Fans don’t care when millionaires squabble: Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright latest to opine about the current state of MLB where free agents go unsigned, thinks a strike is becoming inevitable
A part of me thinks, or at least wants to declare, that if baseball goes on strike again, I should just be done with MLB, because punishing fans because two sides of ridiculously wealthy parties can’t come agree on which side should be entitled to more money. It’s a ridiculous squabble no matter what way it’s looked at, where it’s abundantly clear that neither has any concern of how it looks from the perspective of those not a part of it. But the reality is that I like sports too much, and even if there were a strike, and then they come back at a different time, I’d probably still end up watching again, much to my dismay.
On one side of the fence, we have the players, where many players have been very outspoken this offseason, about how it’s becoming ridiculous and indefensible that some very prominent free agents, namely Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel have not been signed yet, and Spring Training has literally just begun. Ironically, nothing has been heard from the actual “victims” of this trend, and all remarks have been coming from mostly players who are currently locked into cushy, long-term, multi-million dollar contracts, because it’s easy to fling stones from pedestals.
On the other side of the fence, we have the ownership and front offices of all the Major League Baseball teams, whom throughout the last decade-plus, have all entered an era where statistical analysis has risen to prominence, and through such number crunching and analytical predicting, it’s taken a tremendous toll on how they view the financial worth of players, all across the spectrum.
In layman’s terms, teams themselves have become risk-averse and less willing to haphazardly sign players to ridiculously long and high-dollar contracts, fearing the high possibility of “bad contracts” bogging down payrolls and inhibiting the team from succeeding on a long-term basis.
In short, the players are accusing the owners of being cheap and hoarding the revenue for themselves, calling them greedy. They want more money to go in their pockets.
In short, the owners are telling the players that this is the way the game is evolving, and that they need to deal with it and get with the times. They want more money to stay in their pockets.
Frankly, both parties have reason to bitch, because baseball is a multi-billion dollar revenue industry now, and the teams are making more money than ever; at any given time, just about any team most certainly can afford to sign Bryce Harper to a ten-year, $300 million dollar contract; granted there’s an arbitrary not-a-salary-cap salary cap called the luxury tax threshold that teams pretend like they’re trying to stay under, but teams are allowed to go over it, but they’ll just pay a penalty for doing so.
But from a business standpoint, baseball is still a business and every single team is an independent business, with the goal of making money, not having it all be allocated to individuals playing a children’s game. There are still investors and executives to consider, not to mention everyday personnel, cost of property, taxes, and all sorts of expenditures that every single taxpayer has to worry about. Long-term, multi-million dollar contracts are kind of the antithesis of good business, unless it was absolutely definitive that a player was going to absolutely guarantee the team would get more wins and inspire more tickets, merchandise and concessions sold throughout the entire life of the contract.
And so we’re at this impasse where the players are beginning to think that they should go on strike, in order for the owners to get the message that they’re not happy with the way things have evolved, and that players should be guaranteed to be getting ridiculous contracts whenever they hit free agency, and the owners are trying to use statistical and new-age analysis to justify why players aren’t worth the money they’re hoping to get.
But take enough steps back from the whole scenario, and it turns out that there’s a third fence that encapsulates the entire thing outright: the fans. Ultimately, the fans are the lifeblood of the entire industry as a whole, and when the day is over, they’re the only ones that really suffer. The players in the MLB Players Union are all millionaires. The ownership of the teams are all millionaires. The fans are for the most part not even close to all being millionaires. But at the same time, the fans are the sole reason why the players and the ownership are millionaires, because it’s them who buy tickets, merchandise and go to games or subscribe to cable/internet/radio packages. Without fans, then baseball is a dead industry.
But here’s a wild idea: why not try and make the fans happy?
Sure, the sheer notion of such a statement is a pipe dream in itself and will never ever happen, but I for one certainly think there’s some weight to it. So MLB ownership doesn’t want to give more money to players, I’m cool with that; I think long-term contracts are detrimental to teams, because players almost always absolutely never perform to the value of their contracts with few exceptions (Evan Longoria’s 6/$18, Todd Helton’s 9/$141, Albert Pujols’ Cardinals 7/$100 come to mind), and at some point throughout the life of every mega deal, it’s considered a “bad contract.”
Fine, don’t give the money to the players, at least not caving into their ridiculous demands. However, the alternate idea is that perhaps they shouldn’t be the ones to profit so heavily, as not to make the players so sour.
How is that accomplished? Slashing costs of damn near everything, for the fans. Tickets to games should cost less. It should cost less to park, get a beer or a hot dog or any other concessions at the park. Team merchandise should be reduced. MLB.tv should cost less to subscribe to. Internet and radio subscriptions for baseball should cost less.
Here’s the wild ironic theory though: by reducing costs of everything with the objective of taking money out of the pockets of ownership, baseball fandom becomes more financially available to more people, and could hypothetically end up making more money than ever before. And if ownership makes such a glut of profits that were higher than anticipated, maybe even they would reach a point to where they could feel comfortable doling out more money to the players.
Sure, putting that in writing makes it sound as outlandish as it reads, and it will never, ever, happen. But there are so many instances in the world of sport and business, and sports business, where catering to the masses, and including the lower-class of the economic pyramid ends up making more money than trying to curate to the rich.
Sega rose to their peak success by giving away Sonic the Hedgehog, to promote sales of Genesis consoles. The entire mobile gaming industry is built on giving away the base games for free, but then profiting hand over fist on billions of micro-transactions. The entire plot of The Wolf of Wall Street was Jordan Belfort cleaning up on penny stocks.
Even within Major League Baseball, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim by way of I-5 in Orange County, are a perfect example of how ownership spread a little bit of goodwill towards the fans, and slashed prices across the board. Arte Moreno paid $180 million dollars to buy the Angels in 2003, doubled the value in just three years, and Forbes valued the team at $1.8 billion just a year ago.
My favorite story though, is Mark Cuban’s after he bought the woeful Dallas Mavericks in 2000. At that time, the team was still among the laughing stocks of the NBA; the base strategy that began the renaissance of the team was basically Cuban giving away tickets to Mavs games, most notably to attractive women at clubs, but it created an environment on television that made more men want to go to games, that they paid for, and as the cycle perpetually spun, the team start making money, to which they could invest on talent, to which helped them win more games, to which made more money, and then by 2011, the Mavs, the Dallas Mavericks, won an NBA championship.
The point of the theory is, if instead of the players making more money, and the owners keeping more money, if a little bit of goodwill were given back to the fans en masse, I think there’s the possibility of everyone winning out in the end anyway. There’s lots of examples of where profit is made from cutting costs in the world of business, and for as many Ivy League educated eggheads employed by MLB teams, I’m seriously curious to know if anyone’s even considered such a possibility.
