Kansas City Royals All-Star Whit Merrifield: Owners care about revenue over winning games
Kansas City Royals All-Star Whit Merrifield has a level of trust in the club’s local ownership group.
That benefit of the doubt certainly does not extend to the collective group of Major League Baseball owners nor to commissioner Rob Manfred.
Manfred on Tuesday announced the cancellation of the first two series of the regular season due to the ongoing MLB lockout. The announcement came in the aftermath of nine consecutive days of negotiations between the owners/MLB officials and the MLB Players Association.
Merrifield, in a sports radio appearance on the “Cody and Gold” show on KCSP 610 AM, said the players weren’t surprised in the slightest by Tuesday’s announcement.
“Frankly, it has been expected for a long time,” said Merrifield, the Royals’ players union representative. “We’ve seen this coming for a while.”
Merrifield, who took over the player rep post from retired fan favorite Alex Gordon, pointed to the shortened 2020 season played during the pandemic as an example of why players weren’t shocked by Tuesday’s outcome.
The 60-game slate during the pandemic was truncated due to coronavirus concerns, but the two sides also had drawn-out negotiations at that time that further shortened the number of games played.
“A lot of these owners don’t care about playing a full season,” Merrifield said. “They’ve got it figured out in some sort of equation where there’s X amount of games they can play to get their maximum revenue. And if they don’t have to pay players for those games, it benefits them.”
Merrifield also said that owners attempted to push the 2021 season back a month before they were rebuffed by the players.
Merrifield pushed back against the characterization, seemingly promulgated by the owners’ side Monday, that the two parties were closing in on an agreement.
While some progress had been made on certain issues, Merrifield said, “The key areas that we’ve wanted to make progress on for months and years — and we’d told them that — they weren’t talked about that night. So it was just a way to generate some false optimism with the media, and it’s a shame because it’s not how it went down.”
Merrifield said the problems the players want to address are all “one package.”
He went on to state that the desire to get younger players paid earlier and get paid more will raise team payrolls thereby requiring the competitive balance tax to go up since teams have been using it as a default salary cap.
Otherwise, it would disincentivize teams from signing free agents, Merrifield claimed.
“We feel like we’ve exhausted pretty much every option that we could think of,” Merrifield said. “We’ve tried to be creative. We continued to talk and talk and talk about our issue, what needed to be addressed. Until Rob came up with this quote unquote deadline, those issues weren’t taken seriously. It’s a shame it took that long.”
A compensation trend
Merrifield cited the decrease of baseball’s average player salary, and the median player salary in recent years.
Data compiled by the Associated Press backed up Merrifield’s assertion. The average major-league salary dropped 4.8% on opening day last season compared to the start of the most recent full season in 2019. That average has fallen 6.4% since 2017, when it topped out at $4.45 million, according to The AP.
The median salary — the actual mid-point where an equal number of players’ salaries are above and below — is $1.15 million. That number went down 18% from two years prior and 30% from the record high of $1.6 million at the start of 2015.
On opening day last year, 902 players were on major-league rosters; 417 made salaries less than $1 million, while 316 made less than $600,000.
Merrifield said that the average amount of service time for a player prior to his retirement has also decreased.
That means players have been put in a situation of being paid lower salaries on average at the same time they’re careers in the majors are shorter on average.
“We’ve come up with a system that we believe will address that, will help players and help teams put the best product on the field year after year to compete and bring entertainment to fans,” Merrifield said. “Because nobody wants to go out and watch a 40-win team lose year after year with a $30 million dollar payroll because all the owner cares about is generating revenue.”
John Sherman not the problem
In the past, Merrifield has offered praise for the Royals management approach from the front office led by president of baseball operations Dayton Moore.
Royals CEO and chairman John Sherman, the principal member of the ownership group that purchased the team before the 2020 season, has not commented publicly during the lockout.
Moore spoke during a conference call with reporters Wednesday during roughly the same time that Merrifield went on the radio.
Merrifield made it a point at the end of his radio interview, unsolicited, to offer words of praise for Sherman.
Based largely on the strength of sentiments conveyed to him by Moore in the past, Merrifield said that Sherman is in the business for the “right reasons,” loves the game and wants to win.
“I guarantee you if we had 29 other owners like John Sherman and the ownership group that we have, at least from what I’ve heard from Dayton, we wouldn’t be in this position anyway,” Merrifield said.
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 2:44 PM.
