Let’s talk baseball! All sorts of big moves we can think about, speculate on what teams are going to do what, and just generally discuss the state of the game. How’s that going?
Oh, right, when baseball’s owners see a way to make more money, they’re going to take it.
That’s it. That’s the logic. Will there be negative consequences to go along with all that more money? Very possibly. Do they care? Absolutely not.
They don’t have to lock out the players. They don’t have to bring on months of headlines about baseball’s labor issues and gameplay issues and fundamental issues. They don’t have to draw attention to just how broken they’ve already made this sport in the name of more money, how broken they are continuing to make it, how broken they will make it in the future should they get their way. They could let that all fade to the background, like it has for so many years.
But there’s money to be made. If they can break the Players’ Union, or even bend the Players’ Union, or slip something past them in the middle of a contentious negotiation, then here’s what they’ll get: more money. What is the health of the sport, what is growing the game, in the face of more money?
Aren’t these the tough decision owners of things are supposed to make? To sacrifice some short term money for the long-term health of the business? Aren’t the people who make those decisions supposed to be good at them? When you own a thing, when you run a thing, at a fundamental level, aren’t you supposed to care about that thing?
Baseball’s owners don’t. That’s beyond discussion at this point, beyond thought, beyond any consideration. To them, baseball is nothing more than a vehicle to make money. The sport of baseball is not a worthwhile thing in its own right, or maybe it is but not in a way that will influence anyone’s decisions in any way.
The way capitalism is supposed to work, the reason it is supposed to work, is that there is a trade-off between risk and certainty. If you take big risks, you make big money. If, instead, you are certain that your business will be stable and profitable, you make less money.
There is not one owner in Major League Baseball for whom it is a financial risk to be a Major League Baseball owner. Not one. There is not one owner in Major League Baseball who put his (or her) reputation or financial future on the line to be an owner in Major League Baseball. There is not one owner in Major League Baseball without whom the entire operation would fall apart. None of them built the league. None of them do anything but write checks.
There are just people, watching money come in, ensuring less money goes out. They add nothing. They are useless. They are worthless. They are a vampire class, convincing the public that they are lucky to have their blood sucked. They are aspiring feudal lords, looking to push the rest of the world down so they can call themselves dukes. They are 30 Fredos, 30 cab drivers from Total Recall.
And they want the rewards of risk-takers for cashing checks. This is because, to them, they are entitled to that money. They deserve that money simply by dint of being themselves. They blackmail cities into paying for most of their new stadiums, keep the stadiums for themselves, and claim they’re doing a civic good. They leech money from their local areas (Miami, for example, will end up paying $2.6 billion for the Marlins’ stadium) and people grumble once and then forget. They have this whole parasite thing down to an incredibly lucrative science, and it’s not enough.
Fun fact, by the way: In the late ‘80s, then-Padres owner Joan Kroc tried to give the Padres to the city of San Diego, along with a $100 million trust fund to operate it. The league nixed it. It would have set a bad precedent, you see, and threatened their interest: the interest of nobody questioning their God-given right to make as much money as humanly fucking possible.
So for all the horseshit Rob Manfred spewed in his horseshit letter — the union refused to bend over for us, the union didn’t want to agree to our ridiculous demands, the union the union the union, mom — the fact remains, this lockout didn’t have to happen. They chose this. When he said that they did it so the two sides could come to an agreement, well…
It’s just more horseshit in the horseshit letter from the horseshit commissioner who works for the horseshit owners and I wish I could get another horseshit in this sentence but they’re the ones in charge. When Manfred says the lockout will move the process forward, what he means is it will help break the players.
The players are the ones we watch for, by the way. The players are the ones who do the important work. The players are the ones fans care about. If you had the choice of watching the 1200 best non-Players Union guys play in MLB stadiums or the 1200 Players Union guys play on sandlots, you’d see a much better product on the sandlots.
The players add value. The owners do not. If the teams would make money regardless, and they would, then all the owners do is siphon some off for themselves without contributing. Do they increase the amount of money in the game through advertising and corporate partnerships and the like? No. They hire people who increase the amount of money in the game through advertising and corporate partnerships and the like. Taking owners out of the picture, making it a player-owned league that still employs people to do that job, would make everything better for everyone who’s not a total fucking piece of shit only out for fucking kickbacks.
The players should be the owners. Instead of some rich asshole saying, “Who should get the money, Them or Me?” it should be a group saying, “Who should get the money, Us or Future Us?” They would be forced to make good, fair decisions or else they would jeopardize their own future earnings. Young players would demand sacrifices for the future in perpetuity. The sport would be forced to strike a balance that was mutually beneficial, instead of one that necessitates acrimony between two inherently opposed sides.
Control of the game should not rest with people whose only skin in the game is money. That is a surefire way to kill it, because the rich are the cheapest, pettiest, shittiest people on Earth. I mean, look at what MLB.com looked like within an hour of the lockout being imposed:
I wouldn’t trust the people who make these decisions to water my plants, because they’d create six shell companies, sell plant-watering business derivatives, short them when they got enough suckers involved, make a bunch of money off the backs of suckers, and my fucking peace lily would end up dead.
It is an accident of history that these sacks of shit ended up in charge of anything. They add nothing, and they never have. The entire management side does not need to be abolished, but the part of the management side dedicated to maximizing its own profit at the extent of its product is worthless. Every action they take, every word they utter, every bit of my oxygen that they breathe is a testament to that worthlessness. Owners have never needed to be part of sports. This horseshit lockout is just the latest example.