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It must suck for the owners now that they can't pull this shit because the entire world knows what they are doing as opposed to 94 when we all were at the mercy of newspapers

THEN WHY DID YOU REFUSE TO MEET FOR SIX F@#$ing WEEKS?!?!?!?

I believe it is 100% the truth. They just left out "but only if it doesn't cost us millions of dollars". I wholeheartedly believe the union has the same goal to start the season on time, but only if they get most of what they want.

I could take the time to dig back through this thread for itemised receipts, but it’s easier to let the thread debunk you the next time a headline breaks. It’s cute that you equate my disdain for ownership with a presumption that I think JR is evil despite his well documented and lauded loyalty to those in his organisation-loyalty to a fault at times-but commendable levels of loyalty nonetheless. There is plenty to critique JR on and I do so when it’s called for, but that certainly isn’t top the list. Additionally, I’m not putting words in your mouth as a defensive mechanism unlike what you’ve tried to do here again. I can make a nuanced critique while acknowledging the good on the side of opposition and admitting the bad on the side in which I defend. I also don’t need to make false assertions in defense of previous false assertions atop my indefensible position.

Exactly. Like I said revenue and profits are why they should spend more. It wouldn't go far but I believe any team receiving revenue sharing should have their profits capped and it shouldn't be much. Those funds should augment their spending not replace their spending.

Yes, thanks for another dismissive oversimplification. I’m not arguing for you to agree with me. But I’m not going to scroll past your pro billionaire drivel without critique or debunking.

This is true. But honestly which side has come to the table with earnest intent to find a fair deal? I can’t say for certain the players have, but the owners sure as hell haven’t. And while they are sitting on record revenues and valuations, they’ve stonewalled and hard-balled and feigned frustration through a media eager to both-sides the framing. I am 100% pro labor, and I’m not saying they are perfect. Far from it in fact. But the ownership side has been far far worse. They could end this today with a modicum of concessions but instead they are pulling PR stunts and crying in the press about lack of progress all while the off-season rapidly elapses and the season is in real jeopardy. Labor didn’t start this shit and they aren’t the ones that need to concede to find a middle ground.

you don't have a sport without the players

They pretty much did exactly that. They didn't negotiate for six weeks, then made an offer. Then the players made a counter offer and they walked away.

Again, 20 years ago, players held about 63% of baseball's revenue pie. Today it is a touch over 47%. They have lost 16 percentage points or about 25% of the share they once had. In order to start to make some of that back up to get back to even where they were, it is going to take some revenues flowing their way. For some perspective, the most recent baseball revenue numbers I saw were $10.7 billion. So when the players were asking for a $110 million piece for a specific group of underpaid arb qualifiers, you are talking about just a shade over 1% of the pool. When the dropped their ask to $100 million, it became less than 1%. The generous owners who proposed this idea and were willing to put $5 million into it are offering players 0.04% of revenues back. To simply get back to the 52% share the players had a few years back, the ownership would have to move almost $500 million in revenue over to players. To get back to 63%, it would take about $1.6 billion. So while the owners and their mouthpieces will try to blow people away with headlines about the players asking for 100 MILLION DOLLARS!, they leave out all perspective of the missing $1.6 BILLION that players would have had if things had remained simply the same for the last 20 years.

Owners sitting on record profits and revenues and pretending nothing has changed for them financially over the last decade is a pretty outlandish and unreasonable starting position IMO. The non-starter offers are a reflection of that. Owners stalling to run out the clock and then feigning at an impasse is also pretty unreasonable. As is the extreme tactic of attempting to stonewall players into a quick capitulation of every reasonable confession they have asked for.

I miss baseball. ?

No, you’re right, there does need to be some wiggle room to compromise from the players side. I’m just not going to let ownership off the hook for greedily pretending that the labor has outlandish demands and are the ones being unreasonable.

Coming from the most pro-ownership sycophant on this site, this is rich. I would chuckle if I weren’t dizzy from rolling my eyes at the continual nonsensical framing.

The idea that the players' counter-offer was "Ridiculous" and "insulting" and the owners' offer of a salary cut was neither of those, and that it's biased to think anything else is so insulting to the intelligence of the reader that I recommend you try it somewhere else rather than a page where people pay attention to baseball.

ok you delay the season and cancel games, fans tune out. hurt the sport in 94, hurt the sport in 2020, would hurt even more with a sport that's already hurting owners may not see it as "fair"; a business or a businessperson (same as an employee) has no right to succeed. baseball (and professional sports) are analogous to nothing else.

Holy shit Ayo. Billy giving him 1-1 right there was awesome, he blew right by his guy and delivered a poster 15 points 14 assists, what a night from that kid

Also I wanna send some love to the rookie Ayo. Man that kid has been unbelievable. Growing up in front of our very eyes.

Really like that Vucevic is stepping up recently. This is the guy that they thought they were getting from Orlando.

Your example is spot on but doesn't quite match. You have the option to leave and take your talents somewhere else. Something players don't have. Basically all real world examples seem to fail when looking at this. Bottom line, the owners are fleecing fans, their employees, and their communities. Sadly in my mind, the only group with leverage are the employees who are doing the best. I just hope that no city gives in to a MLB team when they cry poor and want a stadium.

The players’ original offer was made in November and included reduced time to free agency. It was a full and complete offer, you don’t get to pretend it doesn’t exist and then assume people on Soxtalk are too stupid to call you on it. The owners said “this will ruin small clubs” and countered with a big cut to arbitration and that $10 million fund. This was the owners first full and complete offer, submitted on January 13. The players took a week and submitted a counter offer, dropping their free agency time request and adopting the owners “extra fund” concept at $105 million. The owners then refused to counter, which is why you are giving details from the January 13 offer here. I don’t know your motivation, but if you want to defend the owners and you cannot do so without telling things that are factually incorrect, then you are pointing out that the owners cannot be defended.

Again, what evidence do you have of this?

I can’t imagine very many true baseball fans saying “who cares if they only play a short season”. Not only is baseball supposed to be a grind, but wanting to watch baseball is kinda the point. I like that first time in March I find a spring training game on MLB network and my wife just says “oh no”.

I think you are underestimating the players. They stuck together in 1994-1995 strike when they lost plenty of pay checks. As far as the owners making a reasonable attempt at a compromise, they can do that any time they want. No one is stopping them.

This is exactly what was happening. The MLBPA has made concessions. The owners have made none. Anyone thinking the owners are negotiating in good faith is smoking some good shit.

To answer your last sentence...the 1200+ players represented by the union will start to weaken very fast once the checks start being missed IMO. As many pro-union forum members have pointed out....not all players are filthy rich. Keeping those 30 owners unified will be a much easier job. I want the season to start on time as much as anyone but I am not at all optimistic at this point. Like you, I hope the MLB makes what they think is a fair offer and the players agree to take it. If the owners make a reasonable attempt at compromise and the players overplay their hand we could lose the season.

Poeltl doesn't seem like the kind of guy that will work next to Vucevic. He'd solve a lot of rebounding problems, but he'd create a ton of spacing problems at the same time on offense.

I'm annoyed just seeing his face.

I loved watching him call a game the Sox were not involved in. I'm hoping for a Jomboy retrospective on West's career.

The owners' first offer was fine for a first offer. It should have been made in November rather than January, but it was an appropriate opening offer for them. Aside from that, literally everything they've done has been an effort to use the season as a hostage, including all of the other employees.

I'm just trying to understand both sides. I don't have any disagreement in how the union has handled the negotiations, I have disagreements with the owners and how they are negotiating just not as severe as yours. I think what gets lost is within the CBA the union has not been asked to give up anything. Yes, MLB profits have increased faster than expenses, but that isn't something covered in the CBA (but I would hope so in future negotiations). So isn't it a lot easier to negotiate when the only uncertainty is how much you will gain? And isn't it more difficult when the only question is how much you will give up? We'll offer you $10,000,000 (I'm not saying that was excessively generous) Get lost- We want $110,000,000 (and I'm NOT saying that the owners can't or shouldn't pay the $110,000,000) I can see how that leads to an impasse with both sides feeling they are being more than fair. My example of the 70% is I'm not certain if splitting the difference is fair or perhaps one side picked a more reasonable number. In this example that could be $90,000,000 or maybe $25,000,000. We could take it issue by issue but I honestly am more interested in a settlement. The other reason I can't feel too bad for the union is they are way down the list of where I would like to see those team profits go. MiLB players and staff, communities who footed the bill for stadiums, hourly worker salaries, taxes are all higher on my list than making certain a player earning $6,000,000 will now earn $8,000,000. Do I think some teams place profits over being competitive - yes. Do I think that is bad for baseball? - Yes. Do I want to see players receive more of the profits? Yes.

Agreed. It also seemed like the union's starting position was put out there knowing it wasn't close to being something MLB would accept. I'm not suggesting the union was wrong in my their strategy. Just the opposite, it made perfect sense. I think we saw both extremes.

The US head coach as he gets the easy win but that is about it. I cannot believe that the fans enjoyed it. Two Honduran players were treated for hypothermia. Just a really bad idea.

You’ve been called out multiple times in this very thread for making many false and misleading assertions in defense of ownership w/o a single shred of evidence to back it up. You don’t have to agree with my views, but you don’t get to spout repeated falsehoods unchecked.

Each team in MLB has at least 100 million in cash flow before they sell a single ticket or jersey.

So far neither side has made an offer that they thought had a snowballs chance of being accepted. But since this is a lockout and not a strike, I blame the owners more. You started it, it's up to you to end it.

Oh I completely agree with everything in your response. Valuations and revenue are both way up, which is why framing matters here. It will cost more than $10m from each owner to end this, and it should. But ownership can more that afford to find a more even split and still rake in cash, but they are pretending like they’ve made fair offers when it’s blatantly obvious to most that they haven’t.

If there wasn’t so much controversy surrounding Flores, he might have a good chance of getting hired by the Saints. I would hope the past charges against Bienemy would be viewed on an individual basis, that he would address them in interviews and Reid would vouch for him, but who knows. Leftwich or Bowles should have HC jobs although Bowles may get Arians’ job if he were to retire.

Of course they can spend an extra ten million. But specific to looking at average valuation. Using personal finances as an analogy, just because your home value increases doesn't mean you can spend more money. The reason MLB owners can and should spend more money is revenue and profits are increasing. I still contend that's also a reason that teams should pay taxes, improve the communities they serve, and increase wages for all employees, not just the ones earning the largest checks and have the most bargaining power. It's also going to cost more than $10 million to end this.

Some perspective on the NFL, they just had two of the greatest playoff weekends they've ever had. The need for QB really has dragged me down since the bears are never with one, but I don't remember a time where I was so excited to just keep watching the playoffs. The NBA has an incredibly diverse set of superstars after years of just the super wings, now you have Jokic, Ball, Trea, Steph, Luka, along with the stalwarts still performing. And a now dominant east and a league where nearly all the teams are competing. I maintain that the issue with the 2010s was all sports at once realizing some longheld strategies were now outdated, maybe due to technology or analytics or new voices or what. Now all the leagues FOs are aligned and want to be competitive. It's going to be an awesome sports decade. Yeah Hockey might be bad not sure.

This sucks.

The idea that the players are asking for something crazy just isn't true. The owners have already been taking a larger share of revenues and now want to grow the pie even larger are still not make the players get to where they were. They are down 5 full percentage points (or around 10%) of where they were in 2008 from 52 to 47% of revenues. In 2003 it was 63%. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2020/05/12/mlb-players-revenue-sharing-fight-coronavirus-pandemic/3110292001/

This man has 9 lives.