MLB owners are banking you will return after they locked you out. Why should you?
The stewards of baseball are betting that you will be back because you have returned to them in the past. They are betting that after mandating Tuesday that you take some time apart, you will eventually forgive them because you have forgiven them before.
They believe they are following the historical data in this case — evidence that suggests fans threaten to never attend or watch another game after a work stoppage, but then inevitably do.
Their data is old.
Their data is irrelevant.
Some 28 years ago, as MLB endured a work stoppage, the baseball world worried anger might prevent fans from returning, at least immediately.
Today, owners and players should be worried about a different emotion — or rather no emotion at all. Anger beats a shrug of the shoulders.
What exactly are fans returning to?
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are not waiting on the other side of this dispute. The product on the other end of this mess is already soiled. Former Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost recently said he can stomach only two innings of it. Then he flips the channel.
MLB shut the TV off, hoping when they power it back on you’ll just be waiting on your couch with Cracker Jack.
Are they paying attention? While owners and player reps might want to embrace mediation to solve their fight, the commodity itself needs its own session. These are not just my words, but bold letters of the actual evidence. The recent data.
Viewership and attendance are declining, not to the point of an all-out collapse, but past the point of anomaly. There’s a trend in baseball, and that trend is effectively a tune-out.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced Tuesday the initial week of the 2022 schedule will be canceled as owners prolong their lockout of players.
To which a swath of fans replied: We’re one step ahead of you.
Attendance in MLB dipped seven straight seasons, and that was before the pandemic emptied the seats altogether in 2020. As many stadiums opened up in 2021, many fans just stayed home. They are screaming for the sport to change its product, and it’s instead arguing over how significantly to alter a collective-bargaining agreement.
MLB desperately needs to fix its slow pace of play, more noticeable in an era in which attention spans are shrinking. It needs to find a way to return action to a game so severely lacking it.
And they are instead spending their time fighting over how to split up the money. Meanwhile, an alarming number of its franchises are constructing rosters designed to lose 100 games. Hey, maybe the lockout will throw a wrench in those blueprints.
The future of baseball is headed in a daunting direction with or without a lockout. That its owners collectively refuse to give a larger slice to those who bake the cake has compounded the problem, not created it.
Those in charge here will ask you to wait an extra few weeks — months? — for baseball, and then ask you to wait half a minute between pitches and then four minutes between instances in which a bat actually makes contact with a ball.
You’ve already told them you won’t. At least not at the rate you once did. What’s to draw you back in if you were already hanging by a thread?
But this has never been about you. It’s about your money and who gets it.
The owners long ago turned the cheek on what this all means mean to you, which is really the point, but they could at least recognize what a lockout will mean to them.
After all, as they wave goodbye to fans in seats and viewers in living rooms, this affects the very thing they outright refuse to concede.
Their money.
This story was originally published March 2, 2022 at 3:06 PM.