Major League Baseball was dealt a crushing blow on Tuesday when the owners made a petty “take it or leave it” lowball offer to the MLB Players Association. The Owners imposed an arbitrary “deadline” to get a new collective bargaining agreement done. The current agreement is set to expire at the end of the 2022 season. The Owners locked out the players to try to force a deal through. Both sides were far apart on major issues. The owners decided to torpedo the season by canceling Opening Day. The games will not be made up and the season will be marred. The Owners delayed the “deadline” by one day to instill false hope into fans. That way when fans heard the players rejected the deal after being tantalized at the 11th hour, they would misplace blame on the players. To be clear, this was a lowball, joke offer from the owners who created the problem to begin with.
The Mechanics of the Lockout: A lockout is not to be confused with a strike. A strike is when a labor force stops working to try to gain something. A lockout is when the owners lock the doors of the facilities and refuse to let the employees work. In this case the MLB owners refused to let the season start on time and locked the players out. That is one thing many people fail to understand: the owners initiated the work stoppage as a bargaining mechanism despite the CBA still being active. They wanted to strong arm the players into game damaging ideas that the players refused. Now the season is severely damaged.
Opening Day of baseball is the best season starting day of any sport. The aura of a baseball Opening Day is magical and radiant. It is uniquely American. All the aces are starting. All the teams are 0-0 in a sport that will see many of the teams eliminated with over 82 games remaining. The long slog of baseball is part of what makes it so special. The excitement of April and Opening Day. The June and July games where your team is still in it that you go to see with friends. The stretch drive of September. Baseball is there with you everyday. Its omnipresence is a defining factor of what makes it so special. The grind is what makes a playoff berth so exciting. The sheer number of games makes the stats mean more and weeds out flukey teams.
The Owners simply do not care. They would destroy the season for no reason. These are petty, greedy people utterly without honor. They do not care about the fans. They do not care about the history of the game. Baseball for them is a vessel to be cheaply whored out and covered head to toe in ads. For the last 30 years or so we have seen an uptick in the shamelessness of advertising. Not just the content of the ads, but location and frequency of them. It is a slippery slope.
It started with things like mid inning ads during mound visits. Ads are placed everywhere in the park. On every wall. In front of the urinals. In front of the stadium. In the stadium’s name. Soon nothing was sacred. The product was watered down with so many ads it severely cut into the enjoyability of the game. Ads even started appearing on the back of the pitchers mound. The next step of course was pushed for during this lockout: ads on the jerseys themselves. That’s right: the men who killed the season on purpose want to put ads on jerseys they marked up 600%.
We are finally starting to see the diminishing returns of screwing a fanbase thought too neurotic to drive away. The owners have been degrading and cheaping the game year after year. They do it with gutless ad spam. They do it with juiced balls. They do it by lying to the players. They do it by canceling Opening Day in one of the most repugnant, spineless maneuvers since the Tet Offensive. The owners do not care about the game and would rather kill an entire season than argue in good faith. They continued to try to defile the game, using the lockout as a cudgel. They blew up the season, showing their spiteful, cowardly nature.
The Owners also wanted to expand the playoff format to a laughable 14 team gimmick fest. This would be ridiculous and cheapen the 162 game season. It is clearly just a television focused move to try to get an extra gate or too. Nevermind the prestige of the game or finding the best teams. As usual, the answer is always “more more more, expand, people want more!” That is the sort of mindset the owners had when they duplicitously worked with MLB to use juiced balls in certain big market games. This scandal shows the owners do not understand the beauty of pitching duels. They naively think everyone wants to see 12-10 games with nothing but walks and homers.
People want to see real baseball. Advancing the runner, crisp defense, wicked pitches, and good baserunning. The current New York Yankees style product of every hitter always trying to hit a homer is boring. Constant strikeouts and stranded runners because the hitter is not properly assessing the situation. He is literally always just trying to hit a homer. Even in a tie game with no outs and a runner on third. It is objectively worse strategically than in older eras. Yet we are told by the front office of a team who has not won a pennant in a decade “this is the new way to play.”
MLB Owners love this approach, moronically thinking all people want to see is home runs. This mindless approach takes the nuance out of the game and cheapens it. Part of the beauty of baseball is how each man in a lineup brings something to the table: slap hitting middle infielders that can steal, solid contact guys with gap power, and sluggers. This is what makes baseball the best game ever made. Instead of this electric and dynamic experience that America’s Pastime was founded on, the Owners think it is more fun to see nine of the same guys always trying to do the same thing, regardless of the situation. This shows how short sighted they are, but also they lack the fundamental understanding of what makes the game great. The owners, simply put, just do not get it.
In addition to the owners wanting ads on the jerseys and a massive playoff format, they wanted a steeper salary cap and less money in the pre-arbitration draft pool. The way the current cap works is if you run over it you have to pay a luxury tax. The owners want to make the tax rate higher so they can decrease player wages and use it as soft collusion to have the next best thing to a hard salary cap. The hard cap is the thing the players went on strike against in 1994.
The other issue, the pre-arbitration draft pool, just means that electric young players like Juan Soto do not get paid so little during his first 6 years when he is slugging. This is the main problem with the current MLB free agent situation. A player who is very good at a young age gets underpaid for years, then has one BIG contract when his rookie deal ends. That is usually it for big pay days. This is why Carlos Correa has still not signed. He wants a mega-deal for 12 years. An albatross contract. This is the only true way for a player to get paid top dollar into his age 36-42 years. This is a big problem for the orgs, because they hate giving those deals out because the last years of those deals are brutal. See the Albert Pujols Angels contract. The players need more money in their early years instead of waiting for one big pay day. Overall, the players were being reasonable and got railed by greedy owners who had no intention of acting in good faith.
Baseball is a wonderful sport that helps families and communities grow. Fathers and sons watch and play it together. Friends plan summer vacations around it. People spend all year looking forward to Opening Day. Baseball helps people get through the drudgery of life and inspires entire towns and communities. The Owners not only stole this from us this year but are attempting to defile it for future generations.
