1-Man’s Opinion on Sports-Wednesday. “Baseball-Bad Shutdown–Bad Leadership”
“Bad Day for Baseball—Bad Leadership Too”==================
He had the audacity to smile at the podium..some message you send to the fans.
He had the rudeness to plead poverty despite upgrades in every offer made.
If you didn’t like the leaders in baseball, the Commissioner, and the Union chief, then you did not watch the press conference, hours after the 9-days of meetings ended with ‘take it or leave it offers’. And now the start of the season has been cancelled..
Add Rob Manfred and Tony Clark to my list of people I dislike professionally, for who they are and how they act.
The final offers and responses? They didn’t accept them, and now the start of this season is canceled for at least 2-weeks if not longer. This is different than the pandemic shutdown of baseball in 2020.
It is more about a food fight to carve up bigger pieces of a 10.7-billion dollar baseball revenue pie.
The anger and rage directed at both sides is sandwiched in history. It’s like baseball is in hate mode dating all the way back to the first of the 9-work stoppages, since the late Marvin Miller arrived on the scene.
The hate and lack of trust of the union towards the owners, how mistreated they are , comes on the heels of the 40M a year free agent deal Max Scherzer just signed, and a truck load of rhetoric about players not being taken care of.
Manfred has never been forgiven for his statement that the World Series Trophy is nothing more than a ‘piece of metal’. And now he was caught smiling and joking at the podium as the black curtain-cancel the season press conference began.
Clark is trying to repair a reputation that he was crushed in the last negotiations and is trying to make up for it with absurd demands in virtually every financial category there is out there.
Don’t plead poverty to me when you have taken a sport that was a 6B industry and grown it to 10.7B. Don’t cry poor when the average salary is 4.1B per player and ownership just survived loss of 3B in one year because of the pandemic.
Believe in Manfred? How can you? This is the guy who cut loose 42-minor league teams a year ago. And who wanted to lop off more than 900-lower minor leaguers just weeks ago from team’s protected lists.
Subscribe to Clark? Not really, when you see owners were ready to take rookie pay from 570,000-to 700,000 the first year. Not when owners were ready to dump 30M into a bonus pool for young players coming off very good first or second years. Not when owners agreed to dump all draft pick compensation for free agents. Surely not the agreement to guarantee housing for every minor league players in every team’s system. And definitely not when the Luxury Tax on payrolls was pushed from a 212M-threshold to 220M next year.
The last time Clark spoke he was demanding the Luxury tax threshold go to 278M. Rookie pay start at 775,000. And the Plus 2-Bonus Pool be 110M for a select few young stars. Talk about the absurd negotiating points.
Sorry I can’t buy into the Union theory that we should not have a floor to spending, demanding every small market owner have a payroll of at least 100M. And I disagree with blocking the post season playoffs from going to 12 teams or 14 teams that would generate even more revenue to be distributed.
Stop screeching about salary caps and manipulation of service time. It’s a tired sales pitch to a ticket buying fans community dealing with pandemic fatigue, horrific inflationand unemployment.
You can yell all you want about rules of the game, but that should be outside the window of these negotiations. How can MLB explain to us, with the deadline approaching, they took up time to talk about pitch clocks, elimination of the shift, and larger size bases? All while the clock ticked and there was a need to find a middle ground on the luxury tax and penalty tax and core issues.
I was so mad at both leaders by 4pm on Tuesday I wanted to talk away from the game. And many have.
MLB attendance is down, TV ratings are down, and interest in the game and style of play is waning too.
Baseball is making money for everyone, but yet leadership seems bent on ruining the game and getting even with the other guy.
Bad day for baseball, with the cancellation of another seasonstart for sure.
Bad leadership in baseball, definitely too.
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Day
Time for everyone to go out and start supporting your local youth, high school, and college (NCAA, NJCAA, etc.) baseball programs. MLB is dead for 2022. I sure can’t see a season this year now.