Written by There are a lot of problems in the world today. We are wrapping up the second year of a global pandemic with no apparent end in sight due to a new variant named after a Greek letter no one has heard of and can’t pronounce. Gas prices are out of control, and grocery shelves are empty.
The last thing we need is a fight between billionaire baseball team owners and millionaire players.
At 12:01 a.m. this Thursday, the Major League Baseball owners locked out its players from the game. The collective bargaining agreement in place had expired two minutes earlier. The league feels a lockout is “the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season.” Really?
I usually side with the players on these disputes due to history. For far too long, the rules entirely favored the owners, resulting in unfair treatment of the players. If you watch the Ken Burns Baseball documentary, you see the injustice caused by team owners due to its “reserve clause.” The teams had complete control over the players because they could not negotiate with other clubs.
For 80 years, the league controlled the assignment of players to the ball clubs. Most of these mechanisms remain in place today. The reserve system caused teams to build farm systems to grow and harvest new players while retaining their rights once they became major leaguers. The Rule V Draft kept teams from stockpiling minor leaguers, and an amateur draft eliminated a rush to sign “bonus babies.”
Eventually, the courts granted the players rights to arbitration and free agency after 80 years. The first twenty years were pretty rocky as teams were reluctant to give up their powerful positions. A strike in 1994 canceled the World Series and over 900 games.
Now, the scales are much more balanced, and there seems to be plenty of money to go around. In the days leading up to the lockout, teams opened up their checkbooks and no longer were they complaining about their lost revenues due to the pandemic. The issues they are fighting over, like competitive balance tax thresholds and service time requirements for arbitration, seem trivial to even the most informed fan.
This Wednesday, The New York Mets held a press conference to announce the signing of Max Sherzer, organized hastily to happen ahead of the end of the lockout deadline. His contract broke a record with a $43.3M average annual value. Ironically, Sherzer was in Dallas as part of the MLB Player’s Union negotiation team and participated via a Zoom call. He praised the Mets’ owner for being willing to spend to make his team better.
Rather than treating each other as adversaries, they should be working together to provide the best product possible for the fans. However, rather than brainstorming how to solve the problem, they are bickering over luxury tax thresholds, salary minimums, and draft lottery proposals. They are more concerned with how to slice up the pie rather than growing it.
Baseball is entertainment. Players are entertainers, and the league is its producer. The games are content consumed by fans during live events in person or broadcast to their chosen location via their favorite device. Like music, movies, and other televised events, entertainment consumers constantly change their methods to receive the content.
MLB and the players should be looking for ways to take advantage of this evolution. They have 162 regular-season games and a fantastic playoff format, filled with drama. Social media has allowed both the teams and the players to engage directly with the fans.
Consumers have proven time and time again that we will pay for our entertainment. We will keep paying our cable bill while subscribing to Netflix and several other streaming platforms. We will go to the live events and buy merchandise.
Both sides in this dispute do not need to worry, as they will get paid. But, rather than trying to convince us to watch their content instead of watching Squid Game, they are starting a squid game of their own. Already, MLB chose to remove the player’s pictures from the rosters listed on its website. In response, several players switched the blanked-out photos to be their profile pictures on social media. It looks like there will be a lot of red light and green light until it’s over.
I’m a fan. I love baseball, and I love watching the games and keeping up with the movement of the players during the “hot stove” season. I enjoy counting the days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training. I honestly cannot see any reason to justify a lockout. I’ve read Rob Manfred’s letter and the response from the MLB Player’s Union, and I understand each side’s position.
Sports fans typically pick a team, and our instinct is to turn this labor dispute into another game with one team coming out the winner. I’d love to choose a side to root for in this fight, but I cannot, and it just seems to me like a bunch of tone-deaf billionaires and millionaires arguing over how to spend my money.
The fans are the ones locked out.