Dave Hannigan: Baseball on brink of chaos as billionaire owners say players earn too much

Earlier this month, Major League Baseball issued a 34-page memo containing a very specific set of contingency plans for this coming winter. Images and videos of current stars are to be temporarily scrubbed from team websites and club executives can only attend players’ weddings if they undertake not to talk about the game with guests. The same officials must not send Christmas or holiday cards of any kind to squad members, cannot discuss contracts with their agents and need to ensure all training facilities are closed.

These bizarre instructions covering every aspect of club business are to be carried out if the owners and players cannot, as now seems likely, agree on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) by 11.59pm on December 1st. The gloomy prospect of a lockout potentially wiping out the 2027 season is why the unsavoury stench of industrial dispute hung over the World Series between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays this past week. The fear is this romantic matchup, the first between two small-market teams since 1991, might be the last competitive baseball for 18 months.

As always, the squabble is about money and who gets the largest share of it. Juan Soto, an outfielder for a New York Mets team that didn’t even qualify for the playoffs, has just finished the second season of a 15-year contract worth $765 million (€680 million). Shohei Ohtani, who pitched and hit for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their shock National League Championship defeat by the Brewers, is not even halfway through a deal paying him $700 million across a decade. These astronomical amounts are why owners want to introduce a stricter salary cap, placing new limits on how much the best players can earn.

Apart from being profoundly unAmerican, context here is everything. Twenty-seven of the 30 Major League clubs are owned by billionaires, some, such as the Mets, the Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, belong to individuals who have surpassed that wealth milestone multiple times over. Having amassed great fortunes from their own chosen fields, these plutocrats wish to restrict the ability of extraordinary athletes to let the free market decide their worth. A figure that is always entirely performance-based.

These avaricious characters only want capitalism to apply to their own industries and not to the sport they’ve bought into on some side-hustle ego trip. This is why they are pushing for new rules limiting the length and size of contracts. A player choosing to stay with his own team at the end of a deal will be able to sign for a maximum of six years at $265 million. Should he choose to leave for pastures new, the scale is five years at $202 million. And no individual can earn more than 16 per cent of the team’s salary cap – something owners have wanted to introduce for decades – which will be set at $245.3 million for a 26-man roster each season.

These are ludicrous numbers for ordinary folk but it’s the principle of the thing. Nobody shouted stop when Steve Cohen made $22 billion managing hedge funds and then bought the Mets. John Henry didn’t have limitations on his commodity trading until he was rich enough to buy the Red Sox and Liverpool. These men were talented at one thing and allowed to profit accordingly. Greed is all well and good for money crunchers but seemingly not for those preternaturally gifted with a bat or ball in hand.

Baseball has a long and troubled history of protracted labour relations standoffs that ended up eating chunks of seasons. Just four years have passed since the last showdown between players and owners culminated in a 99-day lockout causing a delay in the start of the 2022 campaign. Thirty-two years ago, the players famously downed tools and the 1994 World Series was cancelled after another impasse about the CBA, where the sticking point was the very same salary cap idea on the table today.

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It says much for the elongated way the sport conducts its business that this forthcoming stoppage has been regarded as inevitable for much of the past year. While the Major League Baseball Players’ Association accuses greedy owners of trying to “juice their profits and franchise values”, the commissioner Rob Manfred contends he’s merely levelling the playing field to give smaller outfits a shot at a title.

“In order for this game to reach its full potential, we need to continue to address concerns that our fans have, particularly concerns that go to the core of what we’re about – that is, competitive balance,” said Manfred. “We need to make sure fans in markets at the beginning of the season have a realistic belief that their team has a chance to win.”

He said that months before the Brewers and Rays reached the Fall Classic, which is baseball’s equivalent of a Champions League final between Viking and Lask. Having the team with the 19th-highest payroll taking on the outfit ranked 28th in spending is so unexpected because between them they fork out nearly $100 million less on salaries than the Dodgers, the most expensive team ever assembled. How much of a long shot was this showdown? Well, conspiracy theorists believe star players on more vaunted clubs threw games to ensure this underdog pairing because it bolsters the union’s argument that the current economic model works just fine.

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A lunatic assertion summing up the trouble baseball is in.