Marvin Miller was exactly right. Wasn’t he a labor lawyer? Labor lawyers know what the public doesn’t or refuses to acknowledge - employers and in particular large rich employers, have been exploiting workers forever. It is not news, and it is not unique to baseball. Do you know how much major league baseball owners will exploit the players? As much as they possibly can.
Marvin Miller is 100% right – the players need to not worry about what the fans think and play some hardball of their own. Do some barnstorming. Have some “injuries” here and there during the season, or maybe en mass towards the end of the regular season. Whatever it takes. Or if they don’t, just go ahead and bend over like usual
I wonder if Joe has some examples of players who were similarly underpaid like Walker Buehler, who NEVER GOT a fair market deal because of injuries, analytics, whatever. Matt Harvey? How about some others? That phenomena is only going to grow – and I think the players know it
The players are really bad at messaging & the owners are very good at it, most of the time when they're not assaulting women or making racist comments. The players need to get better at messaging if they want the fans to understand. If they just give up on messaging, rather than trying to find an effective message, like Marvin Miller gave up, well, then everyone will hate you. That's probably a big reason why Miller isn't in the HOF. And it's self inflicted, and it's lazy.
I think the players should focus their message on the money that the teams get from revenue sharing, and the small market teams often just pocket the revenue sharing without spending it on players. Just keep hammering that message home. And the big money teams that are pushing for a salary cap or intentionally reducing their chances to win a World Series so the owners can make more money. Make sure the fans of each team know that their owner is not trying his hardest to win
I totally agree with you and the players, but I think the fans need representation too. Maybe a fan union or a way to collectively buy shares of the teams?
I have been watching this “wondrous-extraordinary-magical” and, well, “far-beyond-what-words-can-truly-describe” game!
That’s a whole bunch of words of conveying “I love baseball! Always have, forever will!”
I never thought — after 2020, with EVERY! SINGLE! SEAT! IN! EVERY! SINGLE! major league ballpark was EMPTY — anyone associated with MLB would even consider losing games, Spring Training or otherwise.
After two years of a worldwide Pandemic I would be so filled with joy by watching terrific athletes toss and a hit a baseball. The utter joy of watching Mookie run the bases would quiet every bit of me. The artistry of seeing a double play executed would fill me with joy as well.
We all need a distraction, a time away from some really tough things happening in life right now. One of my treasures in life, my “out” (pun intended) is, well, you know…
My “soul” is attempting to convey that there are more important things in life. My “human side” hurts like hell…! I admit it; yet it doesn’t allow me to feel any better!
In time, two words will be said in ballparks around the country. Still, “play ball” could have, should have, been been yelled by now…!
I just wish the two sides (yes, both sides) would, could get past themselves and “figure it out!”
Thanks Joe. I was a bit skeptical when you discussed Acuna in recent article without getting into any of the total data. But the $168 million total drop is pretty damning, and sounds like it’s been going on for a few years. It definitely looks like the owners are squeezing these guys.
Almost there … come out and say it, “reason we should care is the PLAYERS ARE US! Guys on W2s trying to collectively negotiate basic INFLATION increase, yet getting SHAFTED. Keep in mind, an inflation increase IS NOT AN INCREASE. Inflation increase just means your car is simply allowed to continue motoring along at 55 (or even w that, still apparently slowing down, just less). Only thing missing at the ol’ MLB factory are the heavies beating back the strikers to let in the scabs. Should we care about the players? Should we care about us?
It used to be true that fans sided with the owners but the Athletic did a (unscientific) poll of its readers and they overwhelmingly sided with the players and blamed the owners primarily for this mess.
But... Mainstream social media is not representative of fans either. Many of those guys aren't even fans, just guys sitting on their (or their Mom's) couch looking to score of someone. They are not representative of the average fan, or even the average person on any issue. Twitter is mostly extremes. But somehow, the media is always reporting those extremes as if they are real news or an actual poll, businesses make decisions based on those extremes, people think views represented there represent the public as a whole.
The truth is probably somewhere between that and the Athletic poll (which is probably more hardcore fans, who may not accurately represent the "average fan") but what people see - the players, the owners, the media - is what the twitter people are saying.
Unfortunately I don’t think The Athletic fan is representative of the regular fan. I do think fans have shifted some towards the players, but not to the degree a The Athletic fan survey would indicate.
You are generally correct - fans have much less empathy for the players than the owners.
It's honestly baffling to me, but maybe a couple of thoughts (likely wrong):
To some extent, players are more relatable to us. Many of us played sports as kids, some as young adults. We likely had friends or at least classmates that achieved some degree of success athletically. We may have been friends with them. Through a certain lens, they were our peers, in a way that billionaire ownership groups weren't. We never pretended to be the Guggenheim Group as kids, we pretended to be Kershaw. And the guy that had a locker just down the hall was the local Kershaw.
So we see these guys getting paid to play a game, don't really think about the economics, and as you say, every player contract is boldfaced in the news in a way that club revenues aren't. They become a super easy target because to a degree we think we can relate. We have a job. They have a job. They're getting paid WHAT to play a game....that's their job?!?!? Billionaires are supposed to be a greedy in a way that regular folks aren't, we're just supposed to jealous.
Same rationale that has been used to play off the elite upper class against the working and middle class for centuries.
It's all spin. The owners have all of the control - of the narrative, of the timing of negotiations, of the keys to the clubhouse. And we invariably get pissed at the players for not just "shutting up and playing the game".
not so sure fans are pro-owner anymore, though they certainly were in the past. a lot of that was the 90% pro-owner posture of the press. that's largely gone, AP nothwithstanding (isn't that weird, for a media group so famously 0 on the Ph scale?). part of that is the times, part is the douchiness of and knee jerk lies from manfred, part is that owners have a hard time shutting offending writers out, thanks to new media. fangraphs did a twitter poll a couple of weeks ago in which 95% of 2000 respondents blamed the owners for the labor war. not representative of america, but these are baseball opinion leaders.
OK, so imagine the Dodgers come to Walker Buehler and say, "Walker, we will pay you what you worth this year and every year if you agree to continue playing for us under this same arrangement until you retire. You get hurt for a year or two, you don't get paid. You pitch like Nolan Ryan and we will pay you a ton through your mid-forties. You fade away like a lot of guys and you are not going to make much after you turn thirty. Your choice." Will he take a deal like this?
I mean, that’s why no one makes $40mm/yr in baseball. You lose some of the ceiling in exchange for security. Even Mike Trout has routinely been worth $70ish million/yr according to FanGraphs’s methodology but his supposedly fair record-breaking contract averages ~$36mm/yr.
The problem is that most players aren’t Mike Trout and won’t have the opportunity to sign a large deal like that (still less than what they’d be worth on 1 year deals). The teams wait to call guys up til the last possible moment, have 6 (sometimes 7) years of team control and then by the time they hit free agency they’re exiting their prime and not worth spending large dollars on. So they’re underpaid early in their career, and then get “fair” deals later with no chance to make up the difference.
Yes, that's called a free market. There's no way the owners would ever make Buehler or the other players that offer because they'd pay much, much more if they had to pay players what they were worth right from the time they were drafted (no cheap 6 years before free agency that only starts when you're called up to the majors). Every rule baseball has regarding player salaries is intended to artificially suppress the labor market in baseball. The idea that a free market would actually hurt the *players* is laughable. That's what terrifies *owners*.
He might if the Dodgers also agreed to pay him back the difference between what he was worth and what he made for 2018, 2019, and 2021. After all, that's the only way this deal would be fair.
I am actually more interested in the third point, specifically the idea that "it’s not like the money he isn’t getting paid just disappears. It just goes to someone else who is not Walker Buehler." I suppose that's true if "someone else" might include the owner, but if Walker Buehler were actually paid his worth, would it diminish what is getting paid to Max Scherzer (or Dallas Keuchel, if you prefer)? I don't really see any reason to believe that, at least as long as the six years of team control is still in place. But I could be wrong.
Which then has me thinking, what happened to the holdout? When I was a kid, it was pretty common for a star who wasn't happy with his pay to sit out spring training until the team did something about it (or he got hungry). Surely if Walker decided he wanted a bigger piece of that $43MM, he could tell the Dodgers to see how well they got along without him. Why doesn't anyone do that anymore (aside from the obvious fact that $3.75MM buys a lot of tires for your Porsche)?
Thanks to paying to read Joe and The Athletic and frequenting Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus, I have gone from a "the two sides need to figure it out" point of view to a "the players have made a simple, logical and reasonable list of what they want while the owners just want extend the old deal with a minor cost of living adjustment while they keep all the additional revenue" point of view.
Most fans will watch ESPN of FS1 in the morning (they spend most of their time talking about Rodgers, Brady, LeBron and the Cowboys and seemed to have forgotten that baseball exists) or will check out MLB.com or the MLB network. We already know that Rosenthal got fired from MLB.com. This week on MLB Network's Roundtrip on SiriusXM, I heard the both guys declaring the players starting offers to be completely unreasonable and one of the guys actually said that the players should blame their union leadership not the owners. The players realize the deal didn't work out very well for them and now they are trying to get back to a more favorable place, but "it doesn't work that way because the negotiation is based on the previous deal." Wow. Actually taking the "ha ha sucks to be you players, but the owners got you" angle. I'm not saying MLB is telling these guys what to say, but I think it is clear that people with a pro-player narrative aren't going to last on any MLB platform. It makes it difficult for the players to win the narrative.
Wait... are you saying that, when presented with new information and empirical fact and persuasive argument, you've had a change of mind? WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM BECAUSE YOU AIN'T FROM THE U S OF A, SIR.
Anyway, yes, totally. Regarding near the end of your second graf, exhibit A is Ken Rosenthal. Canned for speaking out - mildly! - against Manfred.
I would just like to note here that referring to Bruce Wayne's superhero alter ego as "The Batman" >>>>>>> just calling him Batman. Bonus points if you hyphenate "The Bat-Man"
Marvin Miller was exactly right. Wasn’t he a labor lawyer? Labor lawyers know what the public doesn’t or refuses to acknowledge - employers and in particular large rich employers, have been exploiting workers forever. It is not news, and it is not unique to baseball. Do you know how much major league baseball owners will exploit the players? As much as they possibly can.
Marvin Miller is 100% right – the players need to not worry about what the fans think and play some hardball of their own. Do some barnstorming. Have some “injuries” here and there during the season, or maybe en mass towards the end of the regular season. Whatever it takes. Or if they don’t, just go ahead and bend over like usual
I wonder if Joe has some examples of players who were similarly underpaid like Walker Buehler, who NEVER GOT a fair market deal because of injuries, analytics, whatever. Matt Harvey? How about some others? That phenomena is only going to grow – and I think the players know it
The players are really bad at messaging & the owners are very good at it, most of the time when they're not assaulting women or making racist comments. The players need to get better at messaging if they want the fans to understand. If they just give up on messaging, rather than trying to find an effective message, like Marvin Miller gave up, well, then everyone will hate you. That's probably a big reason why Miller isn't in the HOF. And it's self inflicted, and it's lazy.
I think the players should focus their message on the money that the teams get from revenue sharing, and the small market teams often just pocket the revenue sharing without spending it on players. Just keep hammering that message home. And the big money teams that are pushing for a salary cap or intentionally reducing their chances to win a World Series so the owners can make more money. Make sure the fans of each team know that their owner is not trying his hardest to win
Thank you for writing this, Joe! Completely agree
Just find a way.
I totally agree with you and the players, but I think the fans need representation too. Maybe a fan union or a way to collectively buy shares of the teams?
I have been watching this “wondrous-extraordinary-magical” and, well, “far-beyond-what-words-can-truly-describe” game!
That’s a whole bunch of words of conveying “I love baseball! Always have, forever will!”
I never thought — after 2020, with EVERY! SINGLE! SEAT! IN! EVERY! SINGLE! major league ballpark was EMPTY — anyone associated with MLB would even consider losing games, Spring Training or otherwise.
After two years of a worldwide Pandemic I would be so filled with joy by watching terrific athletes toss and a hit a baseball. The utter joy of watching Mookie run the bases would quiet every bit of me. The artistry of seeing a double play executed would fill me with joy as well.
We all need a distraction, a time away from some really tough things happening in life right now. One of my treasures in life, my “out” (pun intended) is, well, you know…
My “soul” is attempting to convey that there are more important things in life. My “human side” hurts like hell…! I admit it; yet it doesn’t allow me to feel any better!
In time, two words will be said in ballparks around the country. Still, “play ball” could have, should have, been been yelled by now…!
I just wish the two sides (yes, both sides) would, could get past themselves and “figure it out!”
What a silly, selfish thought that is!!!
Thanks Joe. I was a bit skeptical when you discussed Acuna in recent article without getting into any of the total data. But the $168 million total drop is pretty damning, and sounds like it’s been going on for a few years. It definitely looks like the owners are squeezing these guys.
Almost there … come out and say it, “reason we should care is the PLAYERS ARE US! Guys on W2s trying to collectively negotiate basic INFLATION increase, yet getting SHAFTED. Keep in mind, an inflation increase IS NOT AN INCREASE. Inflation increase just means your car is simply allowed to continue motoring along at 55 (or even w that, still apparently slowing down, just less). Only thing missing at the ol’ MLB factory are the heavies beating back the strikers to let in the scabs. Should we care about the players? Should we care about us?
It used to be true that fans sided with the owners but the Athletic did a (unscientific) poll of its readers and they overwhelmingly sided with the players and blamed the owners primarily for this mess.
But... Mainstream social media is not representative of fans either. Many of those guys aren't even fans, just guys sitting on their (or their Mom's) couch looking to score of someone. They are not representative of the average fan, or even the average person on any issue. Twitter is mostly extremes. But somehow, the media is always reporting those extremes as if they are real news or an actual poll, businesses make decisions based on those extremes, people think views represented there represent the public as a whole.
The truth is probably somewhere between that and the Athletic poll (which is probably more hardcore fans, who may not accurately represent the "average fan") but what people see - the players, the owners, the media - is what the twitter people are saying.
Unfortunately I don’t think The Athletic fan is representative of the regular fan. I do think fans have shifted some towards the players, but not to the degree a The Athletic fan survey would indicate.
You are generally correct - fans have much less empathy for the players than the owners.
It's honestly baffling to me, but maybe a couple of thoughts (likely wrong):
To some extent, players are more relatable to us. Many of us played sports as kids, some as young adults. We likely had friends or at least classmates that achieved some degree of success athletically. We may have been friends with them. Through a certain lens, they were our peers, in a way that billionaire ownership groups weren't. We never pretended to be the Guggenheim Group as kids, we pretended to be Kershaw. And the guy that had a locker just down the hall was the local Kershaw.
So we see these guys getting paid to play a game, don't really think about the economics, and as you say, every player contract is boldfaced in the news in a way that club revenues aren't. They become a super easy target because to a degree we think we can relate. We have a job. They have a job. They're getting paid WHAT to play a game....that's their job?!?!? Billionaires are supposed to be a greedy in a way that regular folks aren't, we're just supposed to jealous.
Same rationale that has been used to play off the elite upper class against the working and middle class for centuries.
It's all spin. The owners have all of the control - of the narrative, of the timing of negotiations, of the keys to the clubhouse. And we invariably get pissed at the players for not just "shutting up and playing the game".
well, yes. sorry. high school chemistry was so long ago.
not so sure fans are pro-owner anymore, though they certainly were in the past. a lot of that was the 90% pro-owner posture of the press. that's largely gone, AP nothwithstanding (isn't that weird, for a media group so famously 0 on the Ph scale?). part of that is the times, part is the douchiness of and knee jerk lies from manfred, part is that owners have a hard time shutting offending writers out, thanks to new media. fangraphs did a twitter poll a couple of weeks ago in which 95% of 2000 respondents blamed the owners for the labor war. not representative of america, but these are baseball opinion leaders.
... don't you mean 7 on the pH scale?
OK, so imagine the Dodgers come to Walker Buehler and say, "Walker, we will pay you what you worth this year and every year if you agree to continue playing for us under this same arrangement until you retire. You get hurt for a year or two, you don't get paid. You pitch like Nolan Ryan and we will pay you a ton through your mid-forties. You fade away like a lot of guys and you are not going to make much after you turn thirty. Your choice." Will he take a deal like this?
I mean, that’s why no one makes $40mm/yr in baseball. You lose some of the ceiling in exchange for security. Even Mike Trout has routinely been worth $70ish million/yr according to FanGraphs’s methodology but his supposedly fair record-breaking contract averages ~$36mm/yr.
The problem is that most players aren’t Mike Trout and won’t have the opportunity to sign a large deal like that (still less than what they’d be worth on 1 year deals). The teams wait to call guys up til the last possible moment, have 6 (sometimes 7) years of team control and then by the time they hit free agency they’re exiting their prime and not worth spending large dollars on. So they’re underpaid early in their career, and then get “fair” deals later with no chance to make up the difference.
Yes, that's called a free market. There's no way the owners would ever make Buehler or the other players that offer because they'd pay much, much more if they had to pay players what they were worth right from the time they were drafted (no cheap 6 years before free agency that only starts when you're called up to the majors). Every rule baseball has regarding player salaries is intended to artificially suppress the labor market in baseball. The idea that a free market would actually hurt the *players* is laughable. That's what terrifies *owners*.
He might if the Dodgers also agreed to pay him back the difference between what he was worth and what he made for 2018, 2019, and 2021. After all, that's the only way this deal would be fair.
I am actually more interested in the third point, specifically the idea that "it’s not like the money he isn’t getting paid just disappears. It just goes to someone else who is not Walker Buehler." I suppose that's true if "someone else" might include the owner, but if Walker Buehler were actually paid his worth, would it diminish what is getting paid to Max Scherzer (or Dallas Keuchel, if you prefer)? I don't really see any reason to believe that, at least as long as the six years of team control is still in place. But I could be wrong.
Which then has me thinking, what happened to the holdout? When I was a kid, it was pretty common for a star who wasn't happy with his pay to sit out spring training until the team did something about it (or he got hungry). Surely if Walker decided he wanted a bigger piece of that $43MM, he could tell the Dodgers to see how well they got along without him. Why doesn't anyone do that anymore (aside from the obvious fact that $3.75MM buys a lot of tires for your Porsche)?
Thanks to paying to read Joe and The Athletic and frequenting Baseball-Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus, I have gone from a "the two sides need to figure it out" point of view to a "the players have made a simple, logical and reasonable list of what they want while the owners just want extend the old deal with a minor cost of living adjustment while they keep all the additional revenue" point of view.
Most fans will watch ESPN of FS1 in the morning (they spend most of their time talking about Rodgers, Brady, LeBron and the Cowboys and seemed to have forgotten that baseball exists) or will check out MLB.com or the MLB network. We already know that Rosenthal got fired from MLB.com. This week on MLB Network's Roundtrip on SiriusXM, I heard the both guys declaring the players starting offers to be completely unreasonable and one of the guys actually said that the players should blame their union leadership not the owners. The players realize the deal didn't work out very well for them and now they are trying to get back to a more favorable place, but "it doesn't work that way because the negotiation is based on the previous deal." Wow. Actually taking the "ha ha sucks to be you players, but the owners got you" angle. I'm not saying MLB is telling these guys what to say, but I think it is clear that people with a pro-player narrative aren't going to last on any MLB platform. It makes it difficult for the players to win the narrative.
Wait... are you saying that, when presented with new information and empirical fact and persuasive argument, you've had a change of mind? WHAT PLANET ARE YOU FROM BECAUSE YOU AIN'T FROM THE U S OF A, SIR.
Anyway, yes, totally. Regarding near the end of your second graf, exhibit A is Ken Rosenthal. Canned for speaking out - mildly! - against Manfred.
I would just like to note here that referring to Bruce Wayne's superhero alter ego as "The Batman" >>>>>>> just calling him Batman. Bonus points if you hyphenate "The Bat-Man"