Owners, players forgot who pays bills
The billionaires and millionaires in Major League Baseball have spent the last three months fighting about money.
You’d think that during a pandemic, the contention between Major League Baseball’s owners and players would have been about health and safety, but no, it was all about the Benjamins, baby.
MLB owners voted unanimously to proceed with the 2020 season under the terms of their March 26 agreement with the players association, the league said in a statement Monday night, after the union’s executive board voted down MLB’s latest offer of a 60game season with expanded playoffs.
The owners’ vote now allows commissioner Rob Manfred to implement a schedule of his
choosing — likely between 50 and 60 games.
Manfred asked that the players association provide two pieces of information by today, according to an ESPN report. The first being whether players will be able to report to training within seven days, by July 1. The second is whether the union agrees to the health and safety protocols necessary to provide the best opportunity to complete the regular season and playoffs.
Yes, we’ll get baseball this year. That’s good news. But it will be played among dirty laundry. Good lucky ignoring the stains the sport has picked up over the last few months.
Everyone wants to take sides in this battle, and I will too: The owners were being greedy. The players were being greedy. Divvy out blame at your own discretion — all I know is that it was unbecoming for both sides, and it was unquestionably bad for the long-term viability of the sport.
But what truly bothers me is that the source of all that money — the countless millions the players and owners were fighting over — was forgotten.
Amid this battle, which was made out by both the league and the players to be existential, when was anyone going to think about the actual lifeblood of the sport: the fans?
Feel free to call it self interest — it is — but that’s my side in all of this.
Yes, despite what these leagues and the players believe, 100 percent of all baseball revenue comes from fans. Some of it is indirect, sure, but MLB, the NBA, the NFL, even the Professional Bowling Association, are entertainment products that derive their operating revenue from folks shelling over their hard-earned money for tickets, jerseys, hats, cable packages, and MLB.TV.
But, as if the 4 1/2-hour nine-inning games and consistently increasing prices didn’t already tell you, baseball has forgotten who pays its bills.
And while I, a lifelong lover of the sport — and still a paying customer to both Bay Area teams — will be there for Opening Day (in a work capacity) and will likely enjoy every chaotic minute of the demolition-derby style shortened season (one that could see both the Giants and A’s make the playoffs), it will no doubt be challenging to compartmentalize this fight that has raged over the last few weeks and is only an opening salvo to an even larger battle that looms in December 2021.
Why is it that our love of the sport seems to trump that of those who are entrusted with taking care of it at the professional level.
Oh, and by the way, the while the owners and the players wanted to hash things out, they only created more animosity in the process — not one of the league’s major issues was resolved over the last three months of “negotiations.”
Make no mistake about it, the league is still going to shut down — probably for longer than three months — after the 2021 season, giving baseball two unforced work stoppages in the span of three years.
That’s just bad business.
This, while it purges both steady and casual fans amid the most crowded entertainment landscape in the history of humanity. Don’t worry, though — owners are charging fans more to make up for the losses.
The league had an opportunity — health and safety guidelines permitting — to win back some of those fans in the last few months. Baseball, a naturally socially distanced sport, should have been the first professional game to return to the field this summer. Given the current timeline, it seems as if they will start a day or two before the NBA — a game where players trade sweat inside air-conditioned arenas.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been terrible, but one of the few silver linings is that it has removed a great deal of pretense from the world. Anyone who cared to look deeper knew that this labor showdown between the players and owners was inevitable. But now, without the song and dance, it’s been laid bare for all to see.
And, geez, it is an ugly look.