Hey MLB: Screw You
No one calls themselves an MLB fan, they call themselves ‘baseball fans.’ We’re fans of a sport, not an entity created by owners of individual franchises to protect business interests. ‘MLB’ feels like baseball because of the history of it all, but as Bill Thompson has repeatedly told us, it’s not.
As readers of this site know, I recently read Lords of the Realm (if you haven’t read it, do; if you haven’t read my post about it, do that too), and it has really helped me keep the ups and downs of the current lockout in a much greater perspective and avoid the hyperbolic nonsense overpopulating baseball twitter (from fans and writers, alike) these days.
However, that hyperbolic nonsense shouldn’t be entirely dismissed. Even if some of the details of the 2022 lockout may resemble the previous work stoppages in baseball history (something that writers tweeting things like ‘baseball, nice while it lasted’ should really keep in mind), the rest of the world doesn’t. Maybe in 1986 you could send a particularly cretinous owner like Dick Monfort into a particularly important, crunch time negotiation and it wouldn’t be noticed or reported on until much later. In 2022, it’s immediately noted on everyone’s timelines and is yet another in a very, very long list of damning, callus, and stupid actions that Rob Manfred’s league has made in the last 5ish years, but especially in the last two.
It is becoming crystal clear that the MLB owners and Manfred are making a cold, calculated decision about the financial risk and reward of continuing a lockout, and that in doing so they have totally lost sight of the (slightly) bigger context of public sentiment. Of course, I’ve been complaining for a long time that MLB has clearly decided it doesn’t care about the (much) bigger context of The Game Itself, prizing the next dollar over the sport’s overall health and integrity – so perhaps this should not come as such a shock.
There’s a reason that owners have never, in MLB history, come out on top in a labor dispute: they are a catty, disorganized, self-interested, clumsy group of inherently unlikable people, and always have been. But things are worse for them now. It’s much harder to spin the narrative in the age of information dissemination decentralization, when the specific details of every labor proposal and counter proposal are carefully scrutinized on Jeff Passan’s twitter feed, and multiple years of service time manipulation, suspiciously depressed free agent markets, and disingenuous cries of team poverty have basically predisposed the public to view the collective Owners as villains anyway.
I think a lot about Rob Manfred’s surprise the first time he was booed at the World Series. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the Trumpian level of self-delusion required for him to think anything else was going to happen.
Manfred has been a uniquely fan-hostile, player-hostile, owner-sympathetic figure. All commissioners are, of course, employed by the owners, but there are figures like Bart Giamatti, whose first allegiance seemed to be The Love of the Game, and like even Roger Goodell, who at least cynically seems to understand that the league’s financial viability is ultimately a product of fans’ paychecks, and that market share of that paycheck is a itself a product of how much the fans enjoy going to/watching games.
Manfred, by contrast, seems to view the players as enemies – or, at best, an overhead cost that should be streamlined and made more efficient – and the fans as, I don’t know, inconvenient? Irrelevant?
I don’t know if he thinks baseball is invulnerable as an entity and this little squabble, no matter how ugly it might be on any given day, will blow over and things will just keep chugging along. If that’s the case, I really hope he’s right. (While I’m writing this, Bryce Harper just sent out an image of himself in a Yomiuri Giants uniform. Woof. Good luck, Rob.)
I don’t know if he just thinks this is a fight worth winning for the owners no matter the cost. If so, that seems pretty dumb and I think he’s likely to fail.
I think Manfred’s got it all wrong. I think he underestimates the power of the modern media/social media machine and the recent training Americans of all political stripes have had in voter/consumer/online/in person activism. We’re not likely to forget the way he and the league have comported themselves during this lockout, a lockout we’re all reminded daily online is league-imposed and, because of the league, featured no bargaining sessions at all for the first 6 weeks. We’re not likely to forget Manfred’s lies and insulting claims that MLB teams are terrible investments, investments just about every fan would gladly make if we had a few extra billion dollars lying around. I tend to doubt, when/if this all ends and baseball does come back, that Max Scherzer is going to hear louder boos than Manfred, and Manfred will deserve every one.
I’m pretty pissed and I bet most other fans are too. For years, we’ve watched Manfred pilot the sport from squarely number 2 in the US to barely number 3, while routinely lying to and insulting fans, making massive unilateral (and generally crappy) changes to the sport, enabling rampant violations of the spirit of the previous CBA, and now driving the whole thing into a ditch entirely. We’re not suffering through an acrimonious work stoppage to sort through some very serious decisions about the long term health of the game where there are important and necessary disagreements. That would be one thing. We’re suffering through an acrimonious work stoppage because the owners have violated the trust of the players, their union, and the public, and are trying to extract every last cent from the sport in the immediate term not just at the expense of the players, but at the expense of the long term vitality of the game.
That’s what Manfred has ushered in and presided over. It’s unforgivable.
