If you read Jeff Passan’s latest piece over at ESPN+ (You have to pay to read it, or Google “read espn+ article for free.” I make no moral judgments), you’ll know that Opening Day very well could have not happened. The league league imposed multiple deadlines that passed without a deal. Plenty of players thought that the offer they eventually accepted wasn’t good enough, and if there’d been just a few more of them, maybe they’d have 12 Angry Menned their way to not ratifying the deal.
JACK FLAHERTY: A six-team lottery? Does that address our tanking concerns in any material way?
AUSTIN SLATER: Uh…
GERRIT COLE: Is it gonna work, Austin? How is it gonna work? How could it possibly work?
AUSTIN SLATER: IT WON’T OH GOD IT WON’T AND WE ALL KNOW IT.
But! That didn’t happen, so here we are.
It’s a strange feeling, because in a lot of ways, it’s not good that the players took the deal. Yes, I enjoy baseball and I am glad it’s back, but the owners’ goal in the negotiations was to preserve a status quo in which they can get money out of the game without putting money in. They want guaranteed income, even for garbage teams that don’t try. This is an awful status quo, and as the Reds and A’s have shown this offseason, it’s not going anywhere, even with some concessions in the new CBA.
On the other hand, a protracted lockout would have absolutely dampened fan interest in baseball, and baseball doesn’t have nearly as much undampened fan interest as it did a couple decades ago. The NFL is the King Of Sports. The NBA is the Cool Kid Who Will Share Weed With You Of Sports. Formula 1 has a Netflix show that half of your friends watch. Baseball is left telling anyone who’ll listen, “At least we’re not as niche as hockey, right?”
That is not a strong position to be in.
Then you add to that that the entire point of baseball is to entertain baseball fans. Sure, from a business perspective or just a “I like baseball and want other people to like baseball like I do!” perspective, it’s good to grow the game and have more fans, but even ignoring that, the entire point is for people to have entertainment.
By holding out for a better deal, the players would cause the owners to cancel a month’s worth of games, and that’s an awful lot of entertainment to lose. Maybe the future product would be marginally better, whenever it came, but enough to cancel out that hit? It’s real, real debatable.
One of the things I firmly believe is that if you expose people to baseball, a good percentage of them will like it, get more interested, and watch more baseball on theri own. It won’t be all of them, but it doesn’t have to be. Everything doesn’t have to be for everyone. Losing games would have meant not only not exposing new people to baseball, but losing some of the ones that are already here, and just want a sport that reliably shows up every year. People just want to be able to watch a baseball game sometimes.
Aw dammit.
All the virtues of making a deal and allowing people to watch baseball means nothing when they have to jump through hoop after hoop to do it.
The one job you have as a league office, MLB, is making it easy for people to watch your baseball games on television or online or on their phones or wherever they want to watch them. And MLB, the anthropomorphized corporation which is certainly personally reading this, you’re doing a shitty, shitty job.
Your games are spread across like five cable channels and three streaming services. I can’t just buy something online that lets me watch all the games. I keep having to sign up for new things, pay for new things, consume new things. Why am I paying for NBC Sports Bay Area when there are gonna be a bunch of games that aren’t on it? Why would I pay for Peacock Premium (or whatever it’s called) for just a few games? Why wouldn’t I simply…not watch those games?
I assure you, if I have a problem where I have to pay for a new streaming service to watch games, my solution will be to not watch those games. And as baseball fans go, my commitment to watching games is somewhat above average.
So yes, I am excited about Opening Day. Yes, I am happy that there will be a full 162 game season this year, despite my reservations about who the money is going to. And yes, I will watch as many games as possible that don’t involve me paying extra money for an entire new streaming service just to watch that one game.
But man, the business of baseball can get real bleak. It’s something I’ll mostly forget when I’m watching Kruk and Kuip, or listening to Jon and Dave, but it’ll always be there, ever present. I care for baseball. I don’t care for the people who run it.
Anyway, go Giants!!!!