MIAMI — Major League Baseball slogs, regrettably, avoidably, toward the eighth season in its history to suffer a reduced schedule and shortened season.
The first in 1918-19 and the most recent before now in 2020 had pretty good excuses: A world war and a global pandemic. Every one in between, including this one, were rooted in money and played out at the intersection of avarice and intractability.
So this should be opening weekend for spring training. Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, training camp of the Marlins 90 minutes north of Miami, should be lively, anticipation in the air. Instead the place is quiet but for the exchange of rancor between MLB executives and players union reps (including the Marlins’ Miguel Rojas) meeting there and failing to solve this.
Commissioner Rob Manfred says the regular season scheduled to start March 31 will be delayed unless a new Collective Bargaining Agreement is reached by Monday. One problem: The talks about collective bargaining have included very little actual bargaining.
We were six weeks into the near-three-month-old lockout called by owners before management even bothered to submit a first proposal. And an eventual suggestion to involve a federal mediator was rejected by the players union.
Stalemate. Nobody wins. Fans lose. Baseball loses.
Plainly, players are on the right side here — the workers, not the baseball barons who pay them.
I know, I know. This topic is quite literally laborious. So I’ll be quick:
MLB revenues through 2019 (pre-COVID-19 pandemic) had risen to a record $10.9 billion and increased for a 17th straight year according to Forbes. That marked a 43% increase across the past two CBAs — a figure some analysts believe to be more than 50%. The profits of all teams in this span led by burgeoning national television revenue also pushed franchise values to record heights, further enriching owners
All the while the Competitive Balance Tax (luxury tax) for team payrolls over the same span rose only 16%, from $178 million to $206 million. Players want a commensurate luxury tax increase to boost salaries, and with reason. An Associated Press study found 2021 opening-day salaries were 6.4% lower than when the average salary peaked in 2017.
Simply put, the owners fleeced the players in the previous two CBAs, and the union is hellbent to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Now, owners can afford to give players a larger, more fair slice of their enormous financial pie but are loath to do so.
“I absolutely understand what players are trying to do,” says former Marlins president David Samson, a part of the management team in the previous labor negotiations, and now the voice of CBS Sports’ excellent baseball podcast, “Nothing Personal With David Samson.” “The players are trying to make up for the last two CBAs. We knew the minute they were signed that they were advantageous to owners, not players. They [players] are trying to make up for that in one agreement, which is not realistic. Players are trying to show they won’t be patsies anymore. But it’s unlikely in negotiations to try to get back everything at once.”
MLB players also look at other sports such as the NBA and NFL and want some of that power and freedom. So they want more avenues to end management’s service time manipulation in order to get them to arbitration and free agency faster. But owners aren’t budging on that, either.
But here’s the thing, and it’s quite remarkable:
This acrimonious lockout that is turning off fans and almost certainly will truncate the season — it isn’t even MLB’s biggest problem.
Baseball owners and players are like an old married couple arguing about finances as flames all around them engulf the house.
The product both are offering is the real problem. And it is getting worse.
This impasse will be solved, eventually, unless players play the ultimate hardball and threaten to sit out the season. Owners can live with a shortened season as long as there is an October — a postseason and World Series to flow the TV revenue. But a canceled season would be financially catastrophic.
But when baseball eventually does resume, it will be the same slow, boring sport in an age of increasing consumer options and decreasing attention spans.
Games last season averaged 3 hours, 11 minutes, the longest ever. Pace of play remains a malignant tumor in the sport. Baseball is slower but also is seeing fewer base hits and fewer balls put in play.
Since the previous CBA, defensive shifts have increased by 125% as analytics make the game smarter — but not better, or more entertaining. The number of 100-mph pitches has increased by 46% and games with at least five pitching changes per team by 31 percent.
Strikeouts are way up in a home run-or-bust era.
An MLB internal survey showed fans most love doubles, triples and stolen bases. All are down. Fans most dislike pitching changes and dead time without action. Those are up. The average of 4.43 pitching changes per game (per team) last year was an all-time high.
While basketball, hockey and soccer are sports of continuous movement and King Sport football mostly is, baseball is languid. It sits on the television screen like an oil painting.
It’s no wonder that MLB, back to allowing full-capacity in ballparks in 2021, averaged only 18,651 fans per game — lowest average since 1977. Not counting pandemic year 2020, it was the fifth straight season of declining crowds. Even the New York Yankees had their lowest attendance average (24,196) in more than a quarter century, since 1995.
Baseball must find a way to fix itself with shorter games, a faster pace and an infusion of excitement, and do so with a sense of urgency not yet shown.
Because as is, the national pastime seems past its time, past its prime, moving in slow motion — much like the collective bargaining morass that has the 2022 season held hostage.
Once, there might be great and palpable hunger for baseball right now, a cry for the sides to settle, a national clamoring to “Play ball!”
But is there? Or are we just shaking our heads as a sport too slow with games too long can’t even agree on how or when to start a season?
