When Mom and Dad can’t stop fighting, it’s the children who suffer. In the ongoing battle between Major League Baseball and the Players Association, children are all normal people who work in and around the sport.
In two weeks, a typical organization will send about 75 people to Arizona or Florida who earn more from Mike Trout’s barber than Mike Trout’s. All of these people – sports coaches, club attendants, media relations staff among them – were tied up for three months, unable to sign spring training contracts, largely ineligible to be vaccinated yet, wondering if they would be sent to COVID access points as the cases remain high.
They go, as it turned out, because no one can agree whether there should be 10 playoff teams or 14. The dispute lasted almost all winter and left us here: There will be no agreement to postpone the start of the season until more people can be vaccinated . Instead, spring training will begin, as scheduled in the collective bargaining agreement, on February 17.
Most of the blame here is on the league. The union may be uncompromising, but it is not legally obliged to renegotiate things that the CBA already covers. The league’s labor lawyers know this. Still, they continued to send proposals to the union full of what the union considers a poison pill: expanded playoffs.
The real money for the owners comes in the form of October television rights, so they crave that structure. The position of the players is that the expansion of the playoffs will dilute competitiveness and suppress wages: if you can reach the postseason with 85 wins, why hire an expensive free agent? They agreed to a 16-team format last year, in an attempt to recover some of the money lost without ticket sales and as a security system if the best teams did not appear at the end of 60 games. But the union spent the off-season insisting that it was a single concession.
The league’s latest proposal offered a month-long delay in spring training; a season of 154 games in which players would receive their full salaries for 162 games; a post-season with 14 teams; and a designated universal hitter. On Monday, as soon as the union refused – and refused to make a counter offer – the MLB issued a statement that said, in part: “Following the advice of specialist doctors, we proposed a one-month delay for the start of the spring training and regular season to better protect the health and safety of players and support staff. … This was a good deal that reflected the best interests of everyone involved in the sport, simply postponing the season’s calendar one month for health and safety reasons. “
If health and safety is really the priority, why send a proposal that you know the union will not accept? If health and safety are really the priority, why not just focus on the schedule and leave the small financial disputes for the next negotiations, which will come when the CBA expires in December? (In fact, if health and safety are really the priority, why play baseball in the middle of a global pandemic? But the ship left.)
The truth is that it is not true. The priority is, as always, to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the less wealthy.
Of course, the season – and spring training with it – should begin a month later. COVID cases have started to decline, and each time another arm is bitten, the world becomes a little safer. There is no moral argument to send thousands of people to hotspots now, where they will immediately go to restaurants (both states allow indoor dining) and increase the number of cases. If the league had proposed postponing the season with full payment and left the expanded playoffs out, we could be preparing for spring training in mid-March now.
Instead, the equipment trucks are heading south. Players will join them soon. The same will happen with the hundreds of people who are not represented by a union; who receive COVID tests less often than players; some of them are classified as part-time employees and are therefore not covered by the team’s health plan. Everyone will get in cars or planes and get ready to risk their lives, because a bunch of adults failed to get on a Zoom call and make the right decision. And when they get to the camp, do you know who won’t be there? The owners of the team.