Did baseball learn nothing from 2020?
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred speaks during a news conference in Arlington, Texas, on Dec. 2, 2021. Credit: AP/LM Otero
This can’t be happening again. Seriously?
It was only two summers ago that MLB and the players were attacking each other in the middle of a deadly pandemic as they tried to restart a derailed season.
All everyone wanted was baseball and a few hours of normalcy amid the horrifying uncertainty of COVID-19. Instead, the two sides jockeyed for the moral high ground over three months — not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars — before finally delivering the abbreviated product.
Since then, the sport has battled the pandemic on a daily basis, with restrictive protocols, reduced attendance and juggled schedules. Now, after surviving all of that, with the virus seemingly in retreat, both sides are sabotaging part of Baseball 2022 by their own hand?
Hard to believe. Or should I say stomach.
This is not to say the matters at stake are not critically important to the industry. Even with barely measurable movement, the warring factions tend to agree there needs to be changes in how younger players are compensated along with anti-tanking legislation of some sort. The competitive balance tax, or CBT, obviously is a colossal sticking point, seeing how it functions as a soft cap in a sport that is not supposed to have any such governors on salary.
But the fans of this game — a very patient and forgiving group, I might add — are tired of the fighting over what amounts to poker chips in the big picture. They’re even less interested in who claims to be in the right here. As long as there’s no baseball, how can anybody be above blame?
Maybe MLB was making a concerted effort toward progress in this week’s attempt to enlist a federal mediator for help. On the surface, that would seem to make sense. Until you also factor in that it was MLB’s idea to lock out the players on Dec. 2 — a move commissioner Rob Manfred admitted was done to (forcefully?) speed up a deal — and then let 43 days pass before returning to the negotiating table. Oh, and the two sides have met only four times since.
No wonder the Players Association said thanks but no thanks to the whole federal mediation thing with Friday’s statement, summing up thusly:
"The clearest path to a fair and timely agreement is to get back to the table. Players stand ready to negotiate."
And if that last part sounds familiar, it should. In 2020, union chief Tony Clark uttered a similar challenge that rallied his troops, returning fire at MLB by saying, "It’s time to get back to work. Tell us when and where."
The PR warfare makes for catchy Twitter propaganda but really serves little purpose at this point. The baseball-loving public — i.e., the sport’s paying customers — don’t take out their scorebooks for CBA negotiations. They just want to know "when and where" the game — or at least spring training — is coming back.
Because unlike 2020, when everyone was in quarantine with their immediate families, stuck inside watching "Tiger King" and "The Last Dance," people have better things to do than obsess over any crumbs of labor optimism. There are plenty of sports in full swing, Super Bowl week is on tap and March Madness isn’t all that far away. After a while, if the labor hostility continues, baseball will feel more like filing tax returns than fun, and fans will get turned off by the relentless disappointment.
Maybe MLB’s efforts to pressure the players has backfired. Maybe the union has dug in too deeply after getting burned in the last CBA. But I’m not really into attaching blame at this point.
If you want to watch the bombs fly, Twitter had plenty of that Friday in the wake of the dueling statements. And the Yankees’ Jameson Taillon tweeted it best after railing against MLB’s strategy, adding the kicker, "It’s all extremely tired antics/optics."
Tired, yes. We can all agree on that. Two protracted labor feuds in the span of 22 months (and counting) has been exhausting. And based on the longstanding animosity between these two sides, what realistic chance did a federal mediator have, anyway? Ultimately, the union probably was smart not to waste everyone’s time with that.
"It is hard to understand why a party that wants to make an agreement would reject mediation from the federal agency specifically tasked with resolving these disputes, including many successes in professional sports," MLB said Friday in a statement.
But if 2020 taught us anything, when it comes to "these disputes," baseball is in its own league. Now both sides need to get this resolved before Opening Day becomes the latest casualty of their public rock-throwing.
Nobody is winning right now. And the biggest loser, as always, ends up being the fans.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
