PHILADELPHIA — The sun came out Wednesday. Children went to school, businesses opened, spring grew one day nearer. Life moved right along.
It was the sort of day for sports-loving romantics to daydream about baseball. And wouldn’t you know it, the erstwhile national pastime was even back in the news — a five-column headline above the fold, no less! — after a three-month hibernation.
STANDOFF WIPES OUT OPENING DAY
For the first time since 1995, Major League Baseball — paralyzed for 91 days by a lockout of the owners’ creation and Commissioner Rob Manfred’s sanctioning — canceled regular-season games because of labor unrest. Manfred made the announcement a few minutes past 5 p.m. Tuesday, and almost before he finished speaking, the schedule grids on MLB.com’s team sites were scrubbed of everything before April 8, as though a March 31 opening day and each club’s first two series never existed.
Since it isn’t 1995 anymore, we did what we do when something goes away. We moved on. Faster, too, than a swipe of our smartphones.
It just so happened to be James Harden Day around here, The Beard making his must-see 76ers home debut. The Eagles have three first-round picks next month, and there are only 573,000 online mock drafts to inform us what Howie Roseman will do. And hey, have you binge-streamed the newest Netflix series, or checked Instagram in the last three minutes, or played Wordle, or browsed TikTok?
“Look,” Manfred said after MLB negotiators presented what the union said was termed their “best and final offer” but one the owners fully expected to be refused, “the entertainment market today is different than in 1994. My deepest hope is that we get an agreement quickly, we’re back on the field, and we get back into that market and compete effectively.”
Wishful thinking? You bet. Because here’s the thing: Manfred and the owners really seem so deluded as to think they can take MLB off the radar for months at a time, ruin fans’ spring training vacation plans, and lop games off the schedule — and expect consumers to come running back.
The owners are making this happen. Having routed the players in the 2016 collective bargaining talks, they are intent only on strengthening their economic stranglehold. They voted to lock the gates on Dec. 2, minutes after the most recent agreement expired. They waited 43 days to reengage the union on core economics. They set a Monday deadline, then extended it to Tuesday after their MLB negotiators waged a 16 1/2-hour marathon bargaining session at an otherwise mostly unoccupied spring training ballpark in Jupiter, Fla.
It was the owners who refused to discuss amending the six-year reserve period for free agency. They’ve been intractable on making more two-plus-year players eligible for salary arbitration or reallocating revenue-sharing dollars. And after the players agreed to drop the former and reduce their request on the latter, the owners moved to only slightly raise a competitive-balance threshold that even Manfred conceded acts like a de facto salary cap because small- and middle-market owners want a check on runaway spending from their big-market counterparts.
Manfred claimed the owners’ “best and final” proposal would add more than $100 million annually in additional compensation for the less-tenured players (0-3 years of major league service time) that the union wants to help. Based on where they’re starting from, the players “didn’t think it was enough,” according to lead negotiator Bruce Meyer.
But the accounting doesn’t really matter. As long as the owners’ revenues are increasing and the players’ salaries are falling, the economics of a $10-plus billion industry are out of whack.
The owners could have attempted to settle all of this without shutting down the game. They could have revoked the lockout, opened spring training, and even started the season while negotiating a new agreement. They took that approach in 1994, and it led to a players’ strike in August that wiped out the postseason, a waterfall of revenues for the owners. But timely, good-faith bargaining could have avoided a repeat.
Instead, the owners chose this path. It won’t lead to self-destruction. The NHL endured after a lockout wiped out the entire 2004-05 season. MLB will endure, too.
But baseball isn’t like other sports. It isn’t a spectacle, at least not until October and Game 7s, Joe Carter vs. Mitch Williams and Curt Schilling’s bloody sock. Baseball is a companion for six months, from April through September. It’s 162 games, six or seven nights a week. It’s ever-present in the background, a soundtrack to summer.
And even before the latest labor mess, it no longer had the hold on most people that it once did.
“The game has suffered damage for a while now,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said. “The game has changed. The game has been manipulated. ... Players have been commoditized in a way that’s really hard to explain in the grand scheme.
“If you love baseball the way players do, if you love baseball the way fans do, it’s hard not to be sad with where we are.”
And to wonder if it will ever be the same.
