MLB owners presented a proposal to the Players Association about resuming the 2020 season. It features an abbreviated Spring Training to start in June, an 82-game regular season to start on or about the first of July, a universal DH, expanded playoffs, a 30-man taxi squad with a 50-man enlarged roster, geographically-close opponents, blah-blah-blah. I don't give a shit about the details! All those things are subsidiary to the health concerns and the extraordinary efforts that will be required to protect players, staff, workers, etc.
But the crux of the matter is money. It seemed, at first, MLB and the Players Association could agree on pro-rated salaries and other matters like reducing the draft from ten rounds to five. The new proposal, however, is a revenue-sharing deal. The players would get a portion of the media revenue generated by the games (since there will be no gate receipts). I expect this will be a non-starter for the MLBPA as it amounts to a salary cap. (The luxury tax is a kind of salary cap but it operates at the team level.) Players get a lot of flack about how much money they make, but that's silly when you think about how much money the game generates for the owners. Imagine being able to afford employees who cost $25M/year! That's right, you have to be a billionaire.
Chris Rock put it perfectly: "Shaq is rich. The white man that signs his checks is wealthy!"
Fans don't typically make such distinctions, and when the MLBPA (rightly) rejects the new proposal they'll be seen as greedy, out-of-touch, pampered athlete-celebrities. In the midst of a global pandemic, if the owners really think getting baseball going again is THAT IMPORTANT, then they should foot the goddamn bill! One day perhaps we will make all players free agents from the get-go and get rid of the draft, team-control years, arbitration, and all that un-American nonsense that prevents the free movement of talent. But that's another story.
I understand the urge to get things "back to normal" in the midst of this crisis. I understand the economic pain of the shutdowns. And I love baseball and miss it terribly. But I'm having a hard time seeing a practical implementation of a baseball season this summer and fall. I'd like to see MLB and MLBPA hammer out that stuff first (like, what happens is if a player/umpire/trainer/etc. tests positive for the virus?) and then argue about compensation. And MLB needs to get rid of their anachronistic blackout policy and make ALL the games available in EVERY market (like the NFL) or they are going to slowly strangle their golden goose.
South Korea and Taiwan are showing how it may be possible to resume professional sports. I wish them all the best of luck. I'm not sure we here in the States can use those models as those societies are more comfortable with social restrictions and government mandates, not to mention being quite a bit smaller. They are more able to implement a national strategy for containment and mitigation. Here at home we see more of an ad hoc, state-level approach with less overall coordination. Getting the national pastime re-started is going to require a great deal of coordination!
Stay safe, my friends.
--M.C.
p.s. I realize that South Korea and Taiwan are more properly The Republic of Korean (ROK) and The Republic of China (ROC) but those names are not only a bit ponderous but less revealing so I'm using the casual rather than the formal appellations.
14 comments:
Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it. Leave it to Rob Manfred and a bunch of greedy fuck-head owners to put a poison pill or several into their proposal. It's all politics, everywhere and all the time. They are trying to force things through that they wanted anyway and using the coronavirus stoppage as a leveraging tool. I can see the players agreeing to pro-rating salaries, and even some methodology to compensation for lost revenue from ticket sales, but what if fuck hell does that have to do with a DH and extended playoffs?
Rob Manfred and the fucking owners WILL ruin this game.
It's not just Manfred that wants the DH. The players do, too. A few holdout owners are against it, but they are a minority. I don't really care. I'm long past my old "NL-brand baseball is superior" prejudice. Good baseball is good baseball, DH or no DH.
I don't have an issue with extended playoffs, either. There are lots of interesting possibilities out there. Extending the season into November is not a good idea in my mind, though, unless you want the World Series played at a neutral warm-weather site like they do with the Super Bowl. Now that would be REALLY LAME! I think you have to cut the season by a week or so (which the owners are against, mostly) in order to have another round of teams in the post-season. You have to figure players would mostly support an extended post-season.
To me those are peripheral things. I think the players have blown it by not demanding an end to arbitration and a shorter path to free agency. And they have left their minor league brethren out in the cold too often. The union is dominated by older, wealthier, players and they sometimes miss the needs of the guys on the fringes of the active and reserve rosters, or the guys who do stick but aren't All-Stars.
MLB needs to address the stupid blackout policies and provide better access. This benefits both sides with increased interest in the game.
And they will have to address the pace-of-play issues with actual solutions, not dumb stuff like the 3-batter rule, which will make little impact. I do not want to see a pitch clock, but I think it will become inevitable if the umpires aren't given the authority to speed things up. Batters were supposed to stay in the box but that's not being enforced. I read one fellow's idea about paying players to play faster. That is, teams with the shortest game times would get a bonus. Works for me!
Replay is still a mess--I think you should be required to call for a replay immediately. Asking your video assistant in the next room to decide for you is TOTALLY LAME and slows the game unnecessarily.
I think we'll be hearing a lot of crazy stuff in the next few weeks and then come to find out those are just negotiating ploys and the real agreement wasn't that hard to hammer out. This is obviously a unique situation. There's a real chance of no baseball whatsoever in 2020 and that uncertainty has to make the negotiations harder.
FanGraphs talks about the MLB testing plan proposal.
MLBTR looks at what they call the Medical Protocols Proposal.
Both are short and good summaries of the state of negotiations, at least on the health part.
No exchanges of lineup cards. New baseballs any time a ball is put in play and touched by multiple players. Players wearing masks except while on the field, standing six feet apart during the singing of the national anthem and “God Bless America,” sitting six feet apart in the dugout and, if necessary, even in the stands.
That's the opening paragraph of the article on The Athletic by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich in which they take a look at the details of MLBs plan. It's behind a paywall unfortunately.
Apparently there are 67 pages of guidelines. Stuff like "no spitting" of course and "buffet and communal foods prohibited" and even "saunas, steam rooms, hydrotherapy and cryotherapy pools prohibited." Lots of stuff!
It would be nice if the grocery store workers and those poor folks at meat processing plants and other essential people like them got the kind of attention MLB personnel would get!!
I said before that I appreciate the creativity and enthusiasm of those trying to bring back baseball. Just seems like a really big task. Obviously the rich, the wealthy, and the famous will get more than the regular janes and joes, but if MLB does resume perhaps some of the things they do can be models for other businesses to open.
Players may be rich compared to ordinary folks, but there's no reason they have to take risks they don't want to take. And a whole bunch of support people, who aren't rich, will be taking the risks alongside the players. If MLB can demonstrate empathy and concern for their employees perhaps we might see leaders in other industries do the same thing.
It's uncharted waters, that's for sure. I guess Bundesliga is playing, I suppose we'll see how that goes and if it will be a good sign for MLB.
I read an interesting piece in the Sunday NY Times by James Wagner, "Can Sports Heal the Country? Some Have Second Opinions." It quotes KJ Kearney, a former college football player in Charleston, SC, "...there's a difference between wanting to be entertained and claiming that entertainment is somehow healing or closing up a fissure. ....We need to do a better job of distinguishing the obvious from the important. The obvious is that we're bored and would like to watch sports. The important is making sure everyone is safe."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/sports/baseball/coronavirus-sports-comeback.html
I've been thinking on this - the fact that I haven't been able to see baseball doesn't mean I will rush back to some bastardized, politicized version of it. I have been able to survive without, I can continue to do so. As time passes, I feel my interest growing less. I don't even bother to read the bits about what FZ has to say about some third-string wannabe anymore. Of course, part of this is my expectation that the Giants will totally suck this year were they to play. But not all of it. So what I'm saying is - go ahead, bag the season. I don't care. Play next year when you aren't fighting over how much of a pay cut players will have to take to get on the field and assume all the risks (along with the support staff).
Yeah it will be hard to follow games that have no audience and are played without the usual joy and goofiness (like team-wide hugs and high-fives after a homer). I mean, it is supposed to be FUN. And that's it--we follow baseball for fun. It is not NECESSARY. It will be hard to have fun if we are in the throes of a pandemic. I hope hope hope hope hope that we will be able to travel, gather, party, and do other fun things this summer. That would be the best outcome, obviously. Just seems like too much uncertainty right now and baseball kind of pales in importance.
I'm sure the NFL will take the "we have to heal the nation" approach. Sunday football TV parties are pretty close to a secular religion in this country. I expect an onslaught of NFL ads showing us all being great again in approved activewear. I suspect they will be the first outfit to stuff stadiums with fans. I hope it works! We've been hearing a lot about the virus popping up again if we "open too soon" and the arguments seem pretty solid. I mean, I won't be surprised if we get that "second wave" but I sure as hell hope we don't!
Yes, I expect the Giants will or would have sucked in 2020. Hey man, been down that road before. Plenty of shitty teams in my fan history, that's not going to stop me. I was excited about the future and the development of new talent and the whole re-working of the team. I really was intrigued by the process and intensely curious about how the thing would play out and how long it would take to bring enough talent in to compete again. It's damn near impossible to be interested in that stuff now!
They are trying to force things through that they wanted anyway and using the coronavirus stoppage as a leveraging tool.
Exactly so.
For anyone interested in the history that confirms this, and details the institutional memory that informs this iteration of the players v owners over 150 years, please read:
Lords of the Realm by John Helyer
Short version is that:
The owners lie to the public, to the players union, and - most importantly - to each other.
The players have come out ahead every time since the beginning of free agency because they stand together and have each others backs, while the owners stab each other in theirs.
Terrific writing, hilarious anecdotes, just a great book for anyone who likes baseball.
I'm not so sure the players are in that same place now. The owners "won" the last round of negotiations as the players have made no progress on free agency and service time. The players share of the league's revenue has dropped as well.
I think initially the owners thought the players union was a joke and didn't take them seriously. But after the players union changed the power relationship the owners fought back. Owners, for all their flaws, are businessmen first. As such they have an advantage against a labor union. They spend their days in economic negotiations, it is their field of expertise. The players are amateurs in that regard and have to hire experts to do the heavy lifting. This is true is most union-management conflicts.
Fans get weary of protracted labor disputes in sports. The athletes make so much more money than the fans that they lose some of the sympathy and goodwill that would naturally come their way. The owners are mostly faceless and their perfidy doesn't really hurt them in the public eye. I suppose we expect CEOs to be crooks but we also expect our ballplayers to shut up and play.
I am not as sanguine about the players situation vis a vis ownership. I think the union has lost much of its punch and it does not have the pushback capability it once did. Plus they spend a lot of time on things like the number of draft rounds and bonus payments/slot values instead of trying to get rid of arbitration and reduce the time to free agency.
Thanks for the response.
I this article from fangraphs was worth reading:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/parsing-mlbs-claim-of-a-4-billion-loss/
I saw that. I liked the last part:
Over the last four years, player payroll has not moved while baseball-only revenues have increased by a $1 billion, to say nothing of baseball-related revenues that have put billions more in owners’ pockets. Keeping EBITDA close to zero is an accounting strategy that reveals little about the financial health of the sport or its value to its owners. In addition to the large annual increases in franchise value, there’s evidence that owners have reaped $5 billion to $7 billion over the last three seasons above and beyond the costs of owning and operating a franchise.
n.b. EBITDA means "earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization."
I hope all the owner posturing is just that--posturing. It's part-and-parcel of negotiations. There's enough money in the game to survive. Let's hope we see a settlement soon. People aren't going to be interested for very long in millionaires vs. billionaires.
Baseball must be the best game in the world to survive the people who run it and play it.
I forget who said this, but.....
NPB is set to re-start on June 19th.
Japanese Baseball has not announced a return date for fans. In Taiwan (ROC) they are allowing up to 2000 fans per venue. The stadia are smaller there, only about 20K range. In the ROK, they have cardboard cutout fans but real cheerleaders. That's weird. I mean I'm cool with cheerleaders (they have cheerleaders in Mexico) even if it's not normal at baseball games here in the States, but I have no objection to it. It's just really weird to lead an empty stadium in cheers!
There was supposed to be a link to the NPB article:
https://jballallen.com/npb-goes-viral-season-to-start-on-june-19/
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