As major league baseball players head into a nuclear winter, their collective strength will get tested as seldom before.
Franchises suffered nine-digit pandemic losses and revenue forecasts for 2021 are bleak. Teams declined options on good players like Cardinals second baseman Kolten Wong.
Many players eligible for salary arbitration will get turned out instead as teams slash payroll.
Free agents will encounter a flooded free-agent marketplace that will depress wages. The Major League Baseball Players Association will face its greatest test in nearly 25 years.
Our National Pastime is facing years of economic retrenchment. Owners borrowed huge sums to remain operational. Few of them, if any, will underwrite losses with their personal wealth.
Against that backdrop the MLBPA and owners must decide how to play next season while also bargaining a new collective bargaining agreement for 2022 and beyond.
This will be extremely difficult, as we saw during their months-long haggling before baseball returned this summer with a 60-game season and an expanded playoff bracket.
This challenge will test the leadership ability of commissioner Rob Manfred and influential owners like Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. It will test MLBPA czar Tony Clark and union leaders like Cardinals reliever Andrew Miller.
Can the two sides forge a better working relationship that will allow the industry to recover? Or will simmering acrimony boil over and lead to a disastrous work stoppage?
Fans can only hope that bold leadership emerges on both sides because we are headed toward another historic showdown.
The previous two biggest skirmishes were nasty. After the 1969 season outfielder Curt Flood challenged baseball's reserve clause when the Cardinals traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies. That clause bound players to their team until it either traded or released them.
Flood triggered an epic legal battle which ultimately brought free agency to baseball. The MLBPA recently created an award in his name to preserve his legacy.
"Curt was one of the most influential athletes of the 20th century," Clark said while trumpeting the award. "His principled stand helped fundamentally change the way business is done in all professional team sports — not just baseball."
But Flood paid a terrible price for his stand. He sat out the 1970 season in exile and returned for one more year as a broken player and person.
Baseball's next biggest battle — after the 1986 season, when the owners tried to chill the free-agent marketplace — had a better outcome for the player who pressed the matter.
Outfielder Andre Dawson failed to attract a free-agent offer commensurate to his ability. Finally he gave the Chicago Cubs a blank check and told the team he would play for whatever amount it chose.
The Cubs stepped into the trap and gave Dawson the absurdly low base salary of $500,000, plus bonuses. He responded by winning the National League MVP Award while hitting 49 homers and driving in 137 runs.
"Myself, my agent, we did some creative thinking, and we devised a plan," Dawson said via a MLBPA video. "I didn't know what the outcome was going to be as a result. I guess I made the decision, it's not about the monetary issues; it's about pride and principle moving forward."
That demonstrated the lengths owners would to go to collectively restrain the market. The MLBPA later gained a $280 million collusion settlement that reopened the marketplace for good.
Dawson collected more than $12 million from the Cubs in the five seasons following the showdown and about $10 million more in the final four years of his career. The MLBPA recently honored Dawson as the initial winner of the Curt Flood Award.
Subsequent efforts by the owners to reel in free agency failed. The players held their ground during work stoppages in 1990 and 1994-95 and the owners finally learned to live with the system.
Now the players once again need strong leadership.
On one hand, they can't allow the owners to exploit the pandemic crisis to beat excessive concessions out of them. Baseball revenues and franchise valuations have been soaring since the last work stoppage
On the other hand, players must acknowledge the staggering losses the pandemic wrought. They don't trust the owners' numbers, but it's easy to calculate gate revenues for the 2020 regular season: Zero.
To protect their own long-term earning power, they must help baseball recover. This will take a different sort of courage than Flood and Dawson demonstrated while taking on the owners.
Now that players are experiencing the down side of the free market — the pain of cratering revenues — they should rethink their aversion to the sort of revenue-sharing models that serve the NBA and NHL well.
Now that owners are facing their first economic crisis, they should work collaboratively with the players to move the industry forward.
Ideally, future Curt Flood Award winners will be more of a diplomat than a rebel.
Ideally, the owners won't force players to take such dramatic stands.
