NEW YORK — When you want to catch a thief, watch their hands, not their mouth.
”The concerns of our fans are at the very top of our consideration list,” Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said earlier this week, in the same breath he announced the senseless postponement of opening day.
Nothing Manfred and MLB owners have done in the past three months, since the lockout began on Dec. 2, has betrayed an ounce of care for fans of the game. With every mealy protestation to the contrary, such as the commissioner’s remarks on Tuesday, the stewards of MLB have taken steps to actively deprive fans of the game in service of their agenda to take more than their fair share from players.
MLB’s actions show it is not merely apathetic toward fans and their concerns, but is cynically relying on their good memories of baseball to excuse the embarrassing mess the owners have made. This lack of consideration goes back, at least, to the summer of 2020. While we as a society have overcome so much since then, the reality is MLB has been stuck in the same spot. This is 2020 all over again.
Back then, MLB had the opportunity to be the first professional sport back in session during the early months of a global pandemic. Fans were anxious to watch anything other than “Tiger King”; anything to provide a brief sense of distraction and entertainment. But Manfred and the owners squandered their precious moment to grab the nation’s attention with the sport’s likable and talented stars, who are far more appealing than Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin.
The owners cried poor, staying consistent to its decades-long PR strategy, and said they would lose money on every game without fans in the seats. Never mind that in 2019, the last season before the pandemic, MLB revenues surged for a 17th straight year to a record $10.7 billion, according to Forbes. Still, it remained true that, just like many businesses at the time that experienced economic impacts, MLB’s $10 billion per year industry would take a hit.
Manfred, the mouthpiece for MLB owners, reiterated that the 2020 season would not begin unless players accepted pay cuts — even though a March 2020 agreement between the parties indicated Manfred could set the season schedule as long as players received full pay. Owners tried to stand their ground for over a month, insisting that players will need to take pay cuts for the season to begin, despite the fact that most of them will remain owners longer than players will keep playing. Owners, too, knew they would recoup their 2020 losses relatively quickly, either by lucrative TV deals, or real estate developments and other owned businesses, or by selling their franchises for more than they bought them for, or a highly rewarding combination of all three.
Even then, Manfred and the owners were being shortsighted. They had already won the 2016 Collective Bargaining Agreement and were reaping the benefits, as evidenced by Forbes’ 2019 report. But it wasn’t enough. For billionaire owners who have the power to be insulated from the consequences of their actions, MLB would not settle until it hit that sweet spot of a short season with expanded playoffs, the latter of which safeguards the league’s greatest revenue structure, even if it came at the expense of lifelong baseball fans or stadiums workers who just wanted their sport back.
Owners only realized they needed to start the season when the Players Association said it would file a grievance that MLB did not negotiate in good faith to play as many games as possible in the shortened 2020 season. (In May 2021, the players did eventually file that grievance, which is seeking as much as $500 million, or roughly 20 games of additional pay.)
After more than a month of contentious negotiations between the players union and the league, negotiations that all but ensured there would be a labor battle after the Collective Bargaining Agreement expired on Dec. 1, 2021, Manfred imposed a 60-game season with full pro-rated player pay that would begin on July 23, 2020. Meanwhile, the Mets and Yankees received permission from the New York state government to begin pre-season training from their home stadiums as soon as May 24. Due to the owners’ short-sightedness, players did not begin filing into summer camps for a second spring training until July 1.
Now, MLB has picked up where it left off in 2020: trying to squeeze their product for an extra dollar, while ignoring the pleas from die-hard fans and stadium workers who want the game to return, the very same fans who Manfred claimed are at “the very top of our consideration list.” If MLB was considering its fans, and not just weaponizing them, the owners would lift the lockout, players would start spring training and negotiations for a new CBA would continue to resume while the regular season starts on time.
Instead, Manfred all but abandoned the sanctity of opening day, an annual reset button on the baseball calendar that means more to fans than most of these owners will ever understand, and too easily shaved off a week of regular season games. The owners’ lockout is already on its 92nd day, and if what happened in 2020 is any indication, the labor talks will get even worse before they get better.
