More scathing commentary about MLB and its grasp for defeat.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29302203Buster Olney
ESPN Senior Writer
What we'll call the Jeff Luhnow mentality could be defined as the absolute devotion to gleaning every fragment of advantage, every bit of efficiency, regardless of whether you might drift beyond the bounds of common sense. The ends justify the means; just win the moment, baby.
It's as if Major League Baseball's leadership has embraced the Luhnow mindset in these tortuous labor negotiations, because the owners keep making these absurdly incremental offers at a time when the broader international context calls for decisive and bold action. With a resolution now at least three weeks too late, and counting, the industry is becoming a punchline for sports dysfunction, following antecedents like "the Knicks," "Tonya Harding" and "butt fumble." Every bit of news on America's pastime these days seems to begin with the phrase: "And then there's baseball ..."It's the Luhnow mindset as applied to labor relations.
Under Luhnow, the Houston Astros were the sport's supreme practitioners of tanking, becoming the first team since the 1962-65 Mets to lose at least 106 games in three consecutive seasons. In Luhnow's first three seasons as Houston GM, the Astros spent a total of $137.4 million in payroll -- $53 million less than the next-lowest team, the Pirates ($190.7 million). The Astros drew a 0.0 in local television ratings for consecutive seasons. They manipulated the service time of some of their best young players, as did other teams. Luhnow's team engaged in ultra, next-level sign-stealing, and traded for Roberto Osuna fresh off his 75-game suspension under the sport's domestic violence policy.
But so long as the math made sense, Luhnow pushed the envelope and the Astros won a World Series in 2017. Of course, in the big picture, Luhnow's management turned out to be a disaster for many reasons besides wins and losses. Under his watch, the Astros helped to drag the sport under a low bar of credibility as other teams tried to replicate his formula, with fans left to wonder if what they paid to see was farcical.
Throughout those years, which included Luhnow giving the OK for a club employee to monitor the opposing dugout from an adjacent camera well, you kept waiting for someone to step up and lead. You kept waiting for someone to acknowledge the astounding accumulation of damage to good-faith competition and operation, just as you keep on waiting for someone on the owners' side to end this embarrassing negotiation with the players' association, rather than engaging in this battle of reconstituted Spam offers.
The house of baseball is burning and somebody needs to put out the fire immediately, by making a deal that moves the sport forward beyond this absurd fight over increments.
The opportunity to own the sporting stage in early July is gone. The potential goodwill (and ratings) all but certain for the first big sport out of the gate may be all but squandered.
Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts talking about a cash-flow problem when tens of millions of people have lost their jobs? Not good. Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt, who has seen the value of his franchise multiply by at least a factor of 10, talking about how you can't make money in baseball? Not goodAt a time when some people are struggling to apply for unemployment benefits, nobody wants to hear about the quandaries of billionaires. Nobody should ever hear about minor leaguers having their salaries slashed, in the way that the Washington Nationals and Oakland Athletics intended to do.
But here we are, and the longer this impasse lasts, the more resentful that fans get, as the owners haggle over amounts of money which, when measured against their collective wealth, are pathetically small -- certainly not worth rendering long-term damage to the sport.
The owners don't have a monopoly on shortsightedness, by the way. The union leadership has pushed dominoes that helped lead to this moment through its lack of engagement over the past five years, with the two sides fueling the deterioration of their working relationship into a death spiral. Long before this current situation, MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark has almost uniformly responded to proposals about everything from pace-of-play initiatives to labor overtures with a hard no. Not, "let's talk about that," or "let's get in a room and kick this around" -- but a flat rejection.
In lieu of dialogue, MLB has seemingly become more frustrated, more draconian in its actions, and the two sides are building nothing together. The two sides are growing nothing. The golden goose they own together is seemingly absorbing significant damage that will inevitably be reflected in the diminished revenues of owners and players.Many agents fear that while it's very possible that the players might think they will win this moment, because of how they've been unified, there will be virtually no long-term gain for the standoff. The conditions for the pool of what could turn out to be 300-plus free agents in the fall haven't been addressed or improved through agreement. The leverage of this time might've been parlayed to attack larger issues that have hurt the players -- tanking, service-time manipulation, etc. -- but that hasn't happened, and given that the two sides aren't really on speaking terms, hasn't even been explored. In the same way that agents were immediately livid about what they saw as disastrous CBA terms in 2016, they view this chapter as a missed opportunity that will ultimately bear long-term costs because of the lack of productive collaboration and the destruction to baseball.
