own money to make the minorleaguers whole (or as whole as you can be for $400 a week).
The Lerner family that owns the Nats is worth an estimated $4.4 billion. Assuming the Nats had 300 minorleaguers, the $100 weekly cuts would have saved the Lerners roughly $400,000 through Labor Day (the end of the minorleague season). That’s not nothing, but the $100 out of each player’s pocket would have been a big something at a time of record unemployment. Turning to the Giants. They have been more generous than most during the pandemic. They resisted the urge to furlough fulltime staff, including amateur scouts who will have no amateurs to scout this year. They ordered pay cuts throughout the building, but they were progressive ones. Lowerpaid earners take less of a hit.
I’ve had worker bees send me unsolicited notes saying they feel fortunate to work for the Giants.
Last week, though, the Giants joined almost every team in baseball by trimming their minorleague rosters. They cut 20 players Thursday to go with 17 others they had released since March with no publicity. All lost their $400 weekly stipends.
I interviewed one of the 20, pitcher Brandon Lawson, who did not want to sound critical of the organization but acknowledged his surprise that a franchise this successful and financially sound thought it necessary to save what amounts to pennies.
If the Giants pay their minorleaguers from now through Labor Day — which they have not yet guaranteed — the 20 who were cut Thursday would cost the club about $100,000.
Team officials privately gave me all sorts of reasons why the cuts made sense. These players had little chance to reach the majors. Teams have to trim their systems because onefourth of minorleague teams will be eliminated next year. In some cases, the players needed a push out the door toward another line of work.
All this would make sense in a normal year. This isn’t a normal year.
The Twins and Royals, neither of whom have the Giants’ revenue or market value, opted against similar cuts, which only underscores that all bigleague teams have the means to keep these players on retainer.
The Giants have wealthy owners. I know enough economics to agree that wealth and the bottom line are not the same.
Seems to me this would be a good time for the Johnson family and other investors who have a lot of scratch, who have been generous in so many ways over the years, to stretch that munificence an inch farther and restore the $400 weekly stipends to all 37 minorleague players who lost their jobs.
If these players need to hear that the Giants do not see their futures in baseball, the medicine would go down easier with a few dollars in their pockets to pay rent and buy groceries.