This is petty. It’s shortsighted. It‘s insulting. In other words, it‘s Major League Baseball owners doing what they do best: missing the point.
“Concern about our fans is at the very top of our consideration list,” said commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday, three months after the league locked out the players and three minutes after the league canceled Opening Day. Perhaps he misread the list: To his right, watching through the gates of Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Fla., stood a fan holding a sign that read WE WANT BASEBALL.
He’s not going to get it any time soon, because the owners don’t care whether he does. There is a legal definition of the term “good faith,” and by all accounts the owners have gone out of their way to stay within it. But morally, they left that idea behind on Dec. 2, when they unilaterally ended 27 years of labor peace by locking out the players. Manfred insisted that he and his 30 bosses had done so “out of a desire to drive the process forward to an agreement now.” Then they waited 43 days to make a proposal to the union.
