When the final second ticks down in the Super Bowl, I normally think to myself “It’s baseball season!” So 9 days ago when Matthew Stafford took a knee to run the clock out, that same thought went through my head followed by “Oh wait.” The fact of the matter is we are getting closer to the scheduled “Opening Day” of baseball but the negotiations between Major League Baseball and the Players’ Union have left a lot to be desired.
There’s nothing I want to do more than finish my position rankings and write about the upcoming season. But I just don’t have it in me. It feels like thousands of baseball fans are realizing that there could be a delay to the season if the negotiations do not significantly improve this week and a deal is agreed upon by next Monday. I have been frustrated and angered by the apparent lack of unwillingness to want to meet and negotiate the issues at stake by both parties. After having a 60 game season less than 2 years ago due to this dumb pandemic, it appeared MLB and the Players’ Union were choosing a shortened season by not meeting throughout the off-season. My blood pressure has been boiling.
If you follow me on Twitter, you know how critical I have been of the commissioner Rob Manfred. I could go on for hours about why he is a terrible commissioner and how he is worried about all of the wrong things. Despite my criticism, I realize that Manfred is nothing more than a puppet to the owners. There’s no difference between a bellhop at an expensive hotel and the commissioner of Major League Baseball. They are just carrying the load for the rich. Manfred is the scapegoat for everything negative that should be directed towards the owners.
What confuses me about what the owners are doing is why are they acting like they are tight for cash? MLB owners should be owning teams with the intent to win. Former MLB commissioner Bud Selig implemented rules that favored the smaller market teams and those rules should be encouraging teams to spend their money, not hoard it. Revenue sharing hurts the big spenders and the teams that are “going for it” while putting more money in the wallets of the owners of teams who are noncompetitive. According to Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus, the teams share the National TV revenue and will each take around 60 million. Teams will also profit at least 40 million from local television deals.
The crazy thing about teams getting 100 million from television deals is that does not include teams receiving luxury tax percentages from other teams and the revenue teams make from their home games. If you look at the numbers from the 2021 season, ⅓ of the league spent less than their TV revenue and 3 teams spent less than 60 percent of their TV revenue. To make matters worse, according to Forbes, it’s estimated that MLB franchises have quadrupled in value since 2010 but salaries for players decreased by 4 percent at the start of the 2021 season compared to the 2019 campaign. From what I can tell, there are way too many owners that are content with just making a profit from the team rather than winning. Organizations should be forced to spend all revenue sharing money. And if owners feel afraid they won’t make a profit, sell the team for a billion + and get out.
Last week, MLB proposed cutting 30 minor league jobs from each organization. Cutting hundreds of minor league spots when the 2020 minor league season was canceled does not seem like a smart way to improve and grow the game. I would think prospects would need as many opportunities to develop and try to make up for that lost year. Again, it appears owners are afraid of losing a penny. What’s crazy about this proposal is the owners are choosing to hurt the players that make the least amount of money. The journeys that many of the minor league players take to try to get to the big leagues are insane and are not spent in luxury. And many of them never reach their dream. Seems unnecessary to hurt the minor leaguers.
The two sides met yesterday and it appeared they acted in a civil manner as the meeting lasted for a couple of hours. Both parties are meeting as you are reading this post. Time is ticking because after today, the two sides will have 6 days to strike a deal before the regular season is affected.
It should have never come to this and it is ridiculous that they waited until the end of February to meet on a daily basis. What concerns me is if a deal is not agreed upon, there will be no reason to get one done in April or May. MLB already knows the financials for what a 60 game season looks like. They know how all of the scheduling will shake out since they had to do it back in 2020. As long as there is a postseason, the owners will get their money.
Let’s hope that the owners and union realize that this time around fans may not come running back with open arms. Ballparks were closed due to the pandemic. Fans came back to the ballpark because the opportunity was taken from them by the pandemic. Delaying the start of the season would be completely self inflicted, and fans may not come running back, because it’s the owners that would have taken the opportunity away from the fans.
Despite not trusting Rob Manfred for a second and knowing how ridiculous both parties have acted during this lockout, I still believe a deal will happen before the season has to be delayed. I’ve read reports from interviews with agents that stated that crunch time starts this week. Hopefully there is more progress today and both sides can envision a deal getting done before the February 28th deadline.