We’ve made it to the first week of March! The weather is getting warmer, and the days are getting longer. In any other year, spring training would be underway. But this year, the season is on hold because of a labor dispute between Major League Baseball, team owners, and the players’ association.
The current lockout was about a decade in the making. Both sides ignored long-term economic concerns in the last two collective bargaining agreements, but the COVID-shortened 2020 season was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Back in May, Evan Drellich wrote at The Athletic, “the Major League Baseball Players Association filed a grievance worth an estimated $500 million alleging MLB did not act in good faith when it set a schedule for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, people with knowledge of the grievances said.”
“The union believes the league chose to play fewer games than it could have and thereby unduly reduced player salaries. In a one-off arrangement, the league and the union agreed to tie player salaries during 2020 to the number of games played,” Drellich continued.
Team owners locked players out in December, ending the longest period of labor peace within MLB in over 25 years. Three days of meetings between owners and players’ union representatives led to both parties being unable to agree on a new collective bargaining agreement. But even then, owners and players alike thought they could resolve their differences in time for the 2022 season.
The MLBPA, the players’ union, is the strongest union in sports, and players have been unhappy since the last collective bargaining agreement. The average player salary is down 6% since 2017, so it’s easy to see why they’re not thrilled with current conditions. Negotiations continued all winter — including nearly a week and a half in Florida at the end of February. But everything broke down on Tuesday.
“Negotiations have ended for the immediate future and the sides are expected to leave Florida, where they’ve bargained with each other for nine straight days,” The Athletic reported on Wednesday.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred stated that the league and the owners are canceling the first two series of the season, and more cancellations are sure to follow.
“I see missing games as a disastrous outcome for this industry,” he said on Feb. 10, yet he and the owners are unwilling to budge in order to make missing games less of a reality.
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It’s easy to see this as a billionaires vs. millionaires scenario, but another columnist at The Athletic, Grant Brisbee, pointed out that the league and the owners are the ones responsible for stopping the season with no real start date in sight.
“The owners have won, and now they’re trying to win more,” Brisbee wrote. “They’re willing to shorten the season to do it. Maybe they’re willing to cancel it.”
And at the end of the day, the fans are the ones getting screwed.
I, for one, am glad that there’s college baseball going on right now. I’ve always been a fan of college baseball, going back to my days watching games at the University of Georgia, but being able to watch them has been especially enjoyable knowing that there may not be an MLB season.
If you have the ESPN app on your phone or streaming device, you can watch any number of college baseball games. You might even find your favorite schools playing. It beats not having any baseball to watch.
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