The easy thing, of course, is to look at the mess baseball has made for itself, and blame "both sides.''
Both before and after negotiations broke down earlier this week in Florida and the impasse reached its three-month anniversary, "billionaires vs. millionaires,'' had been trending on Twitter.
It's a catchy, neat little summation as to why spring training has yet to begin and why the season won't begin on March 31. It's a way for fans to express their frustration, to throw their hands up in despair and wash their hands of both the players and owners.
It'a also lazy -- and wrong.
Because this lockout is not happening because of "both sides.''
The owners implemented it the first possible second they could -- as soon as the clock struck midnight on Dec. 2 and the basic agreement expired. And having started it, they could end it whenever they wish.
They could have continued with the old CBA in place and negotiated, with spring training beginning on time, followed by an on-time start to the season.
Or, after rationalizing the lockout as a means to create a "jump start'' to negotiations, they could have come to the bargaining table before six weeks had elapsed. Instead, they squandered a month of a half, all in the name of posturing.
When the two sides finally began talks in earnest, the owners made it clear that three significant issues weren't even up for discussion: quicker free agency, expanded arbitration eligibility and a reduction in revenue sharing.
Over the course of nine days in Jupiter, the owners barely moved on the issue that concerned the players most: thresholds in the Competitive Balance Tax (CBT), a mechanism that has increasingly served as a salary cap. Despite growing revenues, owners essentially refused to lift the thresholds. For the longest time, their proposal included an initial threshold of $214 million -- about a two-percent increase from the $210 million figure in place for 2021.
Meanwhile, owners also pushed for penalties on overages to be more than doubled -- negating the increases while serving as yet another drag on spending.
When they finally got around to bumping their offer for 2022 to $220 million, they liked that figure so much that they offered the same figure for both 2023 and 2024 -- despite the fact that an expanded playoff format and the introduction of advertising patches on uniforms will bring in $150 million in new revenue annually.
(There have been reports in recent days that some small-market owners were pressing Manfred to actually reduce the thresholds from last year, effectively going backward in their spending while revenues increase.)
To support the owners' position, Manfred further insulted everyone's intelligence by maintaining that the last few years had been so difficult on the owners' bottom line. Surely, the pandemic has temporarily eaten into their profit margins. But at the same time, the values of the franchises continue to soar. A decade ago, the 30 teams were valued at a collective $15.6 billion. Last year, those same 30 teams were worth $55.2 million, more than tripling in value.
And still, Manfred insisted that the return on the owners' investment was less than what would have been realized in the stock market.
It's this kind of fuzzy math that exposes the owners and their intentions.
Here's another: if the game is so in need of fixing, and owning a franchise so trying, why did a handful of small and medium-market franchises spend so lavishly in the days and weeks leading up to the lockout? Texas Rangers owner Ray Davis willingly spent a half-billion on two free agent infielders last November -- and then was on hand in Jupiter, urging fellow owners to hold the line against those greedy ballplayers.
At the time Davis gave out gargantuan deals to Marcus Semien and Corey Seager, he had no idea what a new CBA would like. Still, he spent $500 million on two players. to improve his team. Months later, he was busy playing Chicken Little, advising fellow owners to hold that line at the bargaining table - or else.
Much of what the players seek in a new deal will likely result in only a re-allocation of resources. If younger players are to be paid more via increases in the minimum salary -- long overdue, especially in comparison to the pay scale for other sports -- and a pre-arbitration bonus pool, that's probably to come at the expense of older players, who are already seeing salaries dip on the open market as owners draft away from investing in veteran middle class free agents.
None of which is to suggest that the players and the union are entirely without fault. As it typical in negotiations, some of their early asks (a pre-arbitration bonus pool of $120 million, for one obvious example) were clearly pie-in-the-sky demands which were never going to be met. But that's also the nature of negotiations, whereby early demands are flung out so that moving off them later represents a concession.
But some economists have already determined that even if the owners had accepted the players' last proposal wholesale, they -- the owners -- would have still come out ahead. That's part of the inherent advantage that comes with being on the owners' end of the equation.
Instead, a cadre of small-market owners seem intent on flexing their muscles and seeing if they can break the union. You get the clear sense that many of them aren't the least bit troubled by losing the entire month of April. If you're willing to cut the season by roughly one-sixth because it won't adversely impact your bottom line, doesn't that suggest a pretty owner-friendly system is already in place?
Not that they're overly concerned about the public relations battle, but it might help if owners realized they are losing on that front. In the past, fans typically side with owners, if for no other reason than the old canard about "being paid millions to play a game, and still whining about it.'' An admittedly unscientific study of social media suggest that the pendulum has swung back in favor of the players this time.
Some still cling to the notion that "both sides'' are at fault. As the saying goes: Those people are entitled to their own opinion, but alas, not entitled to their own facts.