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Major League Baseball is currently locked in an ugly battle over the delayed start of the season, with players and owners disagreeing on just about everything. Length of season, salary, safety procedures … you name it, they disagree.
I won’t go into the whole history of all this, because I’d need about 5,000 words to do so, but the main gist is: The owners want a shortened season to help cut costs, and they want to pay the players as little as possible. The players, health concerns aside, want to play, and want to get paid to do so.
Anyway, it looked like the two sides were headed finally toward an agreement this week, when on Monday MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred (who I’ll remind you works for the owners) said he wasn’t sure they’d get a season in.
He said this just five days after saying he was “100 percent” certain they’d get the season in.
It was a stunning statement, one that called into question all the reporting from the last week. Maybe the two sides wouldn’t get a deal done. Maybe they weren’t that close.
Though, just as quickly as Manfred said what he did, players (including Trevor Bauer, notably) took to social media and explained pretty bluntly what was going on here — The owners were trying to run the clock.
See: The owners want to play as few games as possible to fulfill TV contracts and season obligations before getting to the money-making playoffs. But with the two sides closing in on a deal too early, Bauer explained, Manfred needed to buy time. So Manfred gave an ominous interview implying the sides were far apart.
It took a couple hours, but anyone closely following the negotiations saw Manfred’s statement in a new light. Twenty years ago, this doesn’t happen, but right now? Of course it does.
If a factor in these negotiations is trying to win over the public, MLB team owners are running an outdated playbook, and they’re getting worked right now.
Owners can’t just use cheap negotiating tactics, then leak stuff to reporters and get their story out there. Well, they can, but now players have a direct line to the fans in a way they never did before.
Years ago, Manfred would say the season was at risk of being called off. The newspapers would run the story the next day. A day later, an agent would leak it to a reporter that Manfred was using this as a negotiating tactic. Maybe the paper would run it in a column, and a day later some other reporters follow up. Manfred then had to be given the chance to respond.
Now it would have been a full week, and the public would be either uninformed of the entire thing or confused, and the owners had successfully run a week off negotiating time.
Now? It doesn’t work like that. Manfred says what he says. Two hours later players are on social media spreading a new narrative. It’s aggregated and parsed. By the time people are in bed, the story is shifted and they’re right back to where they were. No time bought at all, or at most, a few hours.
MLB owners have the money, so they have the power. Always. But young MLB players have a deeper understanding of this moment, and they’re using it to their advantage in these negotiations. They might not win, but they’re dominating in public opinion.
Tuesday’s Big Winners: Oklahoma State football players
Hours after a photo of head coach Mike Gundy appeared showing him wearing an OAN t-shirt — a far-right “news” website favored by the president — OSU players threatened a mass boycott, speaking up quickly and forcefully against the coach. It might spell the end of his tenure there, and shows that players, when binding together, can enact real change.
Quick hits: Ezekiel Elliott, Vanessa Bryant, Star Wars
– Ezekiel Elliott reportedly tested positive for COVID-19. He floated out a one-word tweet that’s VERY interesting, and our own Hemal Jhaveri explained why it’s a harbinger of things to come.
– Vanessa Bryant had to block Kobe Bryant fan accounts and the reasoning is extremely sad.
– There’s a new Star War. It has some cameos of some kind.