MLB to Blame for Failed Negotiations, Canceled Games – NBC Chicago

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Wittenmyer: Colossal self-own by a tone-deaf commish originally appeared on NBC Sports Chicago

If anyone wondered whether the Ricketts family gave a rat’s ass about Cubs fans when they compelled the trades of a bunch of fan favorites in July and tanked the rest of the season, witness the last three months of MLB’s lockout and the so-called negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement.

And then take a long look at the middle finger they and their brethren of ownership gave to players and fans Tuesday when baseball commissioner Rob Manfred unilaterally canceled the first week of the 2022 season.

The Ricketts family has a well earned reputation for bottom-line decisions that sometimes trump winning and for trickling down the burden of their “biblical losses” during a pandemic onto employees (layoffs) and player payroll (slashing).

But they are just one of 30 behind the first regular-season shutdown in nearly three decades — a move made all the more absurd by the dramatic revenue growth and skyrocketing franchise values ​​in just the past decade alone.

“Players and fans around the world who love baseball are disgusted, but sadly not surprised,” baseball’s players union said in statement Tuesday.

Its obvious and adversarial agenda aside, the union is 100 percent right about this one.

Disgusting. Sad. And expected.

If it wasn’t clear when Manfred’s team spent the first six weeks of its lockout sitting on its hands before re-engaging in negotiations only last month, it was made crystal clear Tuesday that this is MLB’s embarrassment to wear, if not its end game all along.

Remember, this is MLB’s lockout. It’s MLB’s slow-play of negotiations. And this week was MLB’s arbitrary deadline for reaching agreement to avoid delayed openers.

In fact, reports this week said the owners signaled to the union a willingness to cancel the first month of games.

And then during his media session Tuesday after canceling the first week came this gem from Manfred: “Concern about our fans is at the very top of our considerations list.”

He probably should have saved that one for his Opening Day speech in June. Baseball might even have a few fans left to care enough to listen.

Until then, that’s the big — and unbelievably tone-deaf — risk Manfred and MLB are taking when they play chicken with an increasingly ambivalent fan base in a sport already losing ground for years at other entertainment outlets.

Don’t want to give up those gains from the last CBA negotiations that finally resulted in lowering average and mean salaries in the game for the first time since collusion?

Cool. That one’s probably on union boss Tony Clark and his team for signing such a bad deal in the first place.

But this one’s on MLB and its commissioner for a heavy-handed, short-sighted approach to maintaining the status quo that might finally do the kind of damage that starts costing the league its golden age of record revenues.

No?

Have you tried to watch a baseball game for a full nine innings lately? All four hours? With more strikeouts than hits in the game for the first time in nearly 150 years of big-league history?

Sure the hard-core fans will come back. They always do. At least the few of us left who haven’t aged into nursing homes.

As for the casual fan — good luck finding any of those unicorns these days, especially under the age of 40.

Even before the pandemic, attendance across the game was down. And even after the pandemic made watching on TV safer, broadcast ratings were down in 2021.

What exactly does Manfred, Ricketts and the rest think they’ll be selling that a new customer will spend top dollar to buy once they kick their customers in the teeth one more time?

The last time they did this — Manfred was one of the labor-law experts brought in to “help” in 1994 — they at least had steroids pumping up the game with home run shows that even young fans wanted to see.

And they had storylines that included Cal Ripken Jr.’s successful run at Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak.

To be fair and clear, give baseball credit for its effort to clean up steroids.

But one day MLB is going to wake up and find that it needs to be more than DVR-proof content with a game-a-day schedule to justify another increase in national broadcast rights.

It might actually need to be considered entertaining to more than an aging core of loyal fans — especially if it plans to continue to play hardball and financial keep-away with the players who also provide that very entertainment.

And that doesn’t even take into account the shockingly tone-deaf timing of this industry-imposed shutdown that comes in the third year of a pandemic and as Europe’s largest ground war since World War II plays out 24/7 on news channels — against the backdrop of a Russian threat to use nuclear weapons.

Baseball? Really?

Concern for the fans? Come on.

Remember, Manfred also is the guy who pissed off roughly 750 major-league players in 2020 when he called the World Series trophy a “piece of metal,” a guy who tried to claim two weeks ago that owning a major-league team isn’ t as profitable as investing in the stock market, a guy who repeatedly denied tanking existed in his sport as the Astros and Cubs perfected the process and then repeatedly downplayed its pervasiveness as a half-dozen or more teams a year have followed the blueprint since then .

A lot of what Manfred has said doesn’t stand up to common sense much less scrutiny.

And there’s not enough spin rate in all the pitch labs in baseball for MLB to spin this shutdown as anything but a colossal self-own.

Whether it results in furthering the erosion of interest in a product already in crisis, the actual players that fans want to see on the field take their shots at Manfred and owners on social media that wasn’t around the last time labor strife shut the game down.

Consider it took 50 years for baseball’s owners to find their answer to original union hero Marvin Miller.

And it’s already costing them a regular-season labor stoppage for the first time since the strike of 1994.

Imagine what he might be able to do to the season — if not the long-term welfare of the game — with another week or two like the last one.

On literally the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week, MLB negotiators reportedly ended a brief round of negotiations with the union by saying they’d “run out of ideas.”

Here’s an idea: Lift the damn lockout and start bargaining in good faith.

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