MLB owners, players stuck on own self-interest in lockout

Much like on the field, where MLB, its players, and its executives are stuck between playing the game in a way that maximizes entertainment and playing in a data-driven way for the greatest competitive edge, the sides find themselves stuck between their right to bargain for their own best interests and the fact that the sport will suffer if both hold out for those alone.                                                                                                                        As a steady stream of Jupiter locals walked by the padlocked gates of Roger Dean Stadium this week, peering through the steel bars and asking the reporters waiting outside if the owners and players had a deal, what became clear is the reality that whatever right each side has to self-interest, neither side has much concern for the public interest.            Many of those locals moved to the area to be closer to their beloved St. Louis Cardinals or scheduled weeks-long sojourns from up north to see some baseball, like they do every year. Some of them work at Roger Dean Stadium when it’s operating. Almost all of those who stopped to chat with the reporters shared frustration less directed at one side or the other than at the fact that neither seems to understand the collateral damage the stalled negotiations are wreaking on the area and the game.                                                  Those fans bring up the minimum-wage stadium workers who will lose their livelihoods if regular season games are canceled. They mention friends who own businesses around spring training stadiums and those in the big cities, many of whom are already reeling from losses due to the coronavirus. What those outside the gates see that the people in the room do not is that the people MLB needs to worry about are not the ones interested in parsing out which side is right or wrong, in assigning blame correctly, in supporting the prudent cause.

The people MLB needs to worry about, the people it can’t afford to lose, are the people who glance at the sport with moderate interest and see bickering, not baseball. MLB is no longer in a position where it must simply keep the fans it has. To thrive long-term, to keep up or at least keep within shouting distance of the NBA (the NFL is long since out of reach in terms of popularity), it must gain new fans.                                                            Commissioner Rob Manfred and his staff have spent the past few years talking about growing the game, reaching new demographics and making the sport more appealing to people who have lost touch with it. The on-field product has yet to reflect that goal. The current off-field product — a labor dispute that has canceled a week of spring training already and will cost fans at least 10 spring training games per team — is antithetical to it.

And the players are employees, in some ways like those in any other American union, bargaining for the best compensation they can get. Whatever public opinion dictates about how much they are paid or whether people so handsomely compensated should be this determined to get paid more, they are workers who should not necessarily be expected to put the best interests of the sport ahead of their interests, either, particularly when putting their interests aside feels like conceding to even wealthier owners they believe are crying poor for their own convenience. Plus, even when they gave the owners what they believed to be major concessions on several major issues Saturday, MLB’s negotiating team dismissed them as not being real moves at all. What incentive is there to meet in the middle if only one party is willing to do it — or if those involved can’t even agree on what the middle would be?

But the psychology of the parties involved is such that expecting an emphasis on mutually beneficial policy as opposed to whatever they view as a victory is probably naive, too. Reaching the major leagues requires not only rare talent but rare competitive drive, the kind that extends to all walks of a person’s life, not merely to his dealings on the field. Owners, too, are used to winning financially. As one player recently pointed out, many owners made their money by being cutthroat business executives. It would be foolish to expect them to something different now.                                                                      But players and owners have always been that way. Something about this year’s negotiation has reinvigorated an obstinacy that used to define these negotiations every five years. The something is this: The players felt they lost negotiations in 2016, that they ceded ground in their CBA and therefore gritted their teeth ahead of 2021. They hired Bruce Meyer, who had never been the lead man on an MLB negotiation before, to help them. And for five years, Manfred’s unpopular unilateral decisions and glib statements spurred animosity and mistrust among players, a hostility that festered and spiraled to the point that his status as a guile-driven villain became cemented in players’ minds. That animosity only grew Saturday when the players heard the owners wave aside their proposal, leading to expletives and widespread frustration, according to multiple people in the room.