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Calling Both Sides 'Spoiled' in Baseball Lockout Ignores How Owners Forced Labor War Marc Normandin ([link removed])


AP: Locked out MLB players reject offer of federal mediation

AP (2/4/22 ([link removed]) ): "Players blame owners for the lockout," but MLB's commissioner "said his side was being proactive."

As Major League Baseball’s scheduled March 31 opening day looms nearer without a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), the nation’s sports media are pointing fingers squarely at both sides: the players’ union as well as team owners, who have been locked in so-far fruitless talks since the owners imposed a lockout in early December.

“After a half-year of bickering over the sport’s economics, baseball’s warring factions couldn’t even agree on whether to have a mediator,” wrote veteran Associated Press sports reporter Ronald Blum (2/4/22 ([link removed]) ). Paul Hoynes of Cleveland.com (2/15/22 ([link removed]) ) wrote that the start of spring training had been postponed because instead of seeking a quick resolution, “the two parties have circled each other like pampered and spoiled entities too self absorbed to reach a settlement.” The Tampa Bay Times’ John Romano (2/15/22 ([link removed]) ) likewise decried both owners and players, saying the two sides had

months to work on a solution, and instead have mostly ignored each other while suggesting the other side is being A) uncooperative B) unrealistic C) disingenuous D) all of the above.

It’s the kind of both-sidesing that’s familiar in media coverage of partisan political debates, whether over the right-wing insurrection at the Capitol (FAIR.org, 8/2/21) ([link removed]) , congressional budget battles (FAIR.org, 12/22/20 ([link removed]) ), or the benefits of injecting bleach to ward off Covid (FAIR.org, 4/28/20 ([link removed]) ). As in those cases, the media’s coverage of the ongoing baseball lockout obscures both the origins of the dispute and who’s responsible for its consequences.


** Enshrining loophole gains
------------------------------------------------------------
SBNation: The Rise of Cheap

"Fewer and fewer players are seeing benefits from baseball’s record-setting revenues," SBNation (3/18 ([link removed]) ) reported in 2018.

While the lockout officially began when MLB’s CBA expired on December 2, everyone in the sports world has known for years that team owners were preparing to shut down baseball in hopes of enshrining the gains they’ve made in exploiting loopholes in the last agreement to siphon money away from players and into their own pockets. Soon after the previous CBA was agreed to in 2016, owners began aggressively cutting loose players in their prime who were eligible for higher salaries under the league’s system of arbitration ([link removed]) (which kicks in once a player has three to four years in the majors) and free agency ([link removed]) (which requires six to seven years of service time). In 2019, the last season for which full data is available, over half of the total service time was accrued by players who combined for less than
10% of the total pay (Twitter, 12/2/21 ([link removed]) )—indicating that team owners were still paying for stars, but otherwise filling out their rosters with the cheapest talent available.

This not only cost players who were forced to sign cut-rate contracts at well below their market value to compete with youngsters with artificially depressed salaries (SBNation, 3/18 ([link removed]) ; Deadspin, 1/14/19 ([link removed]) ), it trickled down to younger players as well: Ronald Acuña Jr., one of the brightest young talents in the game, surprised everyone by signing a relatively modest eight-year, $100 million deal in 2019 (MarcNormandin.com, 4/12/19 ([link removed]) ), taking a guaranteed lump sum rather than gambling that someone would eventually pay him what he’s worth.

At the same time, owners have used a “luxury tax” ([link removed]) on high-payroll teams as a de facto salary cap (Deadspin, 1/31/19 ([link removed]) ), driving down spending by imposing huge fines on teams that exceed an arbitrary limit—one that the owners, in their latest contract proposals, have repeatedly proposed making even more regressive by significantly ramping up the penalties even for first-time, low-level offenders (CBS Sports, 2/21/22 ([link removed]) ).

The result has been an increasingly two-tier labor system where players can only fully share in baseball’s multi-billion-dollar yearly revenues (Forbes, 12/21/19 ([link removed]) ) once they’ve played in the majors for four years or more—but owners are increasingly incentivized to ditch expensive older players for younger ones making near the league minimum (DRaysBay, 3/21/19 ([link removed]) ).

That minimum salary, meanwhile, has actually fallen relative to inflation (TheScore, 12/2/21 ([link removed]) ), rising only 6.6% since 2017; one of the union’s main demands has been to increase it to $775,000 for the 2022 season. While the salaries of the top stars continue to soar, the average salary fell throughout the life of the previous CBA, from $4.45 million in 2017 to $4.17 million in 2021, and the median salary now sits at $1.15 million, down 30% from 2015 (ESPN, 4/16/21 ([link removed]) ).

There is a third tier, meanwhile, which is the minor leagues, where the vast majority of professional ballplayers are employed, hoping one day to have a shot at the majors. For minor-leaguers, even the major-league minimum salary is a distant dream, as they must work for years at wages as low as $500 a week, while paying for their own equipment and finding their own housing in minor-league cities—something that has left some ballplayers living in their cars (Athletic, 8/5/21 ([link removed]) ). During spring training, it’s even worse, as minor-leaguers aren’t paid at all for their required work time (Defector, 9/8/21 ([link removed]) ) beyond free lunches of single slices of deli meat and cheese on white bread (Marcnormandin.com, 2/12/20
([link removed]) ) (Though minor-league baseball players—unlike, say, minor-league hockey players—lack their own union, they are currently part of a class-action suit challenging baseball owners’ classification of them as “part-time seasonal apprentices'' not subject to minimum-wage laws: Baseball Prospectus, 10/23/20 ([link removed]) .)


** Stop the bleeding
------------------------------------------------------------
Tampa Bay Tribune: The only thing more abundant in baseball than money is shame

John Romano (Tampa Bay Tribune, 2/15/22 ([link removed]) ): "Owners and players...[are] just trying to figure out who gets more time in the vault with the billions of dollars that fans, networks and sponsors are throwing at them."

If this is the necessary context that led to the baseball lockout, you would have been hard pressed to find much of it in most media coverage. Romano, in his Tampa Bay Times column, called it “entirely fair and appropriate to call [owners] greedy %$@#*&!s,” then one sentence later said, while it’s “chic” to point out how younger players are underpaid, “you can’t bemoan the $605,000 bargain that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was in 2021 without acknowledging the same system allowed Albert Pujols to pocket $140 million while being a below-average player for the past five years.” (Pujols, then just two years removed from winning back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards, was signed to a 10-year, $240 million contract in 2011 by Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno—right around the same time Moreno signed a new TV deal that would pay him $3 billion over the next decade: SBNation, 12/8/11
([link removed]) .)

Even more pointed was AP Sports’ tweet (2/23/22 ([link removed]) ) promoting its story on February 23’s bargaining session between the owners and players:

Mets' Max Scherzer arrives in Porsche, joins fellow pitcher Gerrit Cole and other players as union and MLB meet for a third straight day in an attempt to salvage opening day on March 31 amid lockout.[link removed]

— AP Sports (@AP_Sports) February 23, 2022 ([link removed])

As at least one Twitter user noted ([link removed]) , calling out union leader Max Scherzer—a future Hall of Famer who is one of a few dozen elite players to cash in on his pitching skills with multiple big-money free agent deals—for driving a Porsche is a bit disingenuous when there’s no mention of the many private jets owned by the league’s team owners. And it’s an especially cheap shot when Scherzer has been one of the union leaders most vocal about needing an agreement that shares the wealth with all players, not just the most talented few, telling the Athletic (11/28/21 ([link removed]) ) last fall, “Unless this CBA completely addresses the competition [issues] and younger players getting paid, that’s the only way I’m going to put my name on it.”

The union did not realize they were signing on for dropping average salaries and a preference for league-minimum players when they negotiated the 2016 CBA, as they believed they were negotiating with a partner acting in good faith. The present bargaining is an opportunity to reverse these trends, and as it will take more than one CBA to undo all of that damage, their goals this time out are modest: in short, to stop the bleeding.

On the other side, it is just as vital to the owners that they are able to codify the loopholes that led the league to this point (Defector, 2/18/21 ([link removed]) ). Therefore, they wasted away the summer making unserious economic proposals, then locked the players out once the CBA expired (Baseball Prospectus, 12/3/21 ([link removed]) ). The owners claimed this was all done as a defensive measure to hasten the pace of bargaining and avoid any missed games—even though the players would have to strike in order for games to be missed, and a strike can only legally occur if there is an impasse in negotiations brought on by MLB’s refusal to negotiate.


** 'Both sides are exploiting'
------------------------------------------------------------

The media have too often been willing to play along with that strategy. One typical tweet, by ESPN’s longtime baseball writer Buster Olney (11/29/21 ([link removed]) ), bemoaned:

It does seem more than a little weird that the owners and players are prepared to completely shut down a financial system that individual parties on both sides are exploiting in the last days and hours before the CBA deadline. Talk about mixed messages.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 29, 2021 ([link removed])

But at the time Olney posted that tweet, everyone involved knew that a lockout was coming, especially since the owners had refused to even make a proposal unless the players preemptively agreed not to ask for any changes to the core economics of the system set up in 2016 (ESPN, 1/5/22 ([link removed]) ).

The players weren’t “exploiting” anything: The owners were preparing to lock the players out, while at the same time scrambling to sign them to new contracts so they wouldn’t have to rush around filling key roster spots post-lockout—including Scherzer, who was signed to a $43-million-a-year deal just before the lockout by New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund trader who narrowly escaped a lifetime ban from the SEC in 2016 after charges of insider trading (New York Times, 1/8/16 ([link removed]) ).
Sports Illustrated: Don’t Be Silly. This Isn’t Rob Manfred’s Fault, Says Rob Manfred.

After MLB commissioner Rob Manfeld said, “We hope that the lockout will jumpstart the negotiations," Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri (2/10/22 ([link removed]) ) noted, "the league waited 43 days to return to the negotiating table with a response to the last proposal from the players."

There were occasional exceptions that took a deeper look at the causes of the lockout. Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri (2/10/22 ([link removed]) ), for example, reported on how MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced in December that he hoped a lockout would "jumpstart the negotiations”—then went seven weeks before even going back to the negotiating table with a proposal, one that largely ignored any of the union’s complaints about owners manipulating the current system to drive down pay. She also noted that owners’ claims of financial struggles run counter to the soaring sale prices of MLB teams in recent years.

One reason we may not be seeing more reporting like this can be seen in the cautionary tale of Ken Rosenthal, who worked as a commentator for MLB Network until last year, when the TV network—which is majority-owned by MLB—declined to renew his contract (New York Post, 1/3/22 ([link removed]) ) after he wrote a piece for the Athletic (6/16/20 ([link removed]) ) that was mildly critical of commissioner Manfred’s handling of the negotiations for 2020’s pandemic-shortened season. MLB’s ability to reward or punish reporters from other outlets by extending or withdrawing lucrative offers to work for its own state media has long been worrisome, and only becomes more so during a contract war—especially since, once the lockout began, the “This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs”
addendum once included on every story ([link removed]) became a thing of the past.


** 'Stark diminishment of engagement'
------------------------------------------------------------

Instead, we get baseball writers like Randy Miller of NJ.com (2/9/22 ([link removed]) ) writing, “Spring training will not start on time next week due to a labor war that has no end in sight,” while “the Players Association is not backing down in its fight to bring a much bigger piece of the money pie its way”—something that’s only true if returning to the revenue split of six years ago represents “a bigger piece of the pie.” Or ESPN’s Olney tweeting (Twitter, 2/16/22 ([link removed]) ) that the enduring lockout is a sign of “the stark diminishment of engagement and conversation. It costs nothing to talk.”
NJ.com: yankees' gerrit cole on eve of expected solemn mlb announcement: solidarity high'

Randy Miller (NJ.com, 2/9/22 ([link removed]) ): “The Players Association is not backing down in its fight to bring a much bigger piece of the money pie its way.”

But calls for everyone just to sit down and talk ignore that the two sides have very different goals in mind. The union wants to stop the codifying of the various exploitative loopholes the league introduced into the CBA in the last decade, while trying to ensure that future young players won’t be exploited in the same ways as present-day young players, which in turn should help improve the level of competition in the league and make for a better product for fans, too. The owners, meanwhile, want to codify the various exploitative loopholes ([link removed]) they introduced into the CBA in the last decade, and they were willing to lock the players out and risk missing out on 2022 regular season games to do that (Defector, 2/18/22 ([link removed]) ). These are not the same, nor are they the kind of thing that “engagement and conversation” are apt to fix.

“Labor peace” is a lie: It is a call for the perpetuation of the status quo. If there is peace, it simply means the unions do not realize that they are under assault — which is exactly what led to the 2016 CBA, and the discontent that arose from it when the owners went full mask-off with exploiting cheaper talent and ignoring more expensive players unless they were superstars. For trying to reverse this trend, the players end up lumped in as equally as bad as the owners.

The players, if anything, could be asking for more. Though they would arguably be justified in looking to the past and demanding another tripling of the minimum salary (Marcnormandin.com, 3/8/21 ([link removed]) ), they’ve largely limited their demands to a more modest jump in the minimum, as well as an end to teams purposely manipulating young players’ contracts to keep them from the open market, and discarding high-priced players while leaning ever more heavily on younger athletes who aren’t allowed to offer their services on that open market.

Those players with the nine-digit contracts that are beloved of sportswriters trying to sell this as a mere squabble between overpaid rich folks, meanwhile, would gain nothing from the union’s demands, as it hasn’t made new proposals to help them. After all, Max Scherzer already has a Porsche.
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