Who’s to blame for MLB’s lockout? Ask yourself which side declared the work stoppage
Major League Baseball’s week-old lockout has, by and large, not yet affected fans. Visiting Busch Stadium last week after the announcement of the sport’s first disruption of labor peace in more than 25 years revealed business as usual, with tickets and memorabilia still on sale.
As the days fall from the calendar, though, a sense of unease is likely to set in. There are currently no negotiating sessions scheduled between the league and the Players Association, and it’s believed that the two sides are unlikely to meet before the end of the holiday season.
That lack of movement means the lockout is virtually guaranteed to last at least a month, and should one month become two and the stoppage stretch into February, it’s unlikely spring training will begin as scheduled.
At the moment the first workout is canceled, the first game of the regular season is in jeopardy. Baseball players, especially pitchers, rely on their spring routines for health and peak performance, and a day lost is difficult to regain.
Under those restrictions, it’s easy to understand why fans might throw up their hands and decry what they believe to be bickering between millionaires and billionaires. Fans, the thinking goes, just want to go to ballgames and enjoy the action on the field without having to care about what happens off of it.
The first step in breaking away from that thinking is to reconceive what it means to be a professional baseball player. Yes, those at the top of the sport make incredible salaries, often earning in a single season more than a patron in the upper deck might make in a lifetime.
Scherzer, Semiens
Max Scherzer and Marcus Semien are both members of the MLBPA’s executive council, involved intimately in the negotiations, and both signed significant free agent contracts on the eve of the lockout. It’s easy, to a casual observer, to see hypocrisy in those developments.
However, the Scherzers and Semiens of the world are extreme exceptions rather than general rules.
Writing for The Score on Dec. 2, Travis Sawchik found the average length of a career in the big leagues, as of 2019, was 3.71 years. That number was down significantly from 4.79 years as of 2003. Median salary in the majors in 2019 was $558,400, meaning as many players made less than that amount as made more.
That’s still a substantial salary, of course, but given the short span of the average career, it doesn’t exactly paint a picture of generational largesse. Yes, players are paid to play a game for a living, but given the scope of money that comes in as a direct result of their skill sets, it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t earn a representative share.
Take Scherzer, again, as an example. According to Baseball Reference, he’s earned approximately $221 million in his career, with another $130 million now owed to him by the New York Mets. That’s an unfathomable sum for most people — but not for Mets owner Steve Cohen, whose net worth is reportedly more than 31 times that of his ace, cresting above $11 billion.
More about the baseball economics
The psychological limits of human thinking leave most of us truly unable to fathom the scale at which billionaire economics operate. The average person may have an inherent understanding of the difference in value between $1,000 and $100,000, but the difference between $10 million and $1 billion is harder to contemplate, since so fractionally few of us will ever have access to either.
More than the scale of economics, though, lies the truth all fans of baseball deserve to see a player like Scherzer play for their team. With the signing of right-hander Jordan Lyles to a $7 million contract this winter, the Baltimore Orioles marked the largest free agent deal of the tenure of general manager Mike Elias, who was hired in November of 2018.
The Orioles, ostensibly, are rebuilding, though it remains unclear to what end and how they plan to translate years of losing on purpose into even one year of trying to win. Teams in that posture are bad for players, of course, given that they artificially depress the number of jobs available at comparable salaries.
But they’re also bad for fans, who, yes, bear a degree of economic strain when they choose to attend games and end up paying full price for a decidedly not-full product.
As yourself this question
Earlier access to the free agent market, less restrictive rules around service time, and even a desire for the full accounting of revenue made outside of official baseball-related streams are all part of demands from players, but they all amount to the same thing — when more teams have to try to win, more players make money, and more fans get to enjoy the game they love.
If you still believe that players are worthy of scorn in this situation, that’s certainly well within your rights. Owners, though, have been compiling both financial and social capital at almost incomprehensible rates for decades, and when labor seeks to balance those scales, even with some imperfections, they trend more toward virtue than vice.
Still don’t see it? Ask yourself which side declared the lockout.
If you own the keys, the rest is academic.
This story was originally published December 12, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
