It is only a screengrab, a capture of a fleeting expression that did not reflect the overall tone of his address to the media on Tuesday. But it might prove to be the image Rob Manfred is remembered for, on the day that may well define his tenure as Major League Baseball commissioner.
the man who called the world series trophy “a piece of metal” smiling on a day when mlb cancels games pic.twitter.com/UpVgC74yyH
— Joon Lee (@joonlee) March 1, 2022
A smile. A toothy grin as he announced that the league and the players’ union have not reached a deal on a new collective bargaining agreement and so the first two series of the regular season, which was due to start on 31 March, are cancelled.
Spring training delayed, Opening Day postponed: this is jarring for a sport that derives much of its appeal from the comfort of rhythms and rituals, its metronomic on-field tempo and its daily presence in the calendar and America’s popular consciousness from spring to fall every year, since always.
Manfred had warned less than three weeks ago that this would be a “disastrous outcome”. It is doubtful that the team owners agree, since they locked out the players last December yet waited for 43 days before starting meaningful dialogue. The players are resolute and the owners are not in a rush – the latter are very rich individuals who can afford to take the hit. It is not a recipe for smooth and swift discussions.
FANS…this man doesn’t care about any of y’all. Don’t get it twisted. The players are ready to perform, compete, and interact with all of you! However, Manfred has been ruining our game while playing puppet boy to the owners. That’s a fact. We remain ready and anxious to play! 🗣 https://t.co/M9x6LBdBlv
— Marcus Stroman (@STR0) March 1, 2022
Players resorted to gallows humour on social media on Monday. Joey Gallo of the New York Yankees joined LinkedIn. The Philadelphia Phillies’ Bryce Harper offered his services to the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. By Tuesday the mood had turned to anger. “Manfred has been ruining our game while playing puppet boy to the owners,” Chicago Cubs pitcher Marcus Stroman vented on Twitter. “Manfred gotta go.”
The players’ union issued a statement claiming the lockout is “the culmination of a decades-long attempt by owners to break our player fraternity” adding that “players and fans around the world who love baseball are disgusted, but sadly not surprised.”
You might say that a sport with a 162-game regular season can afford to skip a few fixtures. But if the clubs’ billionaire owners apparently care little about missing a week or more of games, why should the general public react with anything but apathy whenever baseball does return after the first work stoppage since the strike that cancelled the 1994 World Series?
“I think it’s a big deal because of the fans more than anything,” says Eduardo Perez, a former player for six MLB teams who is now an ESPN analyst. He was a young infielder with the California (now Los Angeles) Angels during the 94-95 strike. “It definitely did leave a dent on a lot of fans,” he recalls.
While uncertainty grips the sport, the players are sure about one thing: they deserve better. “The average baseball player plays less than five years in the big leagues. It’s true that 63% of the players in 2019 had less than three years service time,” Perez says. “The players have a point when you look at the data and they didn’t come out too good in the last collective bargaining agreement [in 2016], there’s no hiding that fact.”
There is no formal salary cap in MLB, but nor is there a minimum spend per team, unlike the NFL, NHL and NBA. “Major League Baseball is a significantly worse deal probably at this point for the players than any of the other big leagues in the US,” says Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.
Average ages have dropped as teams prefer younger – cheaper – players to costlier veterans. Hot prospects are sometimes held in the minor leagues to save money and delay their eventual free-agency eligibility, when they can either demand a huge pay rise or leave for another team.
The union wants its members to be eligible for salary arbitration more quickly, which would lead to higher wages for young players. It is calling for a raise in the minimum wage, which was $570,500 in 2021. It is agitating for a raise in the luxury tax threshold to reduce the financial penalties levied on the biggest spenders. And it is asking for a draft lottery to discourage teams from tanking to secure high draft picks.
That strategy was infamously embraced by the Houston Astros. Four years before they won the 2017 World Series they lost 111 games with a squad paid about $25m. That was $4m less than the wage of Alex Rodriguez, then of the Yankees.
In a country where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, the optics are tricky when a representative such as the pitcher Max Scherzer, who agreed a three-year, $130m contract with the New York Mets last November, is one of the faces of a union complaining that an annual salary of $570,500 is stingy.
But the issue is how revenue is distributed, not whether income levels are grotesquely inflated in comparison to the wages earned by ordinary mortals doing ordinary jobs. (Or minor-leaguers, for that matter.) Elite baseball players may inhabit a different economic planet to the rest of us, and there’s something apt about these negotiations taking place in a Florida town named Jupiter. All the same, they’re entitled to fair and proportionate treatment – and many of them do not enjoy long careers, so need to maximise their earnings while they can.
In a non-pandemic year, the NHL is estimated to garner total league revenue of $5bn. That’s about half MLB’s gross. Yet the NHL’s minimum wage is $750,000, albeit with smaller rosters. Manfred said on Tuesday that the league offered $700,000 and an annual bonus pool for young players worth $30m.
“It’s weird to be rooting for the underdog when the underdog is a guy who might be making $30m a year, but that $30m a year player is still at a huge disadvantage to that billionaire owner,” Matheson says. “The owners are always going to have way more power than the unions because the owners can be around for 50 years; a player has a pretty limited career so it’s pretty hard for a player to say, ‘I’m going to sit around for one year here to try and get more money in the future’.”
Though a handful of stars collect staggering amounts, overall, salaries are stagnating, and even sinking. Baseball’s payrolls for 40-man rosters in 2021 were down 4.6% from 2017’s record high of nearly $4.25bn, according to information obtained by the Associated Press. On Opening Day last year the mean salary was about $4.17m, down by 6.4% from 2017, while the median was $1.15m - a tumble of 30% from its record high in 2015.
Rising revenues and falling salaries are a recipe for workforce unrest in any sphere. At heart, this is a familiar tale of the middle class being hollowed out by very rich tycoons who want to be even richer. These days, baseball might only be “America’s pastime” to nostalgics, but its income inequality is a perfect emblem of American capitalism today.
Any concessions to the players when a deal is eventually struck will likely be offset by new revenue streams that promise to be quick windfalls for owners but detrimental to the product, such as expanded playoffs that further undermine the relevance of the regular season, and advertising on uniforms, a shattering of one of the last taboos.
Gambling promises to be a fruitful source of income in the coming years. And with traditional broadcasters scrambling to retain customers in a fracturing and volatile media landscape, sports are still at a point where media rights deals increase, boosting franchise values, even as ratings decline. Nearly a quarter of the US population watched Game Six of the 1980 World Series. Last year’s Game Six was viewed by 4.3% of the country.
“For a lot of people, baseball is the perfect sport for radio, it’s the perfect sport for a bygone era, it’s everyone’s grandfather’s favourite sport, but it’s not the favourite sport of people who are 18,” Matheson says. The fanbase is old, with an average age of 57 in 2016 according to a Sports Business Journal study, versus 50 for the NFL, 42 for the NBA and 40 for MLS.
And there are flaws in the on-field product.
Despite efforts to speed up play, nine-inning games last year lasted a record three hours and 10 minutes on average. Game One of the World Series, a 6-2 win for the Atlanta Braves, finished in nine innings yet dragged on for four hours and six minutes, ending after midnight on the east coast.
Fans might be less fidgety if there was an abundance of on-field action and mesmerising battles between famous starting pitchers and sluggers – as was the case in the captivating (albeit dubiously performance-enhanced) years after the 1994-95 strike. But the league-wide batting average in 2021 dipped to .244, the lowest since 1968, as teams become ever better at deploying sophisticated data, such as individually-tailored defensive fielding shifts.
The spectacle of ace starting pitchers duelling deep into games is becoming an anachronism. Managers chop and change, stalling momentum and subjugating human-interest narratives to the colourless imperatives of statistical probability.
A sport long stained by cheating scandals – whether steroids, sign-stealing or sticky substances – can ill afford to have its waning charm further tempered by tactics that sterilise the drama.
Last May, the Miami Marlins manager, Don Mattingly, described baseball as “unwatchable” at times. Tuesday’s news means that for now, that’s the literal truth. And every day disputing dollars is a day not spent addressing baseball’s structural problems.
Together, the lockout and the entertainment level do not represent an existential threat but a danger that the sport could further lose its totemic status in American life, enduring a cultural relegation as it fades into a form of background noise: still important for many, but inessential for most. It’s nothing to smile about.
