The Billionaires Destroying Baseball

The world is uniting against a set of monsters declaring war on innocent people. That’s right, the baseball owners who are destroying the game in order to tank and make tons of profits while doing so. What’s interesting about this labor stoppage is that there is no one blaming the players at all. Every single media story places the blame right where it belongs: on the owners. There’s no justification for the lockout except sheer greed. The owners have gained advantages over the players in the last two contracts and they want to double down on that. The players quite obviously don’t want that. The amount of money paid out to players is actually declining. Now that everyone has figured out that paying a 30 year old free agent 20 million a year for his declining years is a bad idea, you have the entire middle-class of baseball unable to get a decent contract at all while the owners profit by paying great 25 year old players total peanuts. Tanking makes zero sense in baseball–what does slightly highly draft picks even get you in a game like this where the player evaluation is so shaky? But because there is a functional salary cap that funds the cheaper owners to tank, it makes profitable sense to do so. The owners have fuck you money so they just don’t care what the fans think. They are incredibly short-sighted. And here we are. Here’s a couple of examples of the stories that have just destroyed the owners as the season comes under jeopardy. I don’t usually link to pay sites, but I think in this case, it’s a story that needs telling, so here’s Andy McCullough at The Athletic:

The owners did this.

The owners initiated this shutdown. The owners waited 43 days to make a proposal. The owners have refused to budge on the relatively modest requests made by the players for a more equitable piece of the industry’s massive revenue pie. The players are willing to grow the pie by diluting the playoffs and sullying their uniforms with ads. They just want to get paid better. The union isn’t rallying for revolution; they’re asking for a cost-of-living raise.

That’s all. That’s it. And the reason baseball is not happening, the reason camps are closed, is because this legal monopoly — the stewards of the sport who have refused to pay minor-leaguers the minimum wage and contracted affiliates and shrunk the draft these past few years — will not pay the players a bit more.

Debating the details, poring over the differences in the competing proposals about the competitive balance tax or the requirements for arbitration eligibility — it numbs the mind. The particulars are designed to numb the mind. They are designed to distract from the simple truth that the owners can afford to pay a little more. They have the money. All of them. 

Owning a baseball team is a good business. Otherwise, these masters of the universe would sell. The folks in the commissioner’s office add varnish to obscure the obvious. Revenues are rising. Franchise values are soaring. Wages are stagnant. If anything, Manfred deserves credit for his nonsense about the stock market a few weeks back. We all deserved a good laugh, and he provided. The Braves ownership just reported a $104 million profit in 2021. Come on, man: I’ve stood in the rain enough times — don’t pretend that’s what just splashed my leg.

Manfred gets paid, in part, to run cover. The owners have scant interaction with the public. None have spoken about the necessity of this standoff. They can stand behind Manfred’s explanation from December: “This defensive lockout was necessary because the Players Association’s vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive.” It makes you wonder what threatened all those non-competitive teams during the five years of the last CBA.

The players almost immediately stowed the sort of seismic proposals, like earlier access to free agency, that might tilt the sport’s balance permanently toward the most flush franchises. But to Manfred and his benefactors, asking for a bit more, even with the old system still in place, was too much.

All of this is part of some calculus the owners have devised, which includes the misguided belief that the public cannot comprehend the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, and that once the games come back, no one will care what caused them to go away in the first place.

And here’s Jeff Passan at ESPN:

Arbitration has always been a contentious process, and players were livid when they learned MLB celebrated tamping down salaries by awarding a championship belt to the team that did it best. During spring training in 2020, when MLB was reeling from widespread criticism by players that Manfred had been too soft on the Houston Astros for cheating during their championship run, he referred to the World Series trophy as a “piece of metal” in an interview with ESPN’s Karl Ravech.

“‘Piece of metal’ was the Gulf of Tonkin,” one longtime baseball man said. “It was the aha moment for everyone. And then he did it again recently with everything about how owning a team isn’t that profitable. Treating players like they’re stupid has never worked. It’s never been a great approach.”

Baseball, it seems, can’t help from doing it, and it’s a symptom of those in ownership who regard players with disdain and struggle to stomach the notion that they warrant the salaries they receive. There are good owners, ones who prioritize winning above profits and understand baseball is wildly different from the businesses in which they made their billions.

Sports is a unique industry. Typically, workers make a product. In baseball, they are the product. The game of baseball is the framework, and in it exists two classes: players and owners. Players spend their entire lives chasing the major leagues. Just making it there is improbable. Staying long enough to make life-changing money is a miracle. Owners, on the other hand — at least those who don’t inherit their teams — join the baseball world just as they would a country club: by buying membership.

If you went and got the next 1,200 best players in the world, the product would suffer greatly. If you handed MLB teams over to any 30 competent businesspeople, the sport would not suffer. Actually, it might improve. It doesn’t take a billionaire to leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues.

I fully think the owners are willing to just cancel the season. In fact, I bet they don’t play this year unless the players cave entirely and take some crumbs. The league hasn’t even begun to negotiate in good faith. The proposals are just garbage, insults to the players. Rob Manfred is claiming today is the deadline before games are canceled and players won’t be paid for the lost time. Maybe, maybe not. But barring some kind of miracle tonight or the next few days where billionaires stop acting like the world is against them and everyone else is stupid but them, there are going to be games cancelled and I don’t even know where the Players Association would go from here.

Finally, baseball is not exactly doing well in the pantheon of American sports. I know it’s passe to talk about the death of the game, but this would be a real blow. There’s a lot of entertainment options, even in the summer. I’m not sure fans would come back after a year lost. These billionaires, like most rich people, are very, very stupid.