The biggest obstacle to baseball coming back this year is the owners
It probably should be health concerns. It's not! It's rich people.
It’s time for everyone’s favorite part of sports: labor negotiations! The coronavirus has meant that the sport will look different this year than ever before, if it happens at all, and the owners have to negotiate with the Players Union to figure out what that will look like.
The owners publicly floated a plan with some pay cuts for players beyond the already agreed upon pay cuts — in March, the two sides agreed on a plan where the players would receive their salaries, prorated for the number of games that their teams played — and it was met with skepticism and hostility from everyone who saw it. So when the owners met with the union to make a firm offer, they took the reasonable step of cutting salaries more and making up for it with some vague notion about playoff money.
What do you have to say about this, Cy Young and World Series winning pitcher Max Scherzer?
Ah. Things are going well.
Brandon Crawford saw that, by the way. He retweeted it, presumably in support.
Evan Longoria, as of 10 PM last night, had not retweeted it, but he did retweet this the day before:
In it, Roger Ehrenberg, some venture capital guy with a Twitter account, basically says that the owners are trying to privatize profits and nationalize losses, if the nation were only made up of baseball players. So, when times are good, the owners make more money, alone. When times are bad, the owners and the players all lose money. The interesting thing here isn’t the argument (though it’s fine), it’s that Evan Longoria retweeted it.
And, of course, there was this:
The actual financial savings here are not particularly large for the kind of person who can own a major league baseball team. The reason you do this is that you think minor league baseball players are dogshit, and deserve to be dogshit, and they can go fuck themselves, and there’s nothing they can do about it.
Players tend to notice that kind of thing.
This is how the owners would treat major league players if they could, and that is what the players are seeing. To the owners, MLB is a cash-printing business that has the side effect of producing baseball. When cash is not being printed, the baseball is pointless. It is the slag that comes from refining ore. The point is the money, and anything else is just a byproduct.
This is how they will always see it. This is why Rob Manfred, someone who does not seem to particularly like baseball, is the commissioner. His background is in labor negotiations; the owners want someone to “negotiate” with labor, meaning they want someone to beat labor half to death with a shovel, make them dig their own graves with it, then finish the job.
This will make the owners more money tomorrow, when they no longer have to pay their now dead gravediggers.
It’s not necessarily a good long term strategy to maximize current profits at the expense of labor relations: this will alienate players and take money from them, which will cause fewer people to want to play baseball, the quality of the product will go down, and other sports, already with popularity (the NFL) or cool factor (the NBA) or decades of hearing it’s inevitable (soccer) will be more attractive to both fans and athletes.
It is a safer bet to add value rather than subtract it, to have peace and stability on compromised terms instead of a dictatorship on one party’s. But McKinsey says that means teams aren’t being efficient, and the rich guys in charge are seeing their friends in banking get 12% ROI while baseball teams are stuck at a measly 10.8%, and what do you expect them to do? That’s 1.2% profit you could get by just destroying the foundation of the sport. You’d be stupid not to!
Alienating your employees is not the hallmark of a healthy organization, but it’s the path baseball has chosen. Fans have been suckered into blaming the players for it, which is the cleverest part of the grift. But you can’t hide the fact that you’re fucking someone from the person that you’re fucking. The players see what’s going on. They’re mad about it. They don’t have the power to bend reality and make the owners not-cheap, but they can say no. Let’s hope that’s enough for fair deals both this year and in the next CBA, because otherwise baseball is slowly strangling itself to death.
(It’s not enough. It’s totally not.)