“Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say. “It’s only twenty dollars per person.” They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack.”– Terrance Mann

At 5 PM EST on March 1st, the commissioner announced that six games would be purged from the baseball season. It is the second time Rob Manfred has been unable to salvage games in a season. He could blame 2020 on the pandemic and the pandemic certainly takes most of the blame, but he effectively botched any chance of playing 100 or 120 games because of his inability to make a deal.

Any baseball fan worth their salt knows exactly where the quote from above comes from. Any baseball fan worth their salt can rattle off the most famous numbers or relive the greatest moments in the game’s history. When you are a commissioner of the sport you first and foremost must love the sport. Loving the sport enables you to take all of the stakeholders and force them to negotiate in good faith. It also prevents you from succumbing to hairbrained schemes that alter the game for the worst.

Rob Manfred must resign as commissioner. He must resign not because he couldn’t broker an agreement between owners and players. He must resign not because of the ghost runner at second rule, the Astros cheating scandal that was really a league wide cheating scandal, or because he absolutely fumbled the pandemic negotiations. Those are all just symptoms of the disease. He must resign because he clearly doesn’t love baseball. He doesn’t understand baseball at its core. Therefore, he doesn’t understand when he makes the moves he makes how that eats away at the sport itself.

The offseason has a certain arc to it. There are owner’s meetings. There are general manager’s meetings. There are winter meetings. Free agency opens in November and has multiple waves of activity. Teams and players exchange arbitration numbers and have hearings. There is a Rule V draft and trades that boggle the imagination. More importantly, there is the excitement from fans that weaves its way through all of that. They call it the hot stove league. Fans were robbed of it this year.

Owners locked out the players in December. Keep in mind that many of the issues the two sides are currently debating have been known since the labor strife of 2020. They predicted this then. When asked why he waited until February to start negotiating, Manfred simply fumbled about and talked about the last ten days of negotiation. Yup Rob, that was the point of the question. YOU HAD 80 DAYS PRIOR TO THAT AND YOU DID NOTHING.

This is not one of those “make me commissioner” kind of pleas. I’m not qualified for the job, but I do have one qualification that Rob does not have. I love baseball. Of course, I’m not the only one. I’m not even going to try to argue that my love for the sport is superior to anyone else’s. It is superior to Manfred’s and that is clear with the way he talks about the game. It’s clear with the decisions he’s made to make the game shorter. People who love baseball aren’t desperate to have less of it.

The job of commissioner is difficult, but it is also easy to explain. The commissioner is a shepherd of sorts. They marry the interests of owners, players, and fans together to grow the sport and make it profitable for all. If one of those groups distrusts the commissioner he can’t effectively do his job. If more than one group distrusts the commissioner then the entire sport will sink. Don’t mind us now, but the sport is sinking.

People often want to trace the origin of things. It may just be the full extent of my personal timeline, but I vividly remember the 1980s. Lifestyles of the rich and famous was always lingering in the background. Lotteries started popping up around the country. The Ronald Reagan revolution was in full force. It’s difficult to fully appreciate all the impact that it had on society. So, I’ll try one little corner of the world.

Baseball players have one of the more vibrant unions in professional sports. The first work stoppages actually began in the early 1970s with some minor skirmishes here and there before then. Everyone knows the Curt Flood story and the story of his sacrifice is told and retold to the point of folklore.

Somehow, in the intervening decade, athletes and the union went from being the little guy fighting for their rights to being greedy cry babies that weren’t satisfied with all they have. People started siding with ownership. People would exclaim that they’d be willing to do anything for a million dollars. Those players are just too greedy.

No one bothered to question how or why our outlook on these things changed so dramatically. Players are well compensated and there is no getting around that, but they are employees. One of the things we used to believe as a country is that when businesses make money then everyone should grow with that business. Yes, the business owner (or stock holders) should benefit, but so should the people that did the work to help the business grow.

Between World War II and 1980 we saw a virtual renaissance for the middle class. The GI Bill helped millions go to college. You heard all kinds of tales about people being the first in the family to graduate from high school and go to college. A progressive income tax helped build perhaps the most vibrant middle class in the entire world.

That was then. The Reagan years and in the intervening decades have taken that all back. Just remember, 2020 is the same distance from 1980 as 1940. A look at baseball salaries is an interesting place to start. In 2015, the average big leaguer was making 4.25 million per season. In 2021, the average big leaguer was making 4.17 million per season.

More than 60 percent of players at the big league level were making under a million dollars last season. Fans somehow see Mike Trout, Alex Rodriguez, and Albert Pujols and assume they represent the union. They represent the union about as much as the typical owner represents society at large. No one begrudges them their right to earn huge dollars. I’m sure the union members just wish a few dollars would trickle down to them at some point.

Obviously, MLB is big business and their big business operates about like all big businesses operate. The biggest problem in every single labor negotiation is in how to share revenues. The devil is in how they couch it. They want large market teams to curtail their spending so smaller market teams can compete.

Owners have never opened their books to the public. Yet, in a sport where revenues are exploding (with the obvious exception of 2020) and have been exploding fairly regularly for the past 30 years, baseball owners want you to believe they are somehow hurting financially. This is supposed to be true while average salaries have actually declined since 2015. They are losing money and the players want to bleed them dry.

It’s a bunch of bullshit. Yet, while they are shoveling this nonsense, fans are usually siding with the owners. Remember, more than 60 percent of players are earning a million dollars and that’s just in the big leagues. The tale of what happens to minor leaguers is much more stark. Yet, most owners today are worth north of a billion dollars. Franchises grow in value by more than 500 percent annually. If you stop and think about it, none of this adds up.

I know it gets hard to force yourself to care about millionaires fighting with billionaires over huge profits. That’s especially true if you aren’t a fan. Yet, this battle is essentially the same battle as the battle over minimum wage and wages in other industries. The rhetoric is the same. If they raised wages then the costs would swallow them whole or make the cost of a burger outrageous. Neither is true. That’s just what they want you to believe.

Yesterday, MLB made a terse announcement that the league is moving the All Star game AND the MLB draft out of Atlanta as a response to Georgia Republicans passing its voter suppression bill which included voter suppression tactics like stricter ID requirements and shortened absentee voting periods.  The worst provisions, though, included giving the legislature authority to reject county voting results, removing the Georgia secretary of state from the state elections board voting members, and the cruel criminalizing of giving water and food to voters standing in line.

In a statement, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said,

“Over the last week, we have engaged in thoughtful conversations with Clubs, former and current players, the Players Association, and The Players Alliance, among others, to listen to their views.  I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year’s All-Star Game and MLB Draft.

“Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box. In 2020, MLB became the first professional sports league to join the non-partisan Civic Alliance to help build a future in which everyone participates in shaping the United States. We proudly used our platform to encourage baseball fans and communities throughout our country to perform their civic duty and actively participate in the voting process. Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.”

Joining Atlanta based Delta Airlines and Coca Cola, along with other companies, MLB is ratcheting up the pressure on the GOP to stop its massive voter suppression efforts in a desperate effort to cling to power as its demographic shrinks.   It worked in Indiana years ago when then governor Mike Pence signed the anti-gay bill that explicitly allowed private businesses to refuse service to people they didn’t like under the guise of “religious choice”.  After massive backlash against businesses and sports in Indiana, the state legislature “clarified” the bill by adding that, notwithstanding why the bill was written in the first place, it couldn’t be used to deny service to anyone.

That’s not good enough for Georgia, though.  The GOP must be stopped in its tracks in Georgia because it’s doing the same thing in 42 other states.  If companies, sports leagues, activists, and Americans stand against this anti-democratic and anti-American effort to consolidate power, this effort can be stopped.

Written by Nick Carraway on April 1 – 

“Put me in coach. I’m ready to play today. Put me in coach, I’m ready to play today. Look at me. I can be centerfield.” — John Fogerty

Today marks a special day in American lore. It’s Opening Day. Opening day represents so many things for so many people. For some it is a signal of the beginning of spring. For others it is the renewal of hope that this year will be the year that everything goes right. Still others consider the routine of seeing box scores in the newspaper (or online) and a game on the tube (or radio) every single night. For many of us it is all of those things.

I’ve written four books about baseball and half of those have been related to the Hall of Fame. Independent of my love for the Astros or any other specific player there is the love for the game. Opening day should be a national holiday. When done right, nearly every team is opening their season on the same day. Fans can go into a collective coma with copious amounts of beer, peanuts, and other tasty treats seated in front of the television watching a triple header on ESPN.

I’ve spent all of those books talking about the history of the game and settling arguments within it, but I’ve rarely talked about why I love the game so much. For me, it brings order to disorder. There is a symbiotic relationship between cold, hard facts and the thrill of not quite knowing what will happen on any given day.

My cousin (an avid gambler) once asked me how you handicap baseball. I told him you don’t. You can look at pitching matchups, hitting lineups, career averages, and all kinds of numbers and lose every time. Yet, over a long enough timeline the numbers begin to level out and everything begins to make sense. That’s the paradox that brings you back every time.

Numbers fluctuate in every sport and yet the numbers in baseball have a magic all their own. The .300 batting average always means something. 100 runs and RBI always mean something. 20 wins, a 3.00 ERA, and 200 strikeouts always means something. Of course, those meanings become magnified when they turn into career sums. Then it becomes 3000 hits, 300 wins, 500 home runs, and so forth.

In no other sport are the numbers that magical. Running backs and receivers may gain 1000 yards and quarterbacks may throw for 4000 yards, but those numbers have waned in their importance over time. Offenses change and evolve. A yard just isn’t a yard anymore.

Similarly, in basketball scoring has changed dramatically as offenses have changed. The irony is that all three sports have embraced advanced analytics and the analytics have driven the strategy. Where did analytics get its start? You guessed it. Baseball.

I suppose it would be natural for a history buff to love baseball. The game goes back to the American Civil War. Football and basketball can’t possibly compete with that. Few really care about soccer in the United States and few south of the Mason-Dixon line care about hockey. So, baseball was the best opportunity to marry a love of statistics, history, and symmetry.

Today is a day to take a break from Matt Gaetz, Joe Biden, voter suppression, gun violence and anything else we might care about just about every day around here. It is a day to feverishly check the scores to see how my fantasy teams did. It is a day to marvel at individual performances that might or might not be a predictor of things to come. It is a day to hope that my team will be perfect for at least one day. It is a day to allow all of that other stuff to go far far away. It will all be here when we get back.