Major League Baseball Is Back

Almost 50 years ago when Gerald Ford was inaugurated as President of the United States after the resignation of President Nixon, he proclaimed:

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

With the announcement last night that the MLB owners and the MLB players had reached an agreement on a new 5-year CBA,  I think President Ford’s announcement applies today.  Barring something like World War III erupting out of the Ukraine and/or the emergence of the omega variant of COVID-19, we are going to have a “normal” baseball season in 2022.

My position all along has been that neither side in this dispute had any claim on even a single square inch of the “moral high ground”.  And while I am as happy as anyone to know that baseball will take place in 2022, I would like to throw just a bit of cold water on the celebratory mood that seems to have engulfed most of the baseball media.

First, there is nothing – – and I do mean NOTHING – – in this new framework for a CBA that was not available to the negotiators the day after the lockout was announced.  No new ground was broken; none of the alleged abominations perpetrated by the “other side” in this dispute were eradicated.  Everything here could have emerged in short order had the two sides – – BOTH – – sat down and negotiated from realistic positions.  It was never clear to me then and it is certainly not clear to me now why there was a lockout in the first place; certainly now, it is clear that the negotiations dragged on – – or never even began in earnest – – for the first ten weeks after the unnecessary lockout.

  • The owners were stupid and greedy in locking the players out.
  • The players were petulant and greedy not knocking on the door to seek entry immediately.

Second, when all the details of the new CBA are ironed out and massaged by the lawyers, please do not think that we will enter an era of labor peace and mutual bliss on the part of the two sides here.  As I said above, NOTHING new is in this CBA other than a few numbers getting changed.  If the last CBA was sufficiently awful from the point of view of either or both sides, why would this one be any different?

Third, most of the baseball media sided with the players in this kerfuffle; that is OK with me; everyone has an inalienable right to be wrong.  Here is a datum that might lead you to believe that the players were significantly involved in delaying the outcome here.  Consider:

  • Sitting in on negotiations for the players was the MLBPA Executive Subcommittee.  That body consists of 8 players elected by the rank and file.
  • Each member of the Executive Subcommittee gets a ratification vote, and each team then gets one ratification vote too.  Thus, there are 38 votes for or against ratification and a simple majority is needed to ratify.
  • In this case, all 8 members of the Executive Subcommittee voted NOT to ratify this proposed agreement, but the teams voted 24-6 in favor of ratification, so we got a deal.
  • Please note, every player at the table doing the negotiating wanted baseball to stay dark longer than this.  With that on the record, might it not be the case that the players were not exactly striving for resolution?

The MLB regular season will begin on April 7th; they will play 162 games and the players will get the full value of their contracts.  If there had been a representative of the fans at the bargaining table, maybe the following point would have been made:

  • We don’t want to hear about 7-inning doubleheaders ever again unless teams charge only 7/9-ths of the admission price to those games and players only get paid 7/9-ths of their po-rated salaries for those games.

That is the sort of “issue” that neither the owners nor the players ever want to confront.  They both think they have a God-given right to ignore the fans that pay the freight for all the issues they just spent 3 months haggling over.

None of the haggling over the past 2 or 3 months really affected minor league baseball for a simple yet profound reason.  The lockout was by major league team owners not minor league team owners and the players’ side of the deal involved the MLB Players Association and minor league players are not members of that union – – with one exception.  Minor league players who were on the 40-man roster of a major league club at the time of the lockout are members of the union and therefore they could not be part of minor league teams or even workouts had this contretemps gone on further.  Basically, minor league teams had a set schedule and have been adhering to it:

  • Triple A games will begin on April 5th – – two days before MLB games
  • Double A, High A and Low A games, will begin on April 8th.

Just in case you are interested, here are the 8 members of the MLBPA Executive Subcommittee who were at the negotiating table and who voted against this now ratified CBA:

  1. Zack Britton
  2. Jason Castro
  3. Gerritt Cole
  4. Francisco Lindor
  5. Andrew Miller
  6. James Paxton
  7. Max Scherzer
  8. Marcus Semien

Finally, the poet William Butler Yeats had this observation about an Irishman; if you substitute “baseball fans” for “Irish” it seems appropriate today:

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………