Talkin’ baseball … with a bit of golf … and those all-important public perceptions.
But first, some nostalgia.
When a lot of us were kids, the early labor strife in baseball seemed confusing to mushy young minds, but in retrospect, the issues were so simple. A big-league ballplayer was and had always been property, belonging to his original club until that club decided to ship him to another team or send him home to work at Sears.
The players fought for some freedom and eventually won it through an arbitrator’s decision that ushered in free-agency. All that remained was the dirty little business of deciding when and how a player could go about shopping his talents around the market.
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Quick aside within this aside: Along the way, Oakland A’s owner Charlie Finley — a man who earned detractors among employees fellow owners alike — blurted out an idea during an owners meeting.
“Make ’em all free-agents every year,” said the man who stumbled upon decent ideas now and then.
In his autobiography, union head Marvin Miller, the late and original baseball “emancipator,” recalled an immediate sinking feeling upon hearing of Finley’s impulsive outburst.
As attractive as such an idea might sound to players, and as appalling as it sounded to owners, it would actually result in a flooded market and therefore much lower salaries than a system where a small percentage of players — and just a handful of Grade A talent — were available each season.
Supply and Demand, if you’re scoring at home.
Latest news on MLB lockout
Today the biggest issue is a de facto salary cap, known as a “luxury tax” to laymen and the “competitive balance tax” in formal circles. You wonder if Marvin Miller, Andy Messersmith and those long-ago guys could’ve ever imagined a day when players weren’t happy with a limit of $220 million … per year … per team.
If a big-market team exceeds that, they are hit with a financial penalty, and on paper that tax is designed to keep, say, Milwaukee and Kansas City competitive with New York and Los Angeles.
The biggest abuses have actually come on the low end of the scale, with franchises deciding at times it’s best to dump their talent, pay minimal salaries while tanking a couple (or three) seasons and building up a minor-league war chest to prepare for a several-season run of competitiveness.
This isn’t the first baseball lockout
Baseball’s first work stoppage was 50 years ago. That was a player-driven strike, this one is an owner-driven lockout. But even with those apparent disparities, the two sad historic milestones have at least one common trait: Both times, the commissioner was muddied by seemingly everyone within the game, and definitely by everyone with a typewriter or microphone.
Fifty years ago, Bowie Kuhn was just 45 but seemed older, in an establishment-figure sorta way. New York City lawyer, product of Princeton and the University of Virginia, 6-foot-5, gray hair on the sideburns that seemed to creep across his scalp more and more with each owner-union clash.
Kuhn was a Central Casting foil for Miller and over time was perceived as being outwitted by the union and hamstrung by a group of owners who, in retrospect, were bridging the generations from baseball’s black-and-white days to its technicolor future.
Today the commissioner and perceived foil of choice is Rob Manfred, and here is where we transition a bit to golf. Poor ol’ golf, a game that could give an Ivy League tutorial on perceptions.
Last year, after Manfred was quick to remove the All Star Game from Atlanta due to Georgia’s sudden role in national politics, Manfred was publicly shamed for his choice of, yes, golfing playgrounds.
“I am under no illusion that Major League Baseball will sacrifice business revenue on behalf of its alleged corporate values,” wrote U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. “Similarly, I am under no illusion you intend to resign as a member from Augusta National Golf Club. To do so would require a personal sacrifice, as opposed to the woke corporate virtue signaling of moving the All Star Game from Atlanta.”
This past week, Manfred’s hobby of choice bit him in a more damning way, some would suggest. During a break in negotiations, an AP camera captured him in an upstairs doorway.
What was he doing? Pulling wings off butterflies? Preparing to drop water balloons on union leaders?
Nope, worse. Much worse.
He was practicing his golf swing. The backswing, specifically. (Psst, more shoulder turn, commish).
This is what the Boys in Marketing call bad optics. It suggests the game’s biggest authority would rather be heading to the tee for an emergency nine than finding a way to get Major League Baseball and thousands of associated employees back to work.
Phil Mickelson PGA fallout
To continue and conclude with the golf angle, unlike modern baseball, the PGA Tour continues operating — as a 501c charitable organization, mind you — as something Marvin Miller might describe as a plantation. If any of its “independent contractors” find room in the schedule for the upstart Saudi golf league, they’re no longer welcome on the U.S. tour.
The Tour’s stars and near-stars — specifically Phil Mickelson, who made himself an unfortunate recent example — are limited on where they can ply their trade, which on paper seems odd given their independent label.
But they’re perceived as rich golfers, ineligible for pity. In the perception game, the rich ballplayers, on the other hand, benefit from their opposition: Much richer owners.
They also benefit from a commissioner who needs work on his backswing and, needless to say, a competent and badly needed follow-through.
— Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com