It was a rough week or so to be the commissioner of a professional sports league in North America.
Gary Bettman’s attention during NHL All-Star weekend was diverted by Rocky Wirtz’s town hall rant, forcing the NHL commissioner to come to the defense of the beleaguered Chicago Blackhawks chairman, whom Bettman claimed was caught at a “vulnerable, emotional point.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s annual state-of-the-game news conference at the Super Bowl was dominated by questions about the lack of diversity in the head coaching ranks, following former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores’ class-action lawsuit against the league and three teams for racial discrimination.
And then there was MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, who insisted at the owners meetings the league was “doing everything we can to get a deal done for our fans,” knowing the start of spring training was on the verge of postponement because of the lack of movement in negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement, meaning and the start of the 2022 season is also in jeopardy.
Moe, Larry and Curly never had it so bad as these three stooges, the top executives of their respective sports.
While the Wirtz fiasco is a local issue that likely will fade from Bettman’s consciousness in the ensuing months, and Goodell is well aware no controversy can damage the lasting popularity of the NFL, Manfred will be the target of angry baseball fans for the foreseeable future.
There’s never a good time for a sport to lock out its players, but with fans already dealing with the pandemic, runaway inflation and a rise in crime, the notion of billionaire owners shutting down the game over a financial system that could easily be fixed is nothing less than obscene.
After meeting for an hour Saturday in New York, MLB and the players union were at a stalemate, and MLB’s 130-page proposal was unlikely to move the needle. That means the start of spring training camps in Florida and Arizona in a few days likely will be delayed.
The lockout that began Dec. 2 has seen progress on only one significant non-core issue — an agreement to have a universal designated hitter. They’re still far from agreeing on increases to the luxury tax, a pre-arbitration bonus pool, service-time manipulation, proposed revenue-sharing changes by the union meant to reduce the level of tanking and other economic issues.
Manfred said Thursday that he was an “optimist” and believed the season would start on time, adding “you’re only one breakthrough away from making an agreement.” Missing games would be “disastrous,” he said.
But that breakthrough doesn’t appear imminent, and the only way the season would start on time is if spring training were cut short.
No worries. Manfred channeled his inner Rickey Henderson, pointing to his record as a labor negotiator.
“In the history of baseball, the only person who has made a labor agreement without a dispute, and I did four of them, was me,” he said. “Somehow, during those four negotiations, players and union representatives figured out a way to trust me enough to make a deal. I’m the same person today as I was in 1998 when I took that labor job.”
It was in 1991 that Henderson broke Lou Brock’s all-time stolen-base record, pulled the bag out of the dirt, held it over his head and told the Oakland crowd after being handed a mic: “Today, I am the greatest of all time.”
You half-expected Manfred to hold a copy of the CBA over his head and make the same proclamation. Unfortunately, Manfred only implied he was the greatest, leaving the rest to imagination.
Do the players trust the great Manfred to make a deal?
Clearly not.
“The players are ready,” Cubs pitcher Marcus Stroman tweeted last week. “Just waiting on Commander Manfred to stop ruining the game.”
The union is by no means perfect. It blew a chance to address service-time manipulation in the last CBA, when the Kris Bryant situation was still front and center. But at least they’re on the right side on issues that affect the fans, including the need to combat tanking. By trying to reduce revenue sharing between owners, the players are hoping to stop non-competitive teams from being subsidized by their fellow owners, forcing them to at least try to compete. Losing to get better draft picks might soon be a thing of the past.
Manfred as recently as spring training 2016 denied tanking even took place, saying he was “not convinced this is a problem that needs an answer” from baseball.
“I do not believe that any major-league team would adopt the strategy where they would endure 90 or 100 losses in a season in the hope that they’re going to get the top pick in the draft,” he said.
That was the year the Cubs won the World Series, giving more teams cover to lose games on purpose under the auspice of a “rebuild.”
“Hey, it worked for the Cubs, so why not us?”
At least now MLB is reportedly receptive to an NBA-style draft lottery that theoretically would reduce tanking by taking away the incentive of getting the top pick with the worst record.
Still, more progress is needed on that and other issues — and quickly — or the start of the season will be in jeopardy.
The squabble over prorated salaries during the restart of the 2020 season — after the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shutdown in spring training — remains fresh in everyone’s minds. Both sides were clueless, fighting over money while fans were hurting emotionally and financially.
That prolonged debate made us skeptical the sides could come to an agreement before the CBA expired on Dec. 1, 2021, and that’s exactly what happened.
Manfred and the owners were the ones who insisted a lockout was the best way to come to an agreement — then disappeared for six weeks without talking. Manfred said Thursday that “the phones work two ways,” implying the union could’ve restarted negotiations after being locked out.
But realistically, it’s on him to end this. If Manfred really is the labor negotiator he thinks he is, this dispute would already be over.
Instead, it’s Groundhog Day, and the winter just keeps getting longer for anxious fans.
