Have you read a good book lately? Man, there’s so many. Dostoevsky, Didion, Avni Doshi. The library loans them for free. Open one up and find yourself transported.
Do you owe an old pal a call? Are you curious about the NBA playoff picture? Have you not yet forsaken your New Year’s resolution of learning to cook? You can do all those things on March 31. You can roast pork chops or start “The Idiot” or catch Bucks-Nets on TNT. You can binge one of those comedies that don’t tell jokes but do make you vaguely feel better. You can do so much of the stuff we require to sustain and distract us.
What it looks like you can’t do, on that final day in March, is watch Major League Baseball. Not if commissioner Rob Manfred follows through on his threat to the MLBPA and cancels Opening Day, which his office has insisted he will do if a new collective bargaining agreement cannot be struck by Monday. The MLB-imposed deadline will make official what Manfred’s 30 bosses have telegraphed for the past three months: The owners don’t care if you want to watch a full season of baseball.
A seventh day of the staring contest took place on Sunday in Jupiter, Fla. While an MLBPA official emphasized the gap between the two sides, an MLB official called the latest round of talks “productive.” That framed the dynamics quite well: Every day closer to Manfred’s arbitrary endpoint of Monday, every day closer to the ballplayers not getting checks, represents progress for the owners.
The collection of shipping magnates and real-estate moguls and guys born to successful dads who control America’s pastime would prefer there be no baseball on Opening Day, perhaps no baseball for the early weeks of April, rather than games that force them to pay the primary labor force better wages. That the guaranteed salaries for those jobs do sound rather cushy — most fans would rather be a baseball catcher than a baseball consumer, or even a baseball columnist — is immaterial. That the union slept at the wheel for years and woke up wondering how the industry landed in a ditch is not worth rehashing.
The owners did this.
The owners initiated this shutdown. The owners waited 43 days to make a proposal. The owners have refused to budge on the relatively modest requests made by the players for a more equitable piece of the industry’s massive revenue pie. The players are willing to grow the pie by diluting the playoffs and sullying their uniforms with ads. They just want to get paid better. The union isn’t rallying for revolution; they’re asking for a cost-of-living raise.
That’s all. That’s it. And the reason baseball is not happening, the reason camps are closed, is because this legal monopoly — the stewards of the sport who have refused to pay minor-leaguers the minimum wage and contracted affiliates and shrunk the draft these past few years — will not pay the players a bit more.
(Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)
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