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 working in and around the sport.
In two weeks, a typical organization will ship to Arizona or Florida about 75 people who are closer to Mike Trout’s barber’s salary than Mike Trout’s. All of these people – sports coaches, club attendants, media staff – have been accompanied for three months, unable to sign spring leases, largely ineligible to be vaccinated yet, wondering if they will be sent to COVID hot spots. because the cases remain high.
They will be, as it turns out, because no one can agree on whether there should be 10 playoff teams or 14. The quarrel lasted most of the winter and left us here: There will be no business delaying the start of the season until more people can be vaccinated. Instead, spring training will begin, as scheduled in the collective agreement, on February 17.
The biggest blame here lies with the league. The Union may be uncompromising, but it is not legally obliged to renegotiate what the CBA already covers. Labor lawyers in the league know this. However, they continued to send union proposals littered with what the union considered a poisonous pill: extended playoffs.
The real money for homeowners comes in the form of television rights from October, so I want this structure. The players’ position is that the extended playoffs will dilute competitiveness and suppress salaries: if you can make the postseason with 85 wins, why would you sign a free agent with big tickets? They agreed on a 16-team format last year, in an attempt to return some of the money lost without ticket sales and, as a safety in case of error, if the best teams failed to appears at the end of 60 games. But the union spent the off-season insisting it was a one-time concession.
The league’s latest proposal offered a one-month delay in spring training; a season of 154 games for which players would have paid their full salaries, 162 games; a post-season of 14 teams; and a universally designated drummer. On Monday, once the union refused – and refused to make a counter-offer – MLB released a statement that read, in part: “On the advice of medical experts, I proposed a one-month delay until early spring training and the regular season for 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 by simply moving the season calendar back a month for health and safety reasons. ”
If health and safety are 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 timing and leave petty financial quarrels for the next negotiations, which will come when the CBA expires in December? (Indeed, if health and safety are really the priority, why play baseball amid a global pandemic? But that ship sailed.)
The truth is, it really isn’t. The priority is, as always, to further enrich the rich at the expense of the less rich.
Of course, the season – and with it, spring training – should start a month later. COVID cases have begun to decline, and each time another arm is stung, the world becomes marginally safer. There is no moral case for transporting thousands of people to hot spots right now, where they will immediately head to restaurants (both states allow meals indoors) and add to the number of cases. If the league had just proposed that late season with full pay and left the extended playoffs out of it, we could be preparing for a spring training session in mid-March right now.
Instead, equipment trucks are heading south. Players will join them soon. So are 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 insurance plans. Everyone will get in the cars or get on the planes and prepare to risk their lives, because a lot of adults could not receive a Zoom call and make the right decision. And when they get to camp, do you know who won’t be there? Team owners.