Baseball is stuck and time is running out

JUPITER, Fla. - With 48 hours to agree to a new collective bargaining agreement before the league insists it will start canceling regular season games, Major League Baseball’s owners and players are stuck.

They are not merely stuck in the sense that negotiations have moved at a crawl since November and sped up only slightly in the last five days, though the sides are, indeed, moving at a pace just slightly faster than a standstill.

But they are also stuck in a more existential sense, stuck between what is best for the sport and what is best for them, stuck between hopes that each side will feel compelled to give a little for the good of all and the reality that big business is no place for teamwork.

Much like on the field, where the league, 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.

Because 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, whatever their arguments to the contrary.

Many of those locals earned that title by design, having 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 their 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 covid-19. 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 are not the people who see rising owner revenue coupled with shrinking salaries and understand the need for players to fight for more; the ones who understand that a more data-driven game has meant teams are leaning on the cheap labor of younger players at the expense of veterans; the ones who watched MLB impose a lockout in December under the guise of creating urgency then not have discussions with the union until January.

Those people are the kind of fans who will come back even if the labor dispute forces cancellation of regular season games for the first time since 1994, something the league insists is mere hours away from happening unless the sides can make a deal by Monday.

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 them.

Commissioner Rob Manfred and his staff have spent the last few years talking about growing the game, reaching new demographics and making the sport more appealing to people who have lost touch with the game. 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.

But the sides are stuck, in part because needing to appeal to a broader base doesn’t mean either side is wrong to push for the most favorable agreement possible. They are stuck because expecting either to concede an inch to the other for the sake of the sport is an unrealistic. Manfred’s title, Commissioner of Baseball, implies stewardship of the sport. His job description, at least in the minds of those who hired him, is to represent the interests of the owners - interests which, in financial reality or the minds of those that matter, have moved steadily away from what is best for the sport.

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 healthily 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.

Many players, for example, were infuriated when Manfred said earlier this month that a league economist said owning a baseball team is a less profitable endeavor than investing the same amount in the stock market. When Atlanta Braves’ owner Liberty Media - the only publicly traded company to own a major league team - released its year-end financial reports Friday, the outrage only increased because that report showed Atlanta collected $6 million in revenue per game over those 12 months, according to Forbes.

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 give an inch 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.

So they are here, at Roger Dean Stadium, roughly 48 hours away from letting this labor dispute turn into the most destructive in a generation, consumed by the details and ensuring the public knows the other side is the one to blame - calculating only how the details of a deal will affect their livelihoods, unwilling and unable to calculate what will be lost for every day they go without one.