It was a week of false hope in this most false spring, the week in which Derek Jeter – The Captain! - took a look at the baseball hellscape and said, “Yeah, folks … I’m out of here.”
All we needed was New York Yankees voice Michael Kay’s iconic home run call: “Seeeee ya’!”
And while we were busy toting up the damage of imploded collective bargaining talks and watching Rob Manfred and Tony Clark throw out red meat to their constituents – Manfred trying and failing to convince folks that this wasn’t all a plan hatched months ago; the players' association making clear they blamed Manfred for the entire mess and affirming they were doing this “for the kids,” – I found the most thought-provoking thing to be Clark’s decrying the “commoditization” of ballplayers.
Now, it’s possible that this is right up there with the assertion made by members of the Major League Baseball Players Association that ownership wants to “break” the union, which sounds more draconian than the more likely scenario of pitting younger players vs. older players vs. middle-aged players and the highly paid vs. the entry-level guys. Can I let you in on a secret? THAT’S WHAT EVERY NEGOTIATION SETS OUT TO BE! It’s about finding pressure points, just like splitting big-market owners from small-market owners. Done right, it happens organically. It’s like calling a salary cap a competitive balance tax. Mostly, it never works and everybody knows it’s a waste of time. But it sounds scary. It fits in 140 characters.
Yet I’m going to credit Clark, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, with hitting on something I’ve found myself wondering about the more I hear this new generation of baseball executives talk: when I hear folks such as general manager Rick Hahn of the Chicago White Sox talking about using the Capital Asset Pricing Model “to assess the value of a Major League ballplayer” at a conference in 2017 or fired Seattle Mariners president and chief executive officer Kevin Mather glibly detailing service time manipulation to a Bellevue Rotary Club breakfast.
I look at my own user of words: the way I started at some point to refer to players as “assets” and then really cross the rubicon and started using the phrase “prospect capital,” for minor leaguers, like I was talking about widgets or doohickeys instead of … um … human beings. Funny, but back in the day, I remember one of the old-time writers – maybe Paul Meyer or Bob Hertzel – telling a young beat reporter that the difference between National League and American League writers was that the NL guys wanted to be managers and the AL guys wanted to be GMs.
Now?
It’s as if we all want to sound like freaking McKinsey consultants.
I’m not going to verge into old-man-yells-at-clouds territory, here. Nor am I going to embark on one of those anti-analytics screeds that are mercifully now found only in the most distant corners of our industry or among members of the “10 Followers” Twitter club. But I will suggest we think a bit about trying to sound as if we’re all front-office executives.
I had somebody tap in my DMs after I’d made the comment about commoditizing players on the Blair & Barker podcast to tell me that being described by your employer as an asset is a good thing, and he was right: beats the hell out of being called a liability. But that’s not how the word is used by baseball teams: it effectively is a dehumanizing substitute for "ballplayer," one of many that has become part of the game's jargon. I don’t even think it’s by design as much as complicity.
But here’s the thing: players – not just baseball players – bear some responsibility, too. You can’t start putting out your own NFTs or hawking this item or that item without becoming Myself, Inc. Goodness knows, cashing in on athletic celebrity has gone on for years and years. Nothing wrong with it, just as there’s nothing wrong with the concept of college athletes getting paid for imaging rights or – hell – even salaries, as far as I’m concerned. Every athlete deserves to get as much as possible for their labour, and that includes revenue generated beyond your on-field or on-ice performance.
It’s a trade-off almost every professional athlete has made or is willing to make, to some degree, and my sense is we all understand the downsides to making a deal with the marketing devil, and we’re comfortable with it. We’d all do the same if we could.
But I don’t think this is what Clark is talking about, and it’s why I have spent some time thinking about his choice of words. Maybe it’s a cry against the way analytics have removed much of the emotion from personnel decision-making – If I lose this 4.5 WAR guy making $12 million and replace him with two $4-million guys combining for 4.7 WAR, that’s good business – and how we know talk about players giving us “surplus value” instead of calling them “underpaid.” Maybe it’s a sign that Clark and the players union have come to a realization that with so many resources being funneled into research and development and high-performance staffs (hey, old man: remember when they were called training staffs?), they really are losing an almost daily losing battle against technology that is aimed at efficiency.
Maybe it’s a sign that what was once proudly called the strongest union in sports is, like so many other unions in so many other industries, on the wane because technology and efficiency are moving too fast for them.
This much is clear: baseball players have their backs up and they dislike Manfred in a way they never disliked Bud Selig. Maybe that’s because even though Selig shoved out the last real commissioner and turned the job into a CEO’s job, he at least owned a team. Other than Montreal Expos fans, I don’t think anyone ever wondered whether Selig actually liked the game. Nobody who ever saw him around Henry Aaron or Frank Robinson could make that case. Not really. Mostly, it was whether he cared about the game differently than the players and fans.
And so here we are. A sport that has spent the better part of a decade trying to remove emotion from every equation now finds itself choked by some very basic human emotions: mistrust and blind anger. Baseball isn’t failing as a business. But it might be as a human endeavour.
Jeff Blair hosts The Blair And Barker podcast.
