In my particular ecosystem of baseball fans, everyone knows that the owners are to blame for the first week of the season being canceled. In others, people implicitly blame both sides by saying something like “I just wish they would put their differences aside and make a deal,” and there are still others who are fully on the side of the owners, either because they’re sockpuppets or bootlickers.
I don’t care to find out which.
But there are people out there — plenty of people — who don’t look at the lockout and see the owners being unreasonable. There are people who think if only the players had tried harder, wanted to make a deal more, then they’d have got something done.
That’s true, in a way. The owners did make an offer and if the players had said yes, then that would be the end of it.
The owners’ offer was also a total garbagefest. Just pure crap. Totally worthless.
Do I know what was “in” the deal? No, not fully, though enough details have gotten out that we at least have a decent picture:
But without more information, how can I know for sure that the offer was bad? It’s simple. I know one kind of thing that was in the deal, and that’s enough. Take it away, Blue Jays pitcher Ross Stripling, talking about the discussions happening after midnight on Tuesday morning:
“It got to be like 12:30 and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before,” Stripling said. “They were trying to sneak things through us, it was like they think we’re dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something ... They did exactly what we thought they would do. They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed, and then they tried to sneak some shit past us at that deadline and we were ready for it.”
You don’t have to be a genius to be able to put 2 and 2 together here:
On Tuesday night, as the clock ticked down towards the first arbitrary MLB-imposed deadline, there was optimism in the air:
And then, it vanished. As if MLB saw progress being made — not great progress, but enough — and then derailed it by bringing up a pitch clock and banning defensive shifts at the last minute. As if they never really wanted a deal. As if this was all for show.
The owners are comfortable sacrificing April — they have been saying that loud and clear for several days now — because attendance is low in April and really, the whole point of this for them is to get the season to the playoffs, where the real cash starts to come in. If the season starts in mid-May, sure, they’ll lose some TV money this year, but they’ll be allowed (possibly even required!) to pay the players so much less money over the course of the contract that it’ll more than even out.
The players are comfortable sacrificing April because to play in April they’d have to accept a bad deal, which they don’t want to do. It’s not rocket science.
So that leaves the fans sitting, watching, waiting for someone to give in so we can have baseball. It will not be worth it for whoever blinks first; they’ll make less money and then, after some fans like them generally more and express it on social media, that feeling will fade and everyone will get the credit for biting assorted bullets and getting things done.
And yet someone has to. My prediction for the last several months has been that the first game of the season will take place around mid-May and I still don’t think that’s too far off. For now we wait, annoyed and impatient. Baseball should have started by now, dammit. We should have been well on our way to being bored by Spring Training. Instead, here we are, waiting for things to change. It will be a while.