Baseball is back! Thursday was Opening Day, and our long winter is at an end. Baseball is my favorite sport. I know that's weird, because I'm Black and am under the age of 95, but what can I say? I can watch a baseball game while reading a book, and if I happen to doze off, it's still OK. It's not a sport; it's a lifestyle.
And this might be the last season I get it for a while. The lords of baseball—i.e., the owners of the various teams—appear ready to blow up the sport to make themselves a little wealthier.
Baseball is the only major American team sport that operates without a salary cap. There are some "luxury tax" rules and other thresholds meant to punish teams that spend a lot of money, but, fundamentally, owners can spend as much cash on their baseball teams as they want.
You'd think that the kinds of smash-and-grab businessmen who are able to amass the kind of wealth necessary to own a baseball franchise would be fans of, you know, unfettered competition, but they're not. Instead, most of the owners want a salary cap. And why wouldn't they? Imposing a salary cap gives the owners fixed, and artificially depressed, labor costs. Most capitalists are more than happy to abandon capitalism if market regulations help them reduce labor costs.
The owners want a salary cap, and to get one, they're probably going to lock out the players next year—until the powerful baseball player's union agrees to give the owners a way to artificially depress the wages of baseball players.
As Matt Kreisher explains in The Nation, what's particularly infuriating about the owner's position is that many baseball fans will end up taking the side of the greedy owners. For most people, the athletes getting paid multiple millions of dollars to play a game—a child's game that involves hitting a ball or throwing one—already seem grossly overcompensated. Baseball players make vastly more than teachers or scientists or any number of people whose contributions are more critical to the functioning of society.
But athletes are labor. And what the owners want is to artificially cap the cost of labor, even though baseball owners already enjoy a literal monopoly—aided by a straight-up antitrust exemption—for the sport. Moreover, baseball players must accrue six full years of major-league service time before they're even allowed to become free agents with the power to sign with the team that offers them the most money. Owners have a monopoly on the sport, a monopoly on the early careers of all its players, and when the players are finally able to participate in what counts as the free market for their labor, the owners want to introduce another artificial ceiling on how much they can make.
Yet fans of teams, especially fans in "small market" cities, support this ownership control and greed. They feel like their teams can't compete with the big spenders in New York and (especially) Los Angeles without a salary cap.
It's a terrible argument. The owners in Milwaukee or Cleveland or Pittsburg are not poor. They're not even broke. They have money to spend on players and compete with the Los Angeles Dodgers or New York Yankees. And if they don't have the liquid cash available, they can always sell their teams for billions of dollars to somebody who does have enough cash to buy a right fielder.
The problem is that owners of some of the baseball teams don't want to spend money. They want to use their baseball teams as prestige toys, instead of putting the most competitive team they can on the field to try to win the World Series. The owners want socialism for themselves but rapacious capitalism for everybody else.
They seem to be willing to sacrifice the 2027 season to get it. Players are already being told to save money in preparation for a long lockout
Baseball fans are fond of saying "maybe next year." But this year, next year might never come.
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