It was an evening for pomp and pageantry, for celebrating a World Series between two of the five major league teams never to win one. But, before the first pitch of the first game, the commissioner of baseball and the head of the players’ union held separate media gatherings that only served to reinforce the notion that a lockout in December is a virtual certainty and Opening Day next March is in serious jeopardy.
Of all the major North American sports, baseball is the only one without a salary cap. The players and their union vow to keep it that way, and union chief Bruce Meyer said every proposal the owners make on every issue is contingent upon a salary cap. How, someone asked commissioner Rob Manfred, can the owners strike a deal if the union is entrenched against a cap?
“Re-thinking where you are is a really important part of trying to make a deal,” Manfred said. “It’s actually a skill in collective bargaining. It’s easy to say, ‘I’m here and I’m never moving.’ That’s not a particularly skilled approach to the process.”
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That is perilously close to telling the other guy at the negotiating table how to negotiate. It’s also something you might say when you’re feeling pretty darn good that you’re going to win the negotiation.
“We have an unprecedented level of unanimity among ownership that it is something that we need to do,” Manfred said.
He wouldn’t say otherwise at this point, of course. The owners were unified in 1994, when they last demanded a salary cap. They didn’t win, and fans lost the final two months of the 1994 season and the first month of the 1995 season.
When the NHL got its salary cap, owners shut down the league for a full year. Would MLB owners forgo a year — or at least several months — of ticket sales and media revenue to get their cap? Would MLB players forgo a year — or at least several months — of their salaries to stave off a cap?
We won’t know the answer to either question until the spring, and until then a new collective bargaining agreement would require one side or the other to abandon its position.
That makes this year’s World Series something of a Rorschach test: Is a Brewers-Rays series proof that the system actually works just fine the way it is?
To Manfred, the answer is no. A series featuring two of baseball’s smaller markets is an anomaly when history shows a correlation between payroll and success, not only in the regular season but in advancing through the playoffs.
“It’s not that no small market can win,” Manfred said. “It’s just that it’s pretty rare.”
To Meyer, the answer is yes.
“It has nothing to do with what the Dodgers are doing,” Meyer said. “There is no reason whatsoever that the Pirates can’t do what the Brewers have done, or what the Rays have done.”
The Pirates, Meyer said, do not spend all the money they are allotted to sign draft picks. The Brewers, playing in baseball’s smallest market, might not routinely hand out free-agent riches, but owner Mark Attanasio said his team ranks “right in the middle” of the 30 teams in spending on baseball operations.
Attanasio publicly stumped for a salary cap here Friday, saying it would “help us compete but more importantly all of the other teams with lower payrolls too.” He said Brewers fans already fear it might take another 44 years to return to the World Series.
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Said Meyer: “That doesn’t seem like a great way, with all due respect, to try and generate excitement among your fans.”
Meyer said this year’s series “undermines their argument” for what he called “the nuclear bomb of a salary cap.” He said the owners are uninterested in the union’s proposals for addressing competitive balance, including increased revenue sharing among owners and a tax against teams that fail to win consistently, and he alleged the league’s argument is “a charade” for what the owners really want: “to suppress salaries and gut player rights.”
The takeaway: Don’t book non-refundable airline tickets and hotel rooms for spring training.
On other topics:
— As The Times has reported, MLB is keeping an eye on federal investigations into Dodgers owner Mark Walter and his insurance empire, which is under scrutiny for allegedly violating laws designed to protect investors. Walter also is a defendant in multiple civil lawsuits filed by investors alleging fraud and breach of contract.
“As always when we have an investigation — external, law enforcement, whatever — we monitor that,” Manfred said. “That’s where we are right now. We’re just watching what’s going on right now.”
Over the past two months, amid efforts to find what could be more than $20 billion to recapitalize insurance funds, Walter has sold his controlling interest in the Lakers and a minority share of Chelsea, the English Premier League club. On Friday, Bloomberg reported he is seeking to sell the Sparks. He has no plan to sell the Dodgers, team president Stan Kasten has said.
— Meyer said the MLBPA continues negotiations with LA28 over how major league players would be accommodated in the 2028 Olympics. “As of now, we’re not getting satisfaction on those things,” Meyer said.
Both the league and the union say they want to participate in the Games, but Manfred said MLB would normally start preparing its 2028 schedule early in 2027. The league has agreed to an extended All-Star break to accommodate the Olympics, but MLB also could tire of waiting for the union to agree with LA28, which badly wants MLB players to participate.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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