MLB Owners Only Have Themselves to Blame for Lockout Reaching a New Low Point

Things are not as bad as they were in 1994, if there is a bright side to that. The World Series is still on the calendar.

There is no ignoring the darkness that is being cast by the league's owners.

The last collective bargaining agreement expired on December 1 and the players were ocked out by the owners. The owners stayed away from the negotiating table for over a month. The owners canceled spring training games and threatened to axe regular-season games if the MLB Players Association didn't agree to a new deal ahead of arbitrary deadlines.

The owners decided to stand by the threats when the first two series were canceled.

Bleacher Report @BleacherReport

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has canceled the first two series of the regular-season. pic.twitter.com/1LSlMANTdG

According to The Athletic, MLB expressed a willingness to lose a whole month of games during talks with the union on Monday, so it could have been worse. There is hope in the simple reality that there will be more negotiations.

This will be the second shortened season in the last three years, and anguish is still the emotion of the moment. Or, for the players who watched him laugh his way through a Q&A with the press as his bad news was still spreading.

Michael Lorenzen @Lorenzen55

Have no clue how he has the ability to laugh about anything right now. Mind is blown. pic.twitter.com/xxwHnF9cUW

Back in 1994, players couldn't do this. Public opinion has shifted to their side because they now have an effective and unavoidable spokesman. An Economist/YouGov poll from December found that those with an opinion on the latest MLB-MLBPA dispute side with the players by a 2-to-1 margin.

It could be that the whole thing is over. It should be. It never made sense to call millionaires the greedy ones, even though a billionaire is a thousand times over. Baseball is entertainment and they are the ones doing it.

To take the owners side, you need to buy what they are selling. Not just about the general business of the sport, but also any indication that they are negotiating in good faith.

If anyone needs this advice, don't.

It is good to be an owner.

One of the main problems in collective bargaining is that one side's slice of the revenue pie is a matter of public record.

Baseball teams are privately owned and Liberty Media turned a nifty profit thanks to Atlanta winning the World Series. Private owners don't have to show what their books are like, so determining how profitable it is to be in the baseball business is either taking their word for it or playing an educated guessing game.

In February, he tried to make the case that the return on investment from owning a major league team is less than what you would get in the stock market.

It'sooey.

Between 2002 and 2021, the average return price on major league clubs was 669 percent. The S&P 500 has a return of 458 percent. That is a lower number.

The five-year revenue claim was odd because it was only two years ago that the COVID-19 epidemic began. According to Maury Brown of Forbes, the league pulled in $10.7 billion last year, marking its 17th straight season of growth.

Stephen Nesbitt of The Athletic put together a telling graph that quickly started making the rounds on the internet.

Maury Brown @BizballMaury

This is a good visual representation of MLB estimated revenues via Forbes, the average Opening Day Payroll via the AP, and the CBT first tier. Graph pulled together by The Athletic. It tells the story: revenues vastly outpacing CBT and player salaries. pic.twitter.com/dxIwMZ4JeH

The average player salary is a reflection of the stagnant bottom two lines. It was $4.17 million in 2021, down from $4.76 million in 2019.

The lack of concrete data makes it impossible to know how the owners and players are cutting revenue. The players slice has been getting smaller when it should have been bigger.

The question is not how, but how much.

There isn't a single reason why players haven't been getting paid as well as they used to, but the individual factors are out in the open.

The art of rebuilding while spending as little money as possible is called tanking. The system through which players are paid has become out of whack with how teams value talent. They rely more and more on young players who make the league minimum before getting raises. There are a lot of middle class players who have been getting pinched in free agency.

Structural changes are needed for problems like these. The league and the union have come to a common ground. Things like: are expected to be included in the next CBA.

In theory, all of these would help the players. The draft lottery was designed to deter tanking. The minimum salary increase and rewards for pre-arb players is to ease the exploitation of young players. disincentives for teams to spend in free agency are eliminated.

One owner told Jon Heyman of the MLB Network that it was a good deal.

The fact that it was not good enough for the union is largely due to the differences between what the two sides want for the minimum salary, bonus pool and luxury-tax thresholds.

Alden González @Alden_Gonzalez

It doesn't seem as if the gap in minimum salaries is too wide. It should also be doable with regard to the player pool, given that it's an aggregate sum (going from $30M to $85M is less than $2M per club, essentially). The CBT might be the biggest hurdle, as was to be expected.

The minimum salary in the NBA, NHL and NFL is more than MLB's offer of $700,000 for 2022. Even if the MLBPA were to get a minimum of $725,000, it would still be a small increase over the minimum of last year.

The baseline threshold for the luxury tax should be $220 million in 2022, compared to the union's $238 million. If the baseline were to increase at the same rate as it did between 2007 and 2011, it would be $300 million.

The bonus pool is a concession on the part of the union. It wanted to expand eligibility for Super 2.

Travis Sawchik @Travis_Sawchik

The MLBPA was at 80% arbitration eligibility for players with 2+ years (Super 2 status) on Feb. 21. A week later, both parties seem set to agree on the status quo of 22%. Super 2 status hasn't increased since 1991. Avg. MLB service time down considerably since.

Expansion of Super 2 eligibility could have been worth over 70 million dollars to the players. The union is closer to hitting its $85 million demand for the new bonus pool than MLB is. Money from teams would not come from central revenues.

The players are in favor of expanded playoffs and on-uniform advertising, according to Jeff Passan. Andrew Marchand of the New York Post reports that the expanded playoffs would be worth $85 million for a 12-team field and $100 million for a 14-team field.

The players could benefit from an expanded playoff field. Maybe it will encourage teams to pursue upgrades before the season starts. It is not certain if it is possible to ensure such aggressiveness. It could be a license for teams to let it ride and hope to clear the lowered bar with what is already in-house.

The give-and-take balance between the owners and players is the one that really matters, for all that can be said about the specific gaps in the negotiations. The players have given a lot, but they are not trying to take more than is fair.

Where do things go from here?

It is a question of which side will blink first.

It is hard not to blink when you are feeling the sting of lost earnings. The owners and players are going to feel it now that a part of the regular season is in the can.

The owners think the players will be overwhelmed by the pain sooner. All they have done is put the players in a position they prepared for.

timdierkes @timdierkes

A common question is which side is going to blink first. No one can know that. But I will note the players’ strike fund is exponentially larger than its ever been. They’ve been holding back 100% of licensing revenue for several years.

The players are more likely to get a better offer if they are more patient. In case there is any doubt that such an offer is out there somewhere, even the league made the best offer it could on Tuesday.

Evan Drellich @EvanDrellich

Rob Manfred: “We never used the phrase last, best final offer with the union. We said it was our best offer prior to the deadline to cancel games. Our negotiations are deadlocked right now... but that’s different than using the legal term impasse, and I’m not going to do that rn"

If labor-strife theater is your thing, watching the players act opposite the owners is only fun. If you like baseball, this play has moved past merely sucking and is now a relentless soul-eating catastrophe.

There has been little to no discussion of the kind of on-field quality improvements that baseball desperately needs. Changing the ball could increase action and quicken the pace of modern games. A clock. There is an automated strike zone. There are regulations on defensive shifts. Anything is possible.

Thankfully, MLB and the MLBPA want to talk about these things down the line. One can only hope that both sides will have the time and energy to take these things seriously once the economic stuff is figured out.

It is up to the owners when that time will come. They have not a new deal or control of the narrative to show for their actions. All they have succeeded in doing is wasting time.

They should remember that it is not the owners who draw fans to the game.

BaseballReference has the statistics courtesy of the game.