Dear MLB owners, May an umbrella deploy in your ass
Apparently that's a real Lithuanian insult. Fun fact!
None of this was necessary.
That’s the most important thing to remember, thinking about the last three months of the MLB lockout. It never had to happen. There was no objective need to have an orgy of free agent signings at the end of November, then only news about no news for the next month and a half before halfhearted negotiations started in January and the oh-shit-my-12-page-term-paper-is-due-tomorrow-I-should-really-read-the-book energy hit in mid-February.
As of this writing, the players and the owners do not have a deal. Maybe they will by the time this goes up. Maybe they will by the end of the day today. Maybe they won’t come to a deal until the end of March, if not longer. I don’t know. Who’s to say?
Here’s what I do know: the owners didn’t start actually negotiating until fucking yesterday. When it came to talking about the big issues in ways that were actually on the path to Dealville — specifically the luxury tax and the pool of money that will go to elite pre-arbitration players — the owners essentially did not move one inch until February 28, the date of their self-imposed deadline to start the season on time.
They’re comfortable not starting the season on time, by the way. Just to let everyone know, they’re cool with that. They can wait this all out.
So be aware that they’ll just not do anything until they feel like doing anything. You know, whenever that may be.
That could be today. It could have been yesterday, after I went to bed. It could be April 15. There’s no real way of knowing.
But here’s something we can know: the owners are absolutely useless.
The aim of the owners is to crush the players beneath their boot, because the players are common scum and the owners are rich and important and have excellent player-crushing boots to show off. I mean, why even buy the boots if you’re not going to use them for player-crushing? Makes no sense.
Every bit of this lockout, from soup to nuts, has been about the owners amping up the brinksmanship as much as possible in order to force the players into a worse deal. And for what? What does anyone who is not a baseball owner gain from the baseball owners getting a larger share of the pie?
Absolutely nothing. If the players get a larger share of the pie, then that encourages future top athletes to go into baseball and increases the future quality of the sport, and it means that current athletes feel more secure in their futures. If owners get a larger share, then the next time one of them sells, the billionaire who purchases his team in a few years will pay somewhat more money.
The players, as Jeff Passan pointed out above, are necessary for the game because they are the game. The owners are leeches, and the lockout was them all latching on to a victim and getting as much blood out as they could. In a few years, when it’s time for the next round of CBA negotiations, they’ll do it again.
This is their modus operandi, and we’re all paying the cost. Sure, some might argue that we’re paying the cost of everyone’s intransigence, including the Players Association’s, but in reality, if your sport is making way more money then you owe the athlets more than table scraps. They are the product. They are the sport. Show them that you understand that or the sport will die.
The short term outlook of baseball is fine. The long term is not, and every labor fight like this just makes it look that much worse. There are more baseball fans in the last generation than the next one, and as long as the checks keep flowing today, nobody’s going to worry about tomorrow.
Or, to put it another way:
Maybe things will be fine this time. In the course of my writing this, Bob Nightengale has suggested that a deal isn’t far off, and as we all know, nothing bad has ever come of believing a Bob Nightengale tweet. But why would next time be any better?
The owners keep pushing because that’s who they are. They have a lot, they have deals to bring in way, way more, and they are offended that the players want a piece of those deals, when those deals only exist because of the product the players embody. The players get a certain amount of money, and all of the rest that comes in should come to the owners, the owners think.
This is a destructive way to think. It is a way to make enemies out of those people who you need to work with if you are going to produce something worthwhile. But it’s not a financially ruinous way to think, because producing something worthwhile isn’t the point. The owners can continue the lockout into the season or not, because they are very rich. They cannot continue the lockout into the season if they care about baseball’s best interests. Good thing for them, they don’t, and everyone knows it.