If there's one thing Major League Baseball hates, it's bargaining in good faith
If there's two, the second is the players!
Late last week, with negotiations seemingly at an impasse, Major League Baseball requested the aid of a federal mediator to help resolve their differences with the Players Union. The union declined the request.
The league, predictably, was not happy with that decision:
The upshot is that there will not be a mediator coming anytime soon. If there is going to be a deal that allows the season to start on time, it will come from the owners and the players sitting down at the table and hammering out a compromise in the next week or two. It’s a tough road, and both sides will certainly have to cede ground that they don’t want to cede, but there simply isn’t another way to have Opening Day as scheduled on March 31.
Folks, there is not going to be a deal that allows the season to start on time.
MLB did not request mediation from the government because they think that a mediator will get them to a deal. They requested mediation because they knew that the players would reject it, and that would poison public sentiment against them. And while there are lots of holdouts, it isn’t not working:
And it’s not just the fans that can take the owners’ side by default, but also some rather large media outlets:
It’s the players that did it! The dastardly players, in the boardroom, with the Not Doing Exactly What The Owners Wanted. Curse them!!!!
I don’t want it to seem like these opinions are universal, because they’re very much not. Twitter is replete with users who know exactly what the owners are doing, and are responding to these people with facts:
It’s really very simple. The owners instituted a lockout to jumpstart negotiations, then did jack shit for 6 weeks, then finally presented a proposal that they knew was unacceptable to the players. The players countered, the two sides had some meetings, the owners said they would come up with their own counteroffer, and then instead of doing that they called for a mediator. The last time the owners called for a mediator (in 1994), it was a bullshit stalling tactic, and every gasp of common sense and logic will tell you that this time, it is another bullshit stalling tactic.
The owners’ strategy is to wait for the players to start missing paychecks and the fans to grumble at them, and then the players will feel the heat and agree to a deal that is bad for them. That’s it, and they’re not being particularly subtle about it, and they don’t have a Plan B.
The owners, in essence, are not bargaining in good faith. They have never been bargaining in good faith, because that implies a push and pull with the players, who they would consider equals, and a willingness to compromise on a deal that is fair for both sides. If they wanted to actually negotiate, then they’d have started in early December. Or mid-December. Late December, maybe, if they had an awful lot of ducks to put in an awful lot of rows. Certainly things would have been well under way by early January.
Instead, they didn’t start talking until mid-January, and when they did, the owners didn’t even half-ass it. They sixteenth-assed it. They made a couple of proposals designed to get them laughed out of the room, and then tried to go crying to the government and got denied. Now, they’ll “regroup” in Orlando over the next few days and presumably come up with a counter.
Eventually.
After some time.
Do you see how this is all just a stall? How they’re just trying to wait out the players while maintaining the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability that they’re not waiting out the players? How they’re casting about for villains, desperately hoping that something will catch on?
How they’re trying to even induce a moral panic over steroids?
It would all be so pathetic if the large number of people who it’s working on didn’t make it Double Pathetic. Here we have the simplest, clearest, most obvious negotiating strategy imaginable, one designed to avoid negotiations until the last minute, and there are still people blaming the players.
Even setting aside the (somewhat important!) issue of how much players get paid, there are still issues that the players are demanding get solved that the fans want to get solved that the owners, if they get their way, will not solve. Stopping service time manipulation, for example, so that the best players are in the majors. If you are a fan, you should want that! You should want to be watching the best players. Removing financial incentives to tank, for another. Tanking is awful. Remember the 2017 Giants season? What if the team was just like that, for years on end, and they kept saying, “In a couple years we’ll be good.” Why watch?
But the owners like being able to manipulate service time and keep their players from hitting free agency for an extra year. The owners of bad teams like to be able to tank for years on end, collecting revenue sharing checks without putting any money into their teams, and the owners of good teams don’t hate it because that much less competition is that much less reason to spend an extra $20 million on their teams. The system that works for no one else absolutely works for the owners, and their accountants are constantly telling them that they would be fools to change it.
So it’s the players who are painted as the bad guys for pushing them to change it. The owners are somehow seen as paragons of business instead of cheap sacks of shit, and those fussy athletes are the ones holding up business. Never mind that the owners don’t want today’s deal because they are convinced that tomorrow’s will be even more favorable for them. They’ll cost us a month of the season, and somehow a huge portion of baseball fandom won’t blame them for it.
Pretty sweet gig, if we’re being honest.