SPORTICO — The Major League Baseball Players Association is expecting to be locked out by MLB during next year’s collective bargaining on a new agreement.
“Unless I am mistaken, the league has come out and said there’s going to be a work stoppage,” Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, said Friday morning.
Clark said he’s basing that opinion on recent rhetoric from commissioner Rob Manfred.
“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” Manfred said. “The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”
An offseason lockout, which occurred in 2021 during the negotiations that preceded the current five-year Basic Agreement, is preferable to losing games in season as baseball did during player strikes that tore apart the 1981 and 1994-95 seasons. Manfred compared it to “using a .22 [caliber firearm], as opposed to a shotgun or a nuclear weapon.”
That remark rankled Clark then and continued to rankle him Friday.
“The statement has been there’s going to be a lockout and it’s a good thing for the game, even to go as far as saying it’s like using a .22 rather than shotgun,” Clark said.
After much rancor during the last lockout, the 2022 season was delayed, but the entire 162-game schedule was preserved, with off days and split-doubleheaders making up for the games lost during the one-week delay.
I talked about this yesterday pretty casually and that’s not fair to people who don’t pay attention to MLB labor relations. So here’s a full blog and hopefully this clears up some confusion around what most agree to be an inevitable strike.
The big probelm is 3-fold:
- Fans hate owners
- Owners hate players
- Players hate everybody
And it creates just about the worst combination when it comes to splitting money because everyone wants more. Fans want better players, owners want more revenue and players want higher salaries and more protection along the way. So every time a new dollar comes in the door, everyone thinks they have first right to use it.
Another major problem is public perception, and that applies to all things in baseball. People think the commissioner has unlimited and unilateral power. They think owners have too much money and players already make too much without any material consideration for the underlying economics and overall precedent. The end result is a body of people that are literally incapable of rendering sound judgment, and they’re the loudest and most obnoxious opinion in the room.
So really it’s a big competition to get this obnoxious moron (the fans) to agree with either the owners or the players. And historically speaking, the moron has sided with the owners because the owners are better at manipulating a room full of people.
That’s why Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds aren’t in the Hall of Fame despite everyone doing steroids and them clearly being the best players of their era. The owners have manipulated the environment where we have vilified these guys, which weakens the players association and strengthens ownership leverage.
It’s all a crock of bullshit meant to make you hate the players, and the owners are willing to make this huge bet in 2 years that we still hate players. And they’re gonna run this sport into the ground in the process all so they can save a couple bucks on labor. It’s honestly disgusting so let me get in front of it right now.
The owners can suck your dick and kiss your ass and go fuck themselves in the process. They’re suck lousy pussies that I will never find the right words to explain my hate because it’s always expanding. Like how Stephen Hawking explained the universe – it’s growing in a way and rate that simply cannot be understood by the human mind. That’s exactly how much I hate MLB owners and everything they stand for.
So when we talk about the upcoming strike, this is what we mean. The owners have to renegotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the Players Union, and they’ve lost a bunch of leverage over the last decade. The players are going to do their best to try and get more money and protections, and the owners are going to do their best to convince their respective fanbases that the players are huge pussies.
Don’t fall for the bait.
The real pussies are the owners and it’s about time we wake up that.