22 months ago, two weeks into the 2020 season that would have happened if COVID hadn’t, I wrote this newsletter, lamenting the things we would have already seen. Of course, we didn’t see those things that year — or at least not for a few months — because there was a pandemic and whatnot. Nothing you can do about that.
Right now, we are overwhelmingly likely to face the same thing, only this time it’s a choice. The owners are making a choice to deny baseball from us if the players don’t agree to demands that are bad for them, and the players aren’t agreeing to those demands.
I know how a person can physically type words blaming both sides for the situation. I understand the concept behind putting your fingers on keys that produce certain letters on your computer screen. That is a question of mechanical proficiency and turns out to be quite simple. As for the mental justification, well, life is a rich tapestry and whatnot.
Because the owners are choosing this. Depriving you of baseball is a choice that they are actively making because they think it will make them more money in the long run. Regardless of whether negotiations are going well or the union’s representatives are asking too much or anything like that, the owners did not need to implement the lockout. It was their choice back in December, and it has remained their choice during the two and a half months it’s been going on.
There was no requirement for a lockout when the Collective Bargaining Agreement ended. There is no requirement for a lockout to continue into Day 77 when 76 days have already gone by without deals. There is only one reason that baseball players are not currently in Arizona and Florida, beginning their earnest practice to one day play full games of practice baseball which will eventually get them in shape for full games of not-practice baseball. Only one side has chosen this.
That side — the owners, in case you’ve forgotten, whose lockout vote was unanimous — could be facing some related legal issues soon, by the way. The Dodgers and White Sox share a Spring Training complex in Glendale, Arizona which the city paid $300 million for, and each team pays $1 a year in rent. The city’s logic is that they will recoup the costs in tourism revenue. Well, funny story about that tourism revenue when there aren’t any games: it dries up. I pushed some beads around on an abacus and double checked the numbers myself and it’s true. No one is traveling to Arizona for a Spring Training whose start date is still, two days after the original start date, a mystery.
Depending on some contractual language, the teams could be in trouble. According the LA Times article that is my source for all of this, the Angels have a pretty airtight contract with the city of Tempe, but the Dodgers and White Sox, well, there’s some wiggle room there. If things break a certain way (the way of continuing to have no baseball for a while and tourists not coming in whenever they do start playing), that wiggle room could lead to a lawsuit from the city of Glendale against the Dodgers and White Sox.
From Bryan Hull, who teaches contract law at Loyola Law School and is quoted in the LA Times article:
“Normally, someone is not excused under a contract if the reason for the problem is of their own doing,” Hull said. “If it’s a labor dispute, and if it’s under the control of management whether players are able to play, you can argue that, because the owners are responsible, they are not excused because of this particular labor dispute.”
The owners didn’t face any legal consequences for poor Spring Training attendance over the last couple of years because none of them created and released the coronavirus (that we know of, and I’m keeping my eye on you, John Henry).
Now, though, circumstances have changed. This was always avoidable; this was always optional. The owners chose not to avoid it. The owners went with the lockout option. We all would have seen pitchers and catchers report on Tuesday. It couldn’t be more clear whose fault it is we didn’t see that, and the owners are costing themselves, the players, and now multiple cities in Arizona a whole lot of money.