The MLB owners and MLBPA are straying very close to a decision by default they could end up regretting for almost half a century.
As another week came and went without any agreement about how to start an MLB season this year, the time seems ripe for some comment on the matter. This is prompted partly by the other major professional sports organizations working on what amount to details related to resuming competition.
MLB, on the other hand, is a sprinter who leaves the starting block with his shoes untied, trips, falls backward somehow, and spikes himself…
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…in the butt.
Neither the MLB owners nor the players seem willing to give an inch. The owners insinuate they’ll somehow force the players to work for 50 games, and the players wave a 114-game plan under their bosses’ noses since their pay is dependent on how many games they’ll play, as per a March agreement.
Additionally, the owners somehow feel, despite the March agreement, that the matter of pay should still be open since there won’t be as many – or any – fans in the stands. The players’ association says, “Read the agreement, suckers.”
And that’s not even to mention the dispute about expanding the playoffs since they make so much money from TV.
It’s a mess crying out for some memorable image for what MLB seems about to do. There’s just no avoiding it: Major league professional baseball is a wealthy man who’s put a gun to his head in his luxurious study.
There are few more obnoxious matters in the middle of a pandemic that has killed over 110,000 Americans than millionaires and billionaires arguing over how to split an enormous pile of gold bars into two piles.
While a negotiator for the MLBPA went all rhetorical June 5, suggesting that the owners are “depriving America of baseball games” for further salary concessions, most Americans shook their heads and said, “Hell, the whole bunch’a’ya deprived me of all but one or two live games a season already! Who can afford more than that anymore?”
It doesn’t matter to the average fan that the union has a point there.
As has been greatly commented on for several years, MLB tickets sold have been dropping for quite some time – as of this writing, in fact, seven straight years. Moreover, the peak live attendance for The Show occurred 13 years ago now.
Oh, woe is everybody who’s involved with paid baseball at the highest level!
Over 68 million people still went to MLB parks last season to watch games or ignore games, but a huge majority of them not only paid for expensive seats and expensive parking, but also for wildly overpriced food, beverages, team gear, and plastic junk.
All of that, we’re told, makes up 40 percent of MLB’s revenue, and what the owners and MLBPA simply cannot stop whimpering about is the fact that almost all of that revenue is going away this year, but screwing around at the edges of the big pile of gold bars is only annoying their fans.
Everybody. Will. Make. Less. Money. This. Year.
Your live attendance, in a best-case scenario, might be 12 million. Almost all the money will come from TV.
However, if MLB pulls that trigger in that luxurious study, and there are no games at all in 2020, even on TV, that live attendance may not reach 68 million again for 25 years, if ever.
When MLB stopped in 1994, the game lost approximately 20.2 million tickets sold and did not reach the rough number sold in 1993 again for four years. You tell me how long it will take to make up 56 million lost, or more – starting in a depression.