Spoiled MLB players, owners confuse wants with needs as lockout looms

The most surprising thing about the just completed World Series wasn’t that the Milwaukee Brewers won it. It was that anybody cared.

Two starless teams, in a couple of baseball’s smallest markets, one of them unable to reliably fill its own room, even in the playoffs. If baseball is in any sort of financial trouble, this is where it should have become obvious.

But it didn’t. The U.S. ratings were decent – just a smidge off last year’s edition. And that was American sport’s Evil Empire versus Barack Obama’s Evil Empire. The Brewers-Rays audience didn’t start dipping until it became clear that Milwaukee was going to win it jogging away.

Start to finish, baseball had a great season. No major catastrophes or scandals – a modern rarity. Things were competitive everywhere. A nice mix of successful big names (Yankees, Red Sox), unexpected emergers (the other Chicago) and busts (look away).

The league even has serious stars again. Ten years ago, did everyone – and I’m including people who don’t watch any baseball – know who the biggest name in the sport was? They did not (RIP Mike Trout’s legacy).

Now they do. That is the real power of Shohei Ohtani. He allows baseball to colour outside its traditional marketing lines.

MLB could face long lockout as players vow to fight salary cap

Currently, baseball has one overarching storyline – Ohtani’s Dodgers. Not only did they play well, their owner got himself in all kinds of trouble, which is more fun. The coolest sport right now is watching the preposterously wealthy fail.

The Dodgers got pushed so high up on their pedestal that they were essentially floating. Then the Brewers picked them out of mid-air. In a normal off-season, I suppose that would mean L.A. would go out and clone Bo Jackson, Muhammad Ali and Jim Thorpe, and put them in the outfield. But we won’t get to do that. Baseball will instead spend its winter on work stoppage.

The current collective agreement expires on Dec. 1. There is zero chance it will be amicably renewed. A plurality of owners – including the man who owns the new champions – figure now is the time to go to the mattresses over a salary cap. The players are just as determined to remain the only major sport whose maximum pay scale is theoretical.

Who’s right? Neither of them. They’re all delusionally greedy wretches.

The Dodgers lost US$20-million last year, according to Forbes, and are probably worth something north of $10-billion. How does this make sense? It doesn’t. Were it me, I wouldn’t be drawing attention to that fact by complaining about it, but that’s why I sweat our mortgage.

I can’t wait for a strike. I hope it goes on for years. I hope that by the time everyone has become too exhausted to keep fighting over their hundredth million, the stadiums are overrun by crawling vines, and the bleachers have caved in.

In the coming months, fans will be asked to pick sides. Not that your picking has anything to do with anything, but so that the spirit of competition can continue, and so that MLB’s media subsidiaries have something to talk about.

In America, this nonsense will get more coverage than any armed conflict on the planet. It’s the moment a union boss or some hawkish owner can become as familiar as a head of state. That’s the real reason we have strikes/lockouts – so that the suits can have their moment to shine. Throughout, we will be told by either side that this is being done for the sake of the game.

The only people who give a damn about the game are you – because for you, it is a game. For them, it’s a business. It’s a status marker. It’s open warfare. It’s the daily grind. It’s anything but fun.

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Like anybody who does something amazing for a living, sports professionals take it for granted. The more amazing a job is, the more for granted people take it.

I am lucky enough – and it’s all luck – to work in one of those industries. You know how much sportswriters complain about sportswriting? Whatever the maximum amount of complaint is, it’s more than that. It’s the only thing we do at 110 per cent capacity.

What keeps us from spinning off into madness is knowing that if we complain too loudly, or to the wrong people, we’ll all be digging ditches. And not fancy, close-to-the-surface ditches. The deep ones they put sewage pipes in.

People who own and work at sports teams are incapable of this realization because so many people want what they’re selling. It’s a sort of curse. It causes them to confuse want with need.

People need plumbers. They do not need baseball. And they especially don’t need to be told how hard doing baseball is on the twentysomething kajillionaires who play it and the lizard people who manage them.

This argument against strikes/lockouts is ‘Maybe the fans won’t come back this time.’ But no one in sports believes that’s possible any more. They always come back, which proves nothing. The only thing one can say for certain about a black swan is that it is inevitable.

Once in a while, you’ll catch a scene in a movie from the seventies or eighties that features a game in progress – often baseball. The stands are half-empty. That’s the way it was, which means that’s the way it will be again.

With that single idea in mind, why would reasonable people waste the best days of their lives fighting over such abundant spoils? Hire a couple of arbitrators, give them a timeline and let them duke it out. Spend the winter decorating your apocalypse bunker, or shopping for data centres. Live a little.

Appreciate how good you have it, all of you, from the lowest roster scrub to the most out of touch private equity czar. Doing baseball for a living – could anything be less important, and more delightful? But oh no.

Some day, they will say of sports, ‘It was working out so well for them. Where did they go wrong?’. Here, that’s where. Here and now.