Major League Baseball is going to have a lockout. There’s no getting around it. The minute December 1st ends, the current Collective Bargaining agreement will expire, and the Owners will lock out the Players. Will games be lost? I don’t know.
When it comes to sports, I am a pro-Union guy1 because I know what the owners have done to the players over the decades. That doesn’t mean I don’t know how the money works and the realities of sports ownership in the 21st century. However, I am also an optimistic pro-baseball guy. Ideally, there’s a way for the Players and the Owners to come to a mutually beneficial agreement. There will be villains trying to stop that though. Here they are…
Rob Manfred
The current MLB Commissioner is a very obvious villain (hell, he even looks like a movie corporate bad guy straight from central casting), but I do not think he is the kind of villain you think he is. Manfred is an attorney, handpicked by the Owners because he has been anti-labor his entire professional life. Traditionally, this is not someone who should be Commissioner. Why? Because the Commissioner is supposed to lead the Owners, not be led by them. He went from being their employee for 20 years to being their, what? He certainly isn’t their boss or someone who is supposed to unify them. He is here to be the Owners’ whipping boy during the lockout. That was not how Bud Selig operated and it certainly wasn’t who Peter Ueberroth was. This is going to end up being a problem because the Owners do not have someone actually trying to help the situation. Instead, considering he is likely in his last term as commissioner, he likely considers himself in a legacy moment of salary cap or bust rather than to save baseball.
The former Executive Director of the Union isn’t even around anymore but he’s still a villain. Why? Because he screwed things up. Clark allegedly bilked money from the Union and had an affair with a staffer who also happened to be his sister-in-law. He resigned in February. With the negotiation of his life coming up, he threw the Union in flux.
Bruce Meyer
Meyer is the current Union Executive Director but only because he was the #2 to Clark before he left. With labor issues coming, the Union was not prepared for serious elections. Meyer was also implicated in the federal investigation into misappropriated funds and was subject to a mini-mutiny within the Player’s Association due to his alleged kowtowing to agent Scott Boras. He was already known as a hardline hawk, but will now be even less likely to compromise knowing there are cracks in his support.
Scott Boras
I am of two minds when it comes to Boras. On one hand, he clearly does a great job for his clients, negotiating most of the monster deals over the last 40 years of baseball history. On the other, he is almost single handedly responsible for teams either losing their own stars or crippling their teams to keep them. Boras clients almost never negotiate extensions with their current teams, choosing instead to have them reach free agency. This tactic usually results in bigger contracts with the biggest spenders but it also creates serious animosity with teams and angst amongst fans knowing that their time with a star player is limited. Players who sign with him know this, so they aren’t blameless either.
Mark Walter and the Dodgers
The Dodgers villainy has taken on a new look since the revelations that Mark Walter might be supplementing the team’s opulence with the investments of retirees. Previously, it was more of a jealousy that they had been spending on everyone while other teams have not. Now, there is something much more nefarious to the whole thing. Whether they did anything actually wrong or not, it is irrelevant. The Dodgers and all of their loopholes from deferred payments to a crooked TV deal to a local revenue bonanza make them the poster child of all that is wrong with baseball in some fans’ minds. Baseball is now using them in their anti-Union ads.
Bruce Sherman and the Marlins
The Marlins got everything they wanted and still run the lowest payroll in baseball. They got a new stadium, rebranding, friendly and shady terms for revenue sharing from the city, and even new ownership and yet they still run a bargain basement organization. They tried everything except actually spending money on players. Instead of trying to fix their situation by investing money into the team, the Marlins simply cry poor and demand that baseball fix their mess without an ounce of effort from the team. The year is 2026 and they are spending a little over $50m cash on actual player salaries this year. This isn’t just the Marlins either, it’s the Pirates, Twins, Reds, and any other team that claims a lack of fan interest for their failure to spend rather than the other way around.
John Fisher and the Athletics
John Fisher owns the A’s. He’s a legitimate sociopath. He forced the A’s (and the Raiders) out of Oakland because he refused to do anything that would not give him full ownership of the development area around either the old stadium or a new one. The city obviously had problems of its own too, but at no point did Fisher help things. Then he forced his way to Las Vegas. His successful hijacking of the team broke the thin glass veneer that still separated baseball the game from baseball the business. He now goes to a city where his team will only help cultivate tourism rather than his own fans. There is no chance he continues to spend once they settle in. Why would he?
The Commissioner’s Ambassadors
This pains me because some of my favorites are on this list. 3 years ago, Manfred recruited the likes of Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard, and Shane Victornio as “ambassadors” in a way to infiltrate and gain influence within player circles. When Manfred was touring clubhouses last year, he went accompanied by these ambassadors. While on the surface this can just be seen as a way for MLB to reach out to fans and improve communications between the Players and the League, it can also be seen as a way to influence younger players to agree with league proposals. While being spokesmen for baseball for fans is one thing, going with the Commissioner to meet with teams is completely different.
I’m all for people, especially athletes getting their money, but what the hell guys??? Contracts go up and records are broken, often times by people who don’t deserve them. That’s just how it goes. What happened here though is an error of perspective rather than value or judgment. When Ohtani signed his contract, the price tag was what everyone initially saw, $700m. Staggering. When the details came out though, it was worse. $680m in deferred money meant that he was really only getting $2m per year now while the Dodgers had to put $41m in escrow within 2 years so he could get his money ten years on. A 10/$430m contract makes a lot more sense compared to other previous deals signed. Of course, then Scott Boras sees this and wants Juan Soto to beat the sticker price which of course, Steve Cohen does, but with no deferred money at all. Now things are all out of whack.
Steve Cohen
My only real problem with Uncle Steve is that he’s the boogieman now. His bottomless checkbook makes bidding with him impossible. This was previously true with the Yankees under Big George too, but with Cohen, it is a whole new level. He will literally spend anything to get the player he wants. The only reason things aren’t more dire is that David Stearns is keeping him in check for no reason at all. Once he kicks Stearns to the side, everyone will be on notice. I’m sure the other Owners are scared to death of that.
History
I don’t know how much Players today are taught about previous labor battles, but they have to know that the issues of today are not simply relevant to them. For almost 100 years, there was no free agency because of the Reserve Clause which allowed Owners to lie to and shortchange their employees with no defense. For decades the Players fought just to get pensions. Once they did get free agency, the Owners colluded together to simply not offer free agent contracts THREE TIMES!!! All of this distrust left the players to do some bad stuff themselves like rampant steroid use and the refusal to implement testing for years. The Owners knew about this of course and had no problem profiting from it until it was bad for business.
Now we are at the point where relationships are ice cold. This doesn’t mean things can’t be figured out, but it will probably take awhile. If anyone has more villains in this whole thing, let me know.
- I do not get into politics on this website because it makes me mad and that’s the opposite of why I started this ↩︎
Photo: Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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