When you are ultra-rich, you think you can do anything you want. It’s basically the reason that, after you become rich, you keep working hard to become ultra-rich. If you want an island, you get an island. If you want an army of servants, you get an army of servants. If you want to fund a lawsuit that kills a website, you fund a lawsuit that kills a website. The world is your oyster, just how you like it and just how you planned it. The system works.
There are always complications, of course. Maybe there were already people on the island. Maybe you underpay your servants, and the ungrateful wretches keep leaving. Maybe you have to live your life being Peter Thiel, Huge Piece Of Shit. Whatever your action was, it will have at least one consequence if not several consequences.
The owners bet a lot on breaking the players’ union. They strangled fan goodwill towards the sport, and they pushed a group of players who already were ticked about having been pushed around, and they did it all against a backdrop of mass unemployment and social unrest targeting the foundations of American society. They did it to try to cap costs for the year, both in salary and possible liability payouts, and to get expanded playoffs (which make them more money), and to enforce their will.
The owners are ultra-rich, after all, and when you are ultra-rich, you think you can do anything you want.
But their attempt to break the union, which failed, will have consequences. The owners inspired solidarity in the union ahead of the labor fight that’s coming after the 2021 season. The labor dispute forced outsiders to really look hard at the business side of baseball, and see a bunch of lying billionaires in charge, assuming they’d be granted anything they wanted. Sunlight is not as good a disinfectant as actual disinfectant is, but it sure does make you think about things, and if you’ve been paying any attention at all, what you think is, “Owners are constantly lying about money.”
Marc Carig said it best, I think:
These are the consequences from picking a fight in order to save a little money on salaries. There would have also been consequences to rolling over — the owners would have felt like fools — or getting a fair deal by negotiating in good faith — the owners would have felt like fools. But in this case, the consequences were entirely foreseeable and far outweigh any positives — again, saving a little money — from their decision.
There will also be consequences from starting the season.
Look, I like baseball. It is difficult to write a baseball newsletter with no new American baseball, and I am doing my best. But as COVID-19 numbers are dramatically climbing, and we have no national strategy to stop them, it is obvious that the consequence of baseball restarting will be that a bunch of players get the coronavirus and also that they will spread it to every city they visit before they get tested.
Just as the owners have steadfastly refused to reckon with or acknowledge the consequences of picking a fight with the union, they are also ignoring the consequences of playing professional sports when a pandemic is raging in a country that knows what to do but doesn’t want to do it (the pandemic still being wildly out of control, by the way, is the consequence of our national inaction). It will make them look bad, it will cost them money, and it will very likely mean that any hype about a season gets totally wasted as said season goes down the drain.
This is all predictable and yet there is no plan for it. This is the natural endpoint of both the decision to restart and also having a sport run by and catering to the ultra-rich. They will do dumb things because there is a small amount of money in it for them despite all the evidence and logic demanding that you don’t. They will either blindly assume or perhaps just hope that they will not face the consequences of their actions.
They think they can do anything they want, and they are right. They also think that things will be fine no matter what they do. That one’s not such a sure bet.