Baseball’s moment approaches. Please, don’t let the men in charge screw this thing up
No sport has as much to gain or lose from lockdowns brought on by the novel coronavirus than baseball. If the men in charge don’t realize that and act accordingly, they will bring shame on themselves and a stain to their sport.
They should look around. The NBA and its players are largely harmonious, working through the challenges and a potentially canceled season together. MLS has proposed an interesting and innovative plan for playing again, with clearly outlined protocols for testing and acknowledgment of risk.
Baseball, sadly, is doing what baseball has too often done in recent years: owners attempt to nightstick restrictions, players go nuclear and everyone comes out the worse as the sport continues to fall behind.
They all lose, doing it this way, particularly as American sports fans will increasingly compare baseball’s behavior to those in other sports.
The most frustrating part for those of us who love the game is the opportunity that will be lost if this continues. Baseball could have had something of a captive television audience, a nation of 330 million people starved for live sports.
People are waking up in the middle of the night to watch South Korean baseball. They’re betting on cornhole. Major League Baseball’s return in that context could be a national celebration, an introduction to the sport to a growing number of young people who don’t watch, and a reintroduction for those who’ve drifted away.
Instead, baseball’s owners and players are taking a risk that these potential fans will see their latest standoff as bickering and greed from people who have it good.
Let’s be clear on two points. First, the owners have a point. They stand to lose significant money this season no matter what, and with perhaps 40 percent — that’s the commissioner’s public estimate, anyway — of revenue coming from the gate, their financials are cratering.
Let’s be particularly clear on the second point: The players are objectively fighting the better fight here, on so many levels.
That’s true even if we move beyond template arguments about the players being the ones who make the game great, that they’re the ones who kids look up to and adults want to watch.
The players’ side is sound, sober and logical. They’ve already made a deal with the owners in which their salaries would be prorated during a shortened season. The owners believe the agreement included language allowing for another restructuring, but the reasoning there is muddy, at best. This was not made clear when the deal was signed.
Players also, frankly, are more deserving of our understanding right now. A typical player’s career lifespan averages around 5 years. Current owners (and this includes Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman, who’s been in the game six months) average more than 20 years. Owners are likely to get the money back later. Players have precious few opportunities.
But the most compelling argument on the players’ side is safety. They are not doctors or nurses or grocery workers or nursing home employees. But returning to work entails the virtual certainty that many of them will be exposed to the virus, and some will test positive. Owners can watch it all from quarantine, risking nothing.
To be sure, MLB’s return-to-play proposal reportedly includes extensive safety measures, and the owners are smart to lead with that.
But to then ask players to take further paycuts and abandon the free-market principle that’s guided their union for decades is insulting and disingenuous.
When revenues spike, where are the owners? Do they offer their players a representative share?
And then, when revenues go down, the owners expect players to take on all the risk, and for less money per game than in normal times?
Where’s the common sense in that?
One of the complicating factors here is that the owners are so much better prepared for this fight. If the players have a better argument, the owners have better organization and execution.
You’re seeing that in real time. The owners strategically leaked parts of their proposal before giving it to the players, setting off a run of instant reactions that are by definition tilted in favor of management.
And because it’s much easier to keep 30 owners on message than 1,200 players, you’re getting silence from one side and sloppy rants from the other.
Fans are left to hope the two sides can find some kind of middle ground. Maybe that means players take the 50-50 split this season with a caveat — the tightest safety measures possible, no talk of a salary cap in future CBA negotiations and any paycuts this season (beyond prorated salaries) are made up in additional payments within the first year or two of our return to relative normalcy.
A deal that both sides can live with should be easy enough to find. Selfishness is making it difficult instead.
Baseball, like all sports and most businesses, has an uncertain future and many obstacles in its path. Working together and collectively might not be enough. The wrong outbreak in the wrong place could shut the whole thing down.
But it would be among the sport’s worst and most historic tragedies if the men in charge don’t give baseball a chance because they wanted to win an unwinnable argument while the fans who really matter struggle with actual life problems.