So how's that lockout going, Robbo?
Rob. The Robster. Rob-o-rama. Apologies for making you think about Rob Schneider, unless you're too young for that.
One thing that everybody always agrees is fun is when a guy lies to you, and you’re like, “You’re definitely lying right now,” and then the guy is like, “No WAY. I am NOT lying, bro!” and then literally every subsequent action he takes not only confirms your belief that he’s lying, but reveals new, heretofore unsuspected ways in which he had also been lying the entire time, to your face, because he’s an asshole.
People love that. It’s the greatest.
This is the secret of how Rob Manfred built his massive coalition of popular support.
On December 2, in his letter to baseball fans, Rob Manfred wrote this:
I want to explain to you how we got here and why we have to take this action today. Simply put, we believe that an offseason lockout is the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season. We hope that the lockout will jumpstart the negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time.
We always knew that the first sentence was a lie. The owners, as I previously discussed, did not have to lock out the players and also are fucking terrible. They could have continued negotiating, this time in good faith, and did not have to take that action.
We also always knew that the second sentence was a lie. The best mechanism to protect the 2022 season would be to not implicitly threaten the 2022 season. Work with the Players Union instead of against them, find the best agreement you can, and then sign it and play a full season of baseball
We always suspected that the third sentence was a lie. Sure, it doesn’t actually make sense, but Manfred said that the owners hoped the lockout would jumpstart negotiations, and that’s pretty hard to disprove. You can hope for something stupid without that hope being a lie, even if you don’t actually think it’s going to happen.
Major League Baseball and the Players Association are unlikely to talk core economics until January, people with knowledge of the talks said.
Thanks, Evan Drellich of The Athletic! Now we know that third sentence was definitely a lie. Because the owners didn’t hope the lockout would jumpstart negotiations. If they hoped that, they would start negotiation, you know, within the month.
Of course, the players and the owners disagree on whose fault the lack of communication is. The players say that they made a proposal that the owners never countered, so it’s the owners’ turn to propose something. The owners say that they made a proposal and if only the dumb players had accepted it, they’d have been most of the way to an agreement.
One thing everyone agrees on, though, is that they won’t be sitting down at a table anytime soon. From Drellich:
But why aren’t the sides locked in a room now, trying to hammer out a deal almost every day this month? People with knowledge of the process said the sides would likely be saying the same things to each other over and over. There’s little compelling them to change their positions at this point (save for the damage of having a sport that’s frozen, but the owners were, clearly, willing to take on that risk).
So it’s almost like, and follow me on this, the owners choosing to lock out the players in December…didn’t create any leverage to jumpstart negotiations whatsoever. And they don’t want negotiations to jumpstart. They never wanted that because they think they’ll get a better deal if they take this thing as deep into the offseason as possible. So they certainly never hoped that negotiations would jumpstart, because that would be bad for them. So there’s the lie in sentence 3, present and accounted for.
I don’t expect this to be a great revelation, Chazz Palminteri dropping the coffee cup or whatever. It’s just a reminder that to baseball’s owners in general and to Rob Manfred in particular, lying comes as easily as breathing. To them, the purpose of words is not to communicate; it is to advertise.
The same way that Southerners convinced the rest of the country that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery by repeating the lie for like 50 straight years until people took the idea seriously, which they now have for the last century, Manfred is going to say that the owners are generous and kind and the players are betraying them. He will lie obviously and casually, overtly and subtly, all in an attempt to move the court of public opinion just a little bit towards him every time.
I mean, he wouldn’t just say things, right? There has to be some tiny kernel of truth buried in there, right? This thing kinda makes sense, and that thing almost makes sense, and the players are getting millions of dollars to play a kids’ game, and I’d do it for free, and how dare they not accept whatever offer is on the table? How dare they?
Except he would just say things. He would just blatantly lie to your face. The owners don’t have to have a point, not one single good point that you really have to think about. Manfred got the commissioner’s job because of his history negotiating management-friendly labor contracts, and he sure as hell didn’t get good at that by being honest.
In one short, 60-word paragraph, written in plain English, we have found three clear lies. You can’t debate or argue these three lies; they simply are. It should have been easy to write that paragraph without lying, but it wasn’t something the commissioner could do two weeks ago.
This is how much you can trust Rob Manfred: if he says 20 words to you, assume one of them is a slap in the face.