INSIDE BASEBALL

 

               “Inside Baseball” describes the tactical use of singles, walks, bunts, sacrifice flies, stolen bases and squeeze plays to manufacture runs.  It’s pretty much a relic of the past, the polar opposite of today’s dominant playing style, in which strikeouts are accepted and even welcomed in exchange for the big bangs they sometimes produce.  Sports metaphors being virulent, the term also has been used for the minutia of any field, the mastery of which can bring results when frontal assaults fail.

               The term is further apt for the issues that divide baseball owners and players in the contract talks in now progress, ones that could shrink the 2022 season. This blog is not intended to handle breaking news, so I wrote this piece yesterday (Monday), and the thing could be settled by the time you read it. But the lockout it engendered has taken a big chunk out of the game’s spring training, which is economically important in Arizona and Florida, and imperiled the scheduled opening day of March 31, so at best it’s an exercise in brinkmanship, and damage already has been done.

               My point is that the matters that divide the sides qualify as technical, ones that won’t much affect the game on the field or inflame popular emotions, and it’s remarkable--even mind-blowing--that baseball’s actors are willing to risk alienating a dwindling fan base for intramural gain. Annual attendance for the erstwhile National Pastime slid to 68.5 million in 2019 from 78.6 million in 2008, and cratered to 45.3 million in 2021 after the truncated, no-gate plague year of 2020. Instead of putting out the welcome sign now that the epidemic is waning, baseball has emersed itself in its own quarrels, and the public be damned.

               The last time baseball had a work stoppage was 1994, and it wiped out the last 50 games of the regular season and the year’s playoffs and World Series, and spilled into 1995. That was a strike, not a lockout, but there’s no practical differences between the two. Whatever the cost, the issues were obvious and important: the owners wanted team salary caps and an end to salary arbitration. The players resisted and neither demand was met. There’s no demand for formal team caps this time around, and only arbitration tweaks are being discussed.

               Ironically, the one issue that would change the game in the current talks is one on which the sides reportedly agreed to early on. That would be the National League’s adoption of the designated hitter. The two leagues have been split on the matter since 1973, and while the difference once helped the game by enlivening Hot Stove League discussions, that time is long past. Every baseball league save the National has had the DH for many years, and it’s about time it became universal. 

               The list of issues that are on the table is about as long as Randy Johnson’s left arm. I don’t know which are intended seriously and which are not; as a former labor reporter and bargaining participant as a union member I understand that some issues are not dear held by either party and are raised only to be dropped once the end-game trading starts. Things like a pre-arbitration bonus pool, ironing out service-time kinks and whether to limit the number of optional player assignments teams can use don’t raise temperatures anywhere I know.  

               What’s new about this bargaining round is the weakness of player salaries over the last several years.  Not only has the average annual salary stagnated at about $4 million but the more-important salary median—the 50-50 dividing line-- has dropped to $1.15 million last year from $1.65 million in 2015, according to the Associated Press.

The players at the top are doing very well, thank you—the top 50 accounted for fully one-third of the game’s 2021 payroll, and given the record $43 million-a-year the New York Mets pledged to pitcher Max Scherzer for the next three years they’ll continue to do so. But 70%-plus of last year’s players grossed less than $1 million a year and while, say, $700,000 is a princely wage in the real world it’s not that impressive in a profession with high qualifications and a typical career length of about five years.  Meanwhile, the market value of teams, which is the real measure of owner success, continues to skyrocket with the value of TV “content.” To take one example, the Arizona Diamondbacks, a failure on the field and at the gate in recent years, currently is worth $1.32 billion according to Forbes magazine. That's more than 10 times the $130 million owner Ken Kendrick paid for them in 1995.

A couple of issues stand out in the current talks. One is the minimum salary, which just about all rookies get. It stands at $570,500 now but the players want to boost it to $775,000 in 2022 and $875,000 in 2026, each of which figure is about $100,000 more than the owners have been offering (don’t hold me to those figures, they change by the day). Another is the “luxury tax” big-spending teams pay when their payrolls exceed a certain limit, but which also serves as a de facto payroll cap. It stood at $210 million last season and the players want to boost it to $245 million this year. The owners want it to rise to $214 million.

Chances are that the differences will be split, as they usually are in collective bargaining. It may happen in a day or so and the season could play out pretty much as scheduled, or not. No strike or lockout lasts forever and this one won’t be an exception. But so what?, it might be argued. It’s their money, not ours. But it’s also a reminder not to love your teams more than they love you.