Checking in on CBA negotiations
I'll warn you now, the title is at least 35% a fakeout. Don't be mad.
It’s been three weeks since I checked in on baseball’s labor negotiations, so let’s take a look at how things are going. Take it away, The Athletic!
Ah, so exactly how I expected. Outstanding.
Yes, the two sides are at the exact impasse that they were always bound to end up at, where owners insist they’re offering the players a better deal and the players insisting that, hey, no you’re not. The truth lies, as always, entirely with the side that has fewer billionaires on it, because billionaires are terrible and shouldn’t exist and there is no circumstance under which you should trust a single word that comes out of one of their mouths.
In that Athletic article, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich identify five economic sticking points between the two sides: minimum salaries, arbitration and pre-arbitration bonus pools, the luxury tax, a potential draft lottery, and service time manipulation. Each side has made proposals addressing each of those issues, and the two sides are both unimpressed with the other’s offer.
But before I get any deeper into it, I want to take a look at a piece of language I’ve been using. Did you notice it yet? “The two sides,” I’ve been saying. This is a phrase that I used without thinking the first time, and then noticed, and then was annoyed at myself. Because “the two sides” carries an implication that both the owners and the players are equal partners in this thing, jockeying to control what’s going on.
And yet, that’s not really accurate, is it? Because if there is no baseball because the owners are being unreasonable and the players aren’t caving, then the players will still get blamed more by the general public. They get paid to play a kids’ game, and they’re choosing not to play? Sure, the owners are also keeping baseball from the public, but they’re savvy businessmen, doing savvy businessmen things, and that should be expected from them.
And if it was the other way around? If the players were demanding at least partial ownership of every major league team or something like that? Well first off, that would rule and they should do that, but also they would be ridiculous radicals who just don’t know how things work, while the owners would be reasonable stewards of the game, bravely holding their ground just to keep the lights on.
The players are not going to win in the court of public opinion, because the court of public opinion is controlled by the owners. MLB Network is part of MLB, which is run by the owners. NESN is owned by the group that runs the Red Sox, and the YES Network is 26% owned by the Yankees, and NBC Sports Bay Area is partially owned by the Giants, and so on and so on.
The people on those channels will subtly and not-subtly take the owners’ side more often than not. If you’re a hardened cynic, it’s because they’re sellouts who care more about money than their integrity. If you’re a hardened cynic who is a little more generous, it's because their best job option was in an environment suffused with the mandates of capital, so much so that earnestly believing those mandates becomes a survival strategy. If the entire world around you is saying that only having the top 3 picks in a draft lottery will address tanking, then why wouldn’t you say it too? I mean, everyone knows it’s true.
And then those opinions come into your home, and they become your opinions, your thoughts, part of the air you breathe. When I say “the two sides,” it’s easy to imagine the owners on one side and the players on the other, and it’s even easier to associate yourself with the owners. They’ll be around forever, you know, and they’re invested in the future of the team, unlike those greedy players who are just chasing every last dollar they can find, even if it’s in (blech) Houston.
Never mind that the entire point of owning a sports team this century is to leverage that money into building new income streams outside of sports, as Matt Winkelman pointed out. For the Washington Nationals, that’s their new sportsbook; for Frank McCourt, it was the Dodger Stadium parking lots; for the Giants, it’s their Mission Rock housing development.
Baseball owners are separating their own incomes from the fortunes of the team as much as possible, so that even if the players do make modest gains in these negotiations — even if they do get the luxury tax set at $245 million this year instead of $214 million, or if they get that $775,000 minimum salary instead of the league’s offer of $615,000 for first years players, it won’t matter. The players’ share of baseball revenue might increase a tiny amount, but the Giants players’ share of revenue from San Francisco Giants Baseball LLP will dramatically decrease because their revenue will skyrocket in ways that are totally separate from the team or the sport.
And so you look at all those factors, and you look at how little the players are asking to change the sport, how in the grand scheme of things their asks are incredibly minor (and probably good for the game overall), and then you see that in the first comment thread on that Athletic story, you’re still getting this:
That’s depressing. It’s sad. It’s the kind of thing that would make you lose faith in humanity, if you hadn’t already lost it all by paying any attention to anything over the last two years. And it’s not even the worst comment.
Even The Athletic — a paid subscription site with presumably well educated readers who just read how the owners’ proposal is mildly appealing on its face but actually regressive when you dig into the nuts and bolts of it — has bootlickers for billionaires in the comments section. There are other commenters too, better commenters, but the anti-player voices are loud and they regurgitate the same opinions they always say and they do not stop.
I don’t see an answer to this. The owners will push the players to the point when games get cancelled and a lot of people will blame the players. It is how things work. It is not how things should work, but I don’t get to decide that.