Could the players go around the country playing All-Star games in different cities, or set up a mini league of pick-up games in Cowboys Stadium or something like that?
Whatever agreement is finally reached will address nothing that I actually care about. When Opening Day arrives, the games will still be 3+ hours long and filled with boring, unproductive down time.
True. But if I'm to be honest, I've spent tens of thousands of hours in my life watching and enjoying and thinking about major league baseball. I just had my first thought about Ukraine about four weeks ago, unless I count the times I've had Chicken Kiev. And regardless of how the Russia-Ukraine or MLB labor situations play out, I'll still probably devote a thousand times more of my attention to baseball than Ukraine in the future.
I'm pretty sure that the owners are wrong in their estimates about fan bounceback etc. Not because the fans won't come back—they always do, more or less—but because the margins matter, and because habits matter.
For 2 years, fans have been forced to stay away from ballparks. A handful of teams were unrestricted for all of '21, but the vast majority had limits in place for chunks of the year. Beyond that, plenty of people haven't felt comfortable being in crowds like that. MLB has always relied on habitual fans—season ticket holders who provide a baseline of revenue and attendance, people who go to 10-20 games a year and bring friends. But like I say, those habits have changed. And if there's a prolonged delay, after 6+ months of bad press and bad vibes, how many will make the effort to get back into those habits?
And here's why I think owners have misjudged this: Bob Nutting's Pirates. In 2016, after 3 thrilling/frustrating seasons as one of the best teams in MLB*, the team cut salary, got rid of a couple significant players, and did nothing to get better. The veterans tanked, the prospects failed to arrive, and the team collapsed. And attendance has *never* recovered. I am certain that Nutting's front office told him that they had a plan, that the wins would come, that the fans would return. But attendance has been worse than it was in the worst seasons of the 20 year losing streak. In 2011, the moment the team looked like it could compete, the fans started showing up—they didn't wait until after the team reached the playoffs (or even made .500). But next time this team gets good, I guarantee you the fans won't come back until a division title is in hand.
Nutting played it cheap because he was sure the fans would come back, and it's cost a million fans or more since the start of 2017. The owners are collectively walking into the same trap.
*#2 record in MLB, #3 in position player WAR, #4 ERA-
IMHO the MLB owners made a catastrophic decision, born of plutocratic hubris, by saying today was the day that the players had agree not to be locked out anymore, lest Opening Day be lost. Because who fkn cares about Opening Day. Or MLB. The two top trending news items on Twitter right now are the indiscriminate Russian slaughter of Ukr civilians and a spat between Richard Marx and two people I've never heard of. Like Putin, the owners have overestimated their ability to win a propaganda war and to crush an opponent quickly after instigating a war against them.
I just read CC Sabathia's memoirs, and he has a funny bit about how he understands why opening day is a big deal for the fans, but it doesn't mean squat to him as a player. It's one of 162 games.
I don't understand why the players do not treat this like they are being wronged. Why didn't pitchers show up at spring training fields on Feb 15th and Feb 20th and picket every day since like a regular strike? They could have stood outside of the locked spring training gates and signed autographs telling everyone "they locked us out, we are not the bad guys here". The best way for them to "win" is get the fans/public on their side and like Joe has said right now it's just millionaires vs billionaires so the public doesn't care.
In the age of social media, it looks like misinformation is winning the war against facts. So, maybe the players union can just start making stuff up about owners to make them look bad. It shouldn't be very hard to do.
This may be distasteful to do, but owners appear to have no scruples, so you must fight fire with fire. That's the way of the world these days, it seems.
I love baseball and probably won't stay away, but I do think about how to send a message to the owners.
My team is the Jays. I don't subscribe to the RSN that has a stake in my team. I've cancelled the renew on my MLBTv and Audio account, mostly because there is nothing to watch.
I've thought about walking away for a year, but we have an exciting team in an unexciting era of MLB. I want to see Vlad and Bo and Teoscar and Lourdes and my kid loves Vlad and the Jays hand gestures and celebrations on the base paths. It's the players we love and ownership we despise.
A few rule tweaks and this can be a fun league to watch. MLB just has to look tonthe future which they seem incapable of doing.
I wonder if just following the writers I like and catching youtube clips is enough to satisfy my thirst for the game while not supporting ownership. My team is blacked out across the country anyway. Probably not, but it's not me that MLB has to worry about.
I wonder if an opening day boycott would send any kind of message. Stadiums open to no fans, owners have to pay stadium staff and don't sellout. Easy for me to say from far away, but would love to see it. Actually I wouldn't see it if I'm boycotting...
I'm starting to think that for the players to get a fair deal, they need to go above and beyond the negotiation table. Reading Joe's post (and the brilliant comment below by "Mike"), it's so clear that the owners have less to lose and more to gain from the lockout, and that's not going to be any different next time or the time after that.
What if the players and fans start to really target the anti-trust exemption? I don't know much about the legal details, but I believe Congress could just pass a law essentially saying "actually, now MLB IS covered by anti-trust laws". If the appetite were there, Congress could go even further and explicitly ban anti-competitive practices used by all the big leagues such as a salary cap/luxury tax and early-career contract shenanigans (why are these things even legal in the first place???) But I think just the credible threat of losing anti-trust would be enough to get the owners to settle.
I am seeing evidence on social media that, despite the facts you’ve laid out here, there’s still a substantial percentage falling for the idea that “both sides are equally to blame,” “those greedy millionaire players,” etc. I don’t understand how anyone can look at this and say, sure, the owners are being perfectly reasonable. I would’ve hoped that 2016-2020 was enough to squash the notion that billionaires have the interests of the little guy at heart.
At times like this I feel like saying I'm done with baseball, but I know I am not. However, each lockout, strike, controversy, etc. has dulled my enthusiasm such that what was my favorite sport in my youth is now somewhere around 3rd or 4th. My young adult kids and their friends barely pay attention to baseball. NFL, NBA, and Soccer are their favorites. I don't think this lockout "kills" baseball anymore than past stoppages have. But what it does do, is inflict one more wound on a once great sport that will eventually render it an afterthought in the American sports conscience.
A few things keep coming back to me no matter what other noise we hear:
1. I don't think the owners care AT ALL what the public thinks. Like, not one bit. To the extent they're thinking about what's best for "the game," and therefore for themselves, it's all completely short-term thinking. And they know that if and when the game comes back it's gonna put huge mountains of sheckels in their own pockets.
2. The owners know that the players have much more to lose than they do for every regular season game missed. Yeah, it'll take money out of their pockets in terms of concessions (no pun intended) and tickets and merch. But the players get clobbered once they start missing games.
3. The owners can leverage 1 & 2 as they hold firm thru April, May, June, even maybe into July. Again, they'll feel it . . . a little. But the players will be hurting.
4. And therefore, the owners can choose the right moment -- as they look at the players bent over a barrel -- to "salvage" what's left of the regular season and head towards the post-season.
5. And that post-season is where the owners can make serious bank.
So what I suspect is that the owners will continue to negotiate in bad faith, keeping the players weak and helpless, with an eye towards a 50, 60, 75, maybe 100 game season with a 16-team, bracketed tourney-type post-season. And in so doing they can get maximal concessions from the players as that reduced season/expanded post-season approaches.
I hope I'm wrong, and I reserve the right to be so (!), but I don't think I am. The owners have proven they care about nothing but their own finances. They certainly don't care about "baseball," and definitely not in the long term. I don't see them even considering anything but what I've suggested above.
I really don't think that the owners have any reason to care what the average fan wants. Their income comes from long-term TV contracts and luxury boxes. I spend about $300 a year on tickets and MLB.tv. I don't think it matters at all to them.
Heck, let's say professional baseball dies out entirely. How would that really impact Ted Lerner's net worth?
Yes -- if I were a multi-billionaire owner, this is exactly what I would do, too. This has made the most sense for the past month and seems inevitable now.
Why not play a 80 game season starting Memorial Day weekend with a bunch of multi-entry 7 inning double headers to juice revenue and then playoffs for 16 teams starting in September that lasts better part of 2 months like the NBA and NHL. Because history doesn’t matter and who watches regular season anything anyway?
Give the players 2 months of liquidating their aggressive growth mutual funds in a bear market in order to make $7500 monthly mortgage and rent payments. Watch them come begging….
We used to have playoffs for 16 teams in September. I seem to recall it was called a ‘Pennant Race’ or something olde-timely like that.
Thanks. And while I also agree that you're on to something, I want to make it clear that I'm not on the owners' side here. Yes, I want baseball, but I'm not looking for a way to break the union/make the players "come begging."
A big part of me would rather see the whole season lost than the 75 game/October Madness tourney I fear we're heading for.
I am in no way on owners side. I think they aren’t trying to break the union so much as to beat them with a sack of oranges.
They can outlast them and everyone knows it. The rich players can outlast the young players. The rich players are the ones at the table. As long as the young ones believe the rich ones the impasse goes on. If that should break the players go down.
CODA was mostly quite good but had its share of clichés, too. I don't ever again need to see a scene at a big audition where someone on the panel is like, "this is highly irregular!"
Could the players go around the country playing All-Star games in different cities, or set up a mini league of pick-up games in Cowboys Stadium or something like that?
Whatever agreement is finally reached will address nothing that I actually care about. When Opening Day arrives, the games will still be 3+ hours long and filled with boring, unproductive down time.
I just cancelled my MLB.tv package. I doubt I'll change my mind later. I also doubt that MLB cares that they lost a customer.
That service is THE biggest rip-off & waste of money. Dropped it couple years ago. Have not missed it since.
To be fair to Rob Manfred, he's nowhere near as bad as Vladimir Putin. So he's got that going for him.
True. But if I'm to be honest, I've spent tens of thousands of hours in my life watching and enjoying and thinking about major league baseball. I just had my first thought about Ukraine about four weeks ago, unless I count the times I've had Chicken Kiev. And regardless of how the Russia-Ukraine or MLB labor situations play out, I'll still probably devote a thousand times more of my attention to baseball than Ukraine in the future.
I'm pretty sure that the owners are wrong in their estimates about fan bounceback etc. Not because the fans won't come back—they always do, more or less—but because the margins matter, and because habits matter.
For 2 years, fans have been forced to stay away from ballparks. A handful of teams were unrestricted for all of '21, but the vast majority had limits in place for chunks of the year. Beyond that, plenty of people haven't felt comfortable being in crowds like that. MLB has always relied on habitual fans—season ticket holders who provide a baseline of revenue and attendance, people who go to 10-20 games a year and bring friends. But like I say, those habits have changed. And if there's a prolonged delay, after 6+ months of bad press and bad vibes, how many will make the effort to get back into those habits?
And here's why I think owners have misjudged this: Bob Nutting's Pirates. In 2016, after 3 thrilling/frustrating seasons as one of the best teams in MLB*, the team cut salary, got rid of a couple significant players, and did nothing to get better. The veterans tanked, the prospects failed to arrive, and the team collapsed. And attendance has *never* recovered. I am certain that Nutting's front office told him that they had a plan, that the wins would come, that the fans would return. But attendance has been worse than it was in the worst seasons of the 20 year losing streak. In 2011, the moment the team looked like it could compete, the fans started showing up—they didn't wait until after the team reached the playoffs (or even made .500). But next time this team gets good, I guarantee you the fans won't come back until a division title is in hand.
Nutting played it cheap because he was sure the fans would come back, and it's cost a million fans or more since the start of 2017. The owners are collectively walking into the same trap.
*#2 record in MLB, #3 in position player WAR, #4 ERA-
IMHO the MLB owners made a catastrophic decision, born of plutocratic hubris, by saying today was the day that the players had agree not to be locked out anymore, lest Opening Day be lost. Because who fkn cares about Opening Day. Or MLB. The two top trending news items on Twitter right now are the indiscriminate Russian slaughter of Ukr civilians and a spat between Richard Marx and two people I've never heard of. Like Putin, the owners have overestimated their ability to win a propaganda war and to crush an opponent quickly after instigating a war against them.
I just read CC Sabathia's memoirs, and he has a funny bit about how he understands why opening day is a big deal for the fans, but it doesn't mean squat to him as a player. It's one of 162 games.
I don't understand why the players do not treat this like they are being wronged. Why didn't pitchers show up at spring training fields on Feb 15th and Feb 20th and picket every day since like a regular strike? They could have stood outside of the locked spring training gates and signed autographs telling everyone "they locked us out, we are not the bad guys here". The best way for them to "win" is get the fans/public on their side and like Joe has said right now it's just millionaires vs billionaires so the public doesn't care.
This is an awesome suggestion.
In the age of social media, it looks like misinformation is winning the war against facts. So, maybe the players union can just start making stuff up about owners to make them look bad. It shouldn't be very hard to do.
This may be distasteful to do, but owners appear to have no scruples, so you must fight fire with fire. That's the way of the world these days, it seems.
I love baseball and probably won't stay away, but I do think about how to send a message to the owners.
My team is the Jays. I don't subscribe to the RSN that has a stake in my team. I've cancelled the renew on my MLBTv and Audio account, mostly because there is nothing to watch.
I've thought about walking away for a year, but we have an exciting team in an unexciting era of MLB. I want to see Vlad and Bo and Teoscar and Lourdes and my kid loves Vlad and the Jays hand gestures and celebrations on the base paths. It's the players we love and ownership we despise.
A few rule tweaks and this can be a fun league to watch. MLB just has to look tonthe future which they seem incapable of doing.
I wonder if just following the writers I like and catching youtube clips is enough to satisfy my thirst for the game while not supporting ownership. My team is blacked out across the country anyway. Probably not, but it's not me that MLB has to worry about.
I wonder if an opening day boycott would send any kind of message. Stadiums open to no fans, owners have to pay stadium staff and don't sellout. Easy for me to say from far away, but would love to see it. Actually I wouldn't see it if I'm boycotting...
I'm starting to think that for the players to get a fair deal, they need to go above and beyond the negotiation table. Reading Joe's post (and the brilliant comment below by "Mike"), it's so clear that the owners have less to lose and more to gain from the lockout, and that's not going to be any different next time or the time after that.
What if the players and fans start to really target the anti-trust exemption? I don't know much about the legal details, but I believe Congress could just pass a law essentially saying "actually, now MLB IS covered by anti-trust laws". If the appetite were there, Congress could go even further and explicitly ban anti-competitive practices used by all the big leagues such as a salary cap/luxury tax and early-career contract shenanigans (why are these things even legal in the first place???) But I think just the credible threat of losing anti-trust would be enough to get the owners to settle.
Yep.
I am seeing evidence on social media that, despite the facts you’ve laid out here, there’s still a substantial percentage falling for the idea that “both sides are equally to blame,” “those greedy millionaire players,” etc. I don’t understand how anyone can look at this and say, sure, the owners are being perfectly reasonable. I would’ve hoped that 2016-2020 was enough to squash the notion that billionaires have the interests of the little guy at heart.
I need to check out Coda. If you haven't seen it yet, I suggest you watch the Danish movie Another Round.
Might just skip whatever baseball season is salvaged and watch Justified again, start to finish. Probably a better use of my free time.
Send Raylen in. He'll cut (or shoot) through all the BS.
At times like this I feel like saying I'm done with baseball, but I know I am not. However, each lockout, strike, controversy, etc. has dulled my enthusiasm such that what was my favorite sport in my youth is now somewhere around 3rd or 4th. My young adult kids and their friends barely pay attention to baseball. NFL, NBA, and Soccer are their favorites. I don't think this lockout "kills" baseball anymore than past stoppages have. But what it does do, is inflict one more wound on a once great sport that will eventually render it an afterthought in the American sports conscience.
A few things keep coming back to me no matter what other noise we hear:
1. I don't think the owners care AT ALL what the public thinks. Like, not one bit. To the extent they're thinking about what's best for "the game," and therefore for themselves, it's all completely short-term thinking. And they know that if and when the game comes back it's gonna put huge mountains of sheckels in their own pockets.
2. The owners know that the players have much more to lose than they do for every regular season game missed. Yeah, it'll take money out of their pockets in terms of concessions (no pun intended) and tickets and merch. But the players get clobbered once they start missing games.
3. The owners can leverage 1 & 2 as they hold firm thru April, May, June, even maybe into July. Again, they'll feel it . . . a little. But the players will be hurting.
4. And therefore, the owners can choose the right moment -- as they look at the players bent over a barrel -- to "salvage" what's left of the regular season and head towards the post-season.
5. And that post-season is where the owners can make serious bank.
So what I suspect is that the owners will continue to negotiate in bad faith, keeping the players weak and helpless, with an eye towards a 50, 60, 75, maybe 100 game season with a 16-team, bracketed tourney-type post-season. And in so doing they can get maximal concessions from the players as that reduced season/expanded post-season approaches.
I hope I'm wrong, and I reserve the right to be so (!), but I don't think I am. The owners have proven they care about nothing but their own finances. They certainly don't care about "baseball," and definitely not in the long term. I don't see them even considering anything but what I've suggested above.
And it sucks.
I really don't think that the owners have any reason to care what the average fan wants. Their income comes from long-term TV contracts and luxury boxes. I spend about $300 a year on tickets and MLB.tv. I don't think it matters at all to them.
Heck, let's say professional baseball dies out entirely. How would that really impact Ted Lerner's net worth?
Yes -- if I were a multi-billionaire owner, this is exactly what I would do, too. This has made the most sense for the past month and seems inevitable now.
@Mike - 💯 nailed it.
Why not play a 80 game season starting Memorial Day weekend with a bunch of multi-entry 7 inning double headers to juice revenue and then playoffs for 16 teams starting in September that lasts better part of 2 months like the NBA and NHL. Because history doesn’t matter and who watches regular season anything anyway?
Give the players 2 months of liquidating their aggressive growth mutual funds in a bear market in order to make $7500 monthly mortgage and rent payments. Watch them come begging….
We used to have playoffs for 16 teams in September. I seem to recall it was called a ‘Pennant Race’ or something olde-timely like that.
Thanks. And while I also agree that you're on to something, I want to make it clear that I'm not on the owners' side here. Yes, I want baseball, but I'm not looking for a way to break the union/make the players "come begging."
A big part of me would rather see the whole season lost than the 75 game/October Madness tourney I fear we're heading for.
I am in no way on owners side. I think they aren’t trying to break the union so much as to beat them with a sack of oranges.
They can outlast them and everyone knows it. The rich players can outlast the young players. The rich players are the ones at the table. As long as the young ones believe the rich ones the impasse goes on. If that should break the players go down.
Yep. Understood.
CODA was mostly quite good but had its share of clichés, too. I don't ever again need to see a scene at a big audition where someone on the panel is like, "this is highly irregular!"