Baseball Is In Big Trouble and The Owners Are to Blame

There's no doubt after the past few days who is taking down the game.

The flames engulfed the house. Windows began to shatter. Walls began to fall. Smoke billowed outside of the emptiness where there used to be doors and windows. The homeowners were looking for anyone to blame, saying it was the neighbor or the grocery delivery guy or, no, it was their guests who were staying there! And then out of the ashes emerged a man holding a gas can with a sinister smile. He turned and said, “We did all we could.”

Yes, you’ve probably figured out by now that this was an allegory. It wasn’t particularly well put together, but I think you probably get the point. The owners are burning the house down and they were looking for anyone to blame. But over the weekend, they were holding the gas can and the lighter fluid and the structure behind them was imploding.

For the last few months, most have realized that this was all on the owners. They imposed the lockout. They didn’t have a single conversation for 43 days after they had said that the lockout was supposed to help expedite conversations. They promised to return with a proposal within 48 hours and then turned to a federal mediator that was not at the right time for these negotiations. And then they started meeting every day. Finally. They exchanged proposals on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Talks were contentious on Sunday but then they talked all day Monday and deep into the night. That should have been good news.

I expressed privately to some of my baseball friends that I worry a bit about how much the players will begin to give in. There was little to no movement on the Competitive Balance Tax or pay for pre-arbitration players and the owners self-imposed deadline of what is now yesterday was looming. And then Saturday, it seemed like my fears were about to come true. The players had originally asked for everyone after two years of service time to be arbitration eligible (it currently requires three years unless you’re in the top 22 percent of players in service time with more than two years. I know that’s confusing, but it’s not the point here.

They dropped a few weeks to 80 percent of players between two and three years of service time should go through arbitration. Then they dropped to 75 percent. And on Saturday, they dropped that all the way down to either 35 or 33 percent. I’ve seen both numbers and I’m not there, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because that’s a massive give. And the owners response wasn’t the appropriate one in a negotiation. It was just no.

The players also reduced their asks on the CBT on Saturday, dropping it by a couple million dollars per year. The owners responded by raising it by $1 million in the second year of the CBA and minimally dropping penalties, which are already significantly higher than the previous CBA. So I guess that’s better than just saying no, but also maybe it’s actually even more insulting.

They soon began to tie things that don’t move the needle to massive revenue generators for them. The players want a draft lottery in order to help curb tanking, if only a little bit. I personally think the lottery has to go at least 10-12 deep in order to make a dent and neither side is even proposing that much, but whatever. For a bit, the owners tried to tie that to a 14-team playoff.

Things were ugly. But as the league-imposed deadline of Monday came to, the two sides talked. And talked. And talked. They had more than a dozen individual meetings with the league scurrying back and forth all day. Reports indicated that they were closing in on a deal well into the middle of the night. But the players didn’t want to bite, which should have been something that raised eyebrows, but I think everyone was too optimistic to want to see anything else.

As talks started on Tuesday, it was easy to be optimistic after the two sides talked for 16+ hours. But the rhetoric started to change. The owners were upset with the MLBPA because they said the tone changed. The MLBPA said the tone never changed and they were never thrilled with the offer that was made. They weren’t that far off if the owners would budge, but they weren’t close enough to just say yes. The players were angry about the owners trying to paint them in a bad light and the owners were angry that the players didn’t just take their offer.

And again, the signs were there. Why were the owners so excited to get a deal done on Monday night/Tuesday morning? You have to think that was a deal they knew was good for them. And you have to think the players absolutely knew that because they aren’t idiots. So the day went on and eventually the owners made their “best and final” offer.

Final, sure. Best? I mean I guess it’s the best they were going to give, but maybe classifying it as the least bad is the right way to go. Make no mistake, it actually wasn’t a horrible offer. It just wasn’t an especially good one. They did pull back on the CBT penalties, but the number was simply too low. They were stuck at $220 million for the first three years of the deal. You can stay static for three years if you end considerably higher than their offer or if you start considerably higher. But the numbers they gave were just a no go.

There is no doubt about this to me. It’s always been about crushing the MLBPA, not just getting a deal done. And they wanted to win the PR battle in the process. I don’t know if they actually want to make the MLBPA a union like the NFL or NBA where, sure they have labor peace, but basically everything is just dictated from the top. It might just be that they want a massive win. Think back to playing your buddy in a Madden game and you’re just rolling him. There’s 1:22 left on the clock in the fourth quarter and you’ve got all three timeouts and you’re sure as hell using them to get the ball back one last time. That’s what the owners appear to have been trying to do. They used their timeouts in the hopes that the players would give them the ball back and let them score again.

It is truly asinine what is going on right now. There was a time where I would have disagreed with you, but I could see the argument that the players were playing a role in the delays and the lack of movement. I don’t think they were responding quickly enough for awhile. On many issues, they likely could have moved a little more. Should they have had to? No, of course not. But you can’t get every loss back in a single negotiation and they probably should have recognized that. But now? Nope. It’s clear that the owners are the ones who have burned the house down and there’s no hiding it anymore.

One thing that I’m very upset with myself about is that I didn’t think about the people other than the players until this weekend. There are so many people throughout the game of baseball who don’t make $500k or even $100k. They depend on games to be played. The vendors at Surprise Stadium are making nothing right now. Groundskeepers make nothing. The people behind the scenes of the broadcast make nothing. I’m not going to keep going because I’m going to get too comprehensive and miss someone, but people depend on games being played to earn their money.

But they can’t. And that, quite frankly, sucks.

Where do they go from here? It sounds like there won’t be another negotiation until tomorrow at the earliest. It sure would have been nice to spend those six weeks after the lockout where the owners didn’t speak a word to the players actually talking. It would have been nice if the offers were serious before Monday at midnight. It would have been nice if there was as much an effort to make a deal as there was to frame the players as the bad guys on the day that Rob Manfred announced the first two series of the year would be canceled.

The good news is that houses can be rebuilt. No matter how bad the damage, there is still a chance to come back even better. The NHL lost an entire season to a lockout and then part of another a few years later. You could argue it’s as popular as ever. We don’t see it as much in Kansas City because there’s no team, but it’s true. The NBA lost 32 games of an 82-game season in 2011/2012. That’s just a decade ago. And now people are bemoaning the fact that it’s more popular than baseball.

So it can come back. And it most likely will. But boy is it hard to see that through the smoke and flames.

And as you probably know, I’m in Arizona. My parents are here for a few weeks most years and so my wife and I (and my sisters each generally come for a few days too, spread out to avoid sibling fights of course) come down to see them. When we come, it’s a week of baseball games every day, lots and lots of tacos, maybe a casino trip or two and just a lot of fun in the sun. I think we’ll go to an ASU game today and maybe get out to Surprise at some point to roam the back fields. I guess it’ll mean more tacos this week. And I suppose there are worse things.