Friday, March 29

Can MLB save Opening Day today? Real fans should hope not.


commentary

Florida clouds creep over Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, where negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement have been taking place this past week. Katherine Frey/Washington Post

COMMENTARY

No one erased Major League Baseball’s March 31 Opening Day while you were sleeping. That constitutes progress, I guess.

It’s all more maddening than joyous at this address, if I’m being honest. Cramming was a terrible strategy for your term paper, and it’s similarly not going to draw up a collective bargaining agreement that fixes much in a league that, for all we still love, needs ample fixing.

After some 16½ hours of negotiations on days No. 89 and 90 of the lockout, the former an owner-imposed deadline to preserve a full 162-game season, said deadline was slid back to 5 pm on Tuesday.

“The union felt the league showed it is serious about making a deal by how it moved towards long-held union positions on such matters as competitive balance thresholds, minimum salaries, and pre-arbitration bonus pools,” the Globe’s Michael Silverman declared from the scene in Jupiter, Fla., “but that the movements were not enough for the players to agree to a deal.”

Whether they come to an agreement on Tuesday certainly isn’t immaterial, but feel free to declare, “Wake me up when they figure it out.” Especially when so many of you have glanced at all this and declared roughly what my Globe colleague Kevin Paul Dupont did on monday: A pox on both houses.

I could have picked similar sentiments from hundreds. Heck, I probably could have gotten that from my mom, who — in a legendary family story — once saw Jim Rice walking on the Fenway Park concourse before a game and, in relaying the story to my dad, wondered, “What kind of weirdo wears a full uniform to go to a baseball game?”

Your “millionaires vs. billionaires” takes are just as bad.

In 2015, the median MLB player salary reached a record $1.65 million. In the six seasons since, it has dropped more than 30 percent, to $1.15 million at the start of 2021. (Which means, not for nothing, most players aren’t even millionaires.)

In 2015, when Forbes released its annual MLB team valuations, the median sat a shade below $1 billion. In 2021’s, the median was up more than 40 percent to $1.65 billion. The Marlins brought up the rear at $990 million — just about what that average was six years earlier.

I can’t make it starker than that. If baseball replaced its current 800 or so players with the next best available, the product would be demonstrably worse than it would if it replaced its 30 current owners with a different crew of rich guys. To borrow from ESPN’s Jeff Passan, we are dealing with “a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues.”

You want to blame the players for something? Blame them for shortsightedness. Their steadfast refusal to entertain a salary cap comes despite an elephant all know is in the room: The competitive balance threshhold the Red Sox notably reset under a couple years ago is a salary cap.

It’s just one that doesn’t come with the things, namely a salary floor teams must meet, that would increase the players’ bottom line. The NBA, NFL, and NHL all have current salary-cap systems. They also have higher minimum wages than baseball and, critically, far lower percentages of players making said minimum salary.

Nothing in a new collective bargaining agreement forged in the next 24 hours will change that. At best, the players’ union will successfully move up the competitive balance tax thresholds a little and keep the same tax structure on overages from the previous deal.

That’s the setup where big-market clubs, including the Red Sox, frequently spend right up to the line without crossing it. The one where small-market clubs like the Marlins, whom Derek Jeter danced out of Monday, can go on not spending.

And the one that, by setting financial lines in the sand ahead of time, will create the same drain over the next five years. You really think MLB won’t find another money faucet — Local streaming? In-game gambling? NFTs? — it doesn’t really have to share? Or another way to keep paying less while they make more?

We have been promised for three years that the players were ready for real sacrifice this time. That they’d stashed away money to ensure they could weather a stoppage in which they wouldn’t be paid. That they were so miffed by MLB’s rejection of their comprehensive offer on Saturday that they nearly walked away from negotiations.

A deal today would save the full 2022 season, but with so little changed. To service time for younger players, or free agency period. To either revenue sharing or the CBT soft cap on spending. To the parade of strikeouts, walks, and relief pitchers.

A rudimentary draft lottery that might slightly discourage teams tanking for better picks? A playoff system expanded not to a ridiculous 14 teams, but 12, which is still hard to competitively justify when the season remains 162 games?

Baseball needs meaningful changes. The sport has never had more dynamic athletes, yet hasn’t been less enjoyable to watch since the dead-ball era a century ago. They will not come today.

All a deal today will bring is another five years of ownership largesse. And a sport that, at absolute best, will be no worse off.

Of course, the players probably know that as well as I do. Re-read those words that Silverman wrote above: “The union felt the league showed it is serious about making a deal.” that was the movement on Monday.

Ownership created the lockout. Ownership created the “deadline” it just broke, ostensibly because there’s been movement toward a deal. Movement that can stem the parade of people who’ve looked at this and seen the same things I’ve seen, and that ownership can spin on when it “has” to cancel games because, well, “the players didn’t agree to …”

The players didn’t lock themselves out, but they’ll wear it all the same. May as well fight for the truly better game they’re the only ones apparently interested in.

No one wants to watch the phoenix immolate, even if we know a better day sprouts from the ashes. The NHL undoubtedly never got back all the fans and market share it had before a lockout swallowed its 2004-05 season, but the end result was better financial footing — and, ultimately, a better product — for both players and owners.

Major League Baseball is not in that position: Again, if ownership’s books were as bad as they say, they’d be mailing copies to season-ticket holders. But commitment today will simply kick the can of real change down the road another five years.

I can not deny that I’m as instant gratification as most everyone else: I hope today leads to full-throat baseball games on March 31.

But if it doesn’t? I’ll understand that maybe the players really do want this thing fixed as much as most of us diehards do.




www.boston.com

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