In MLB Lockout, There Are No Good Guys
Owners and Players Both Share the Blame of Baseball being on the edge of disaster
Well, it’s official. Major League Baseball’s Lockout has canceled real, meaningful games:
This lockout, which has now dragged on for over three months, has become the first labor-related work stoppage in baseball to impact the regular season schedule since the 1994-1995 strike. That’s the one that canceled the World Series, you may recall.
Neither side seems to have learned their lessons.
You already know my thoughts about some of the MLB Players Association proposals. Their proposal to radically alter the draft is an overly complicated mess. Statistics show that a salary floor creates competitive balance problems. The Universal DH ends the game as it has been played in the National League for 145 years.
The owners, of course, are not exempt here either. They want only minimal increases in the minimum salary, slight increases in the competitive balance tax, and a slight increase in the arbitration pool. They also want to expand the post-season to 14-teams (ludicrous given the length of the season) and put ads on uniforms permanently (hideous).
Though the coverage in mainstream sports media is biased toward the union, both sides have legitimate gripes. The MLBPA is correct that Major League Baseball is horrible at marketing their players. But the owners are also correct in saying that the current salary structure is untenable.
All of this highlights general problems with professional sports in general; artificial caps on spending, both maximums and minimums, create labor discord like this. While baseball has avoided a salary cap like the farcical NBA and NFL salary caps, both sides want some sort of restriction on how the maximum and the minimum teams can pay to players, even if it isn’t a hard maximum.
Both sides want to artificially inflate or deflate the market.
But none of that is going to matter if both sides continue to be hellbent on killing the golden goose. That’s what nearly happened after the 1994-1995 strike; fortunately, one guy basically single-handedly saved baseball.
Baseball avoided a labor apocalypse in 2002 when a strike was avoided at the last second that would have threatened to wipe out another playoff and contract the Expos and the Twins. But I’m not sure another missed season or a season with an extended absence is going to work out well for either side.
Baseball’s problem right now is that society is trying to move past it. Baseball remains in an epic struggle between trying to attract new fans and not trying to piss off existing fans. They’re doing a helluva job of satisfying nobody in that regard right now, and that will continue to spiral if this work stoppage drags on.
Ask the NHL how this worked out, as Michael Bauman writes for The Ringer:
Alternatively, the union could hold fast, as the NHLPA did during hockey’s disastrous lockout in 2004-05. The hockey players not only lost a whole season for their trouble, they settled the lockout on catastrophic terms: a salary cap and salary rollbacks of up to 24 percent, not to mention the economic effects of the lost season, which are still being felt a generation later. (NHL agent Allan Walsh remarked that MLB’s tactics were reminiscent of what he saw in his sport 17 years ago, a parallel that should bring no comfort to baseball fans.)
The NHL has never truly recovered from the lost season of 2004-2005. While the NHL was lower in the level of cultural relevancy at that time than MLB is now, it was at a level they have not achieved since.
And that means we wind up back where we started: money. Nobody is going to make money while games are not being played.
The owners don’t make money because they aren’t selling tickets, merchandise, or getting TV rights.
The players don’t make money because they are missing paychecks.
The league’s media partners don’t make money because they are not receiving advertising revenue from ads shown during games1.
Both the players and the owners need to put some adults in the room. Everybody is going to lose money in both the short and the long term if the lockout doesn’t end and there aren’t players on the field.
Some players have said they are doing this for the young players. How are the young players protected if the game slides into irrelevancy?
Owners have indicated they want to protect the sport. How is the sport protected when games aren’t being played or if the game slides into irrelevancy?
I understand that I am not like most fans: I love baseball and I will not walk away from the game. But I am not the average baseball fan. And a lot of baseball fans, some of them fans longer than me, are done with this and have declared a pox on both their houses.
Both sides need to grow up and get a deal done.
Arguably, the TV and radio folks are coming out of this best of all; while they aren’t making ad money, they also won’t be paying rights fees and are still receiving carriage fees from cable companies regardless of whether games are played or not.