I saw you, with a ticket stub in your hand
Suggested soundtrack: “Twist,” 11-1-13, Atlantic City, NJ
Well, hello there, strangers. Sorry for the silence; I intended this to be a more regular newsletter than it’s been since COVID-19 hit. That coincided with a new job (which has been great but has taken a lot of focus and energy) so I’ve certainly been lax in that department.
A lot has happened in recent weeks, which feels like an enormous understatement given the mood and condition of the country. But it’s also true of this little corner of my life.
Phish officially postponed their 2020 summer tour and essentially pushed everything back one year: same locations, same venues, pretty much same dates, just in 2021. The only missing dates are Atlanta and they seem to be working on getting that sorted.
As it is, the band did the best they could: if you want a refund, you’ll get a refund and if you want to still use the tickets for the show you bought, they’ll honor them. Given the current situation, it’s the best we could hope for. And I was able to pick up a 3-day lawn pass to the Deer Creek shows so see you in August 2021!
Also, their album Farmhouse turned 20 and I, for one, still love that album. It gets a lot of eyerolls thanks to the ballad-esque title track but there are some great jams on there. “Twist,” “Heavy Things,” “Bug,” etc. It’s a fun album that reminds me of summer since it came just as I was wrapping up my junior year of college.
And in case you’ve been wondering if the band will play a show live from The Barn as many fans have speculated and (closer to reality) tried to wish into the existence, the answer is no and my pal Brian Ries explains why.
Oh, and keep your eyes peeled here in the next week or so for my interview with composer Don Hart, whose terrific career includes work with Trey Anastasio and the string arrangements on the new Phish album, Sigma Oasis.
But a lot of my focus has been on the (alleged) return of baseball and what it all means and how it’s a big, damn mess.
It seemed for a few weeks there that every day there was something new with regards to the possibility of a new baseball season, whether it was a “bubble” league or the three divisions ideas or, as it stands now, three 10-team divisions that match up each respective NL and AL division by geography (which is only a slight tweak from the floated idea I mentioned last time).
The owners made their pitch (sorry) to the players for the 82-game season starting around the Fourth of July. The players, though, are hesitant, and with good reason. There are numerous concerns, ranging from guaranteeing their health to what they should do about their families. No less a superstar than Mike Trout, whose wife is currently pregnant with the couple’s first child, has a lot of reservations. And these are all absolutely legit.
Then there’s the money.
Because of course.
MLB owners proposed a 50-50 split with players for whatever revenue is made this year because otherwise the owners are screwed. The idea to return to play only happens without fans in the stand and that is a HUGE drain on revenue for the owners (ticket and concession sales, portions of merch sales, etc). In fact, MLB has claimed that each game without fans will cost teams $640,000 each and that of the revenue earned during the 2020 season as under the current agreement, 89% of it would go to the players.
But then the owners rubbed salt in the wound by offering up a prorated salary proposal that had the league’s top players, like Trout, slated to make roughly 20% of their original salary and less than half of the previously agreed-upon prorated salary.
Leave it to owners worth hundreds of millions - if not billions - of dollars to cry poor in a league that has been home to the iciest and fiercest labor disputes in U.S. professional sports.
(I was wrapping up reading the classic Lords of The Realm about the history of labor in Major League Baseball just as this pandemic was coming down. It’s magnificent. The only critique I have is that even the updated version ends in the middle of the 1994-5 strike that canceled a World Series and set baseball on the road to its current third-place standing in pro sports relevance in the U.S. )
There’s been a lot of “it’s just a first offer!” defense of the owner’s position but, good god, that’s such an insulting first offer that I wouldn’t blame the players for tossing the proposal in a shredder. As it is, the players first counter looks to be keeping the previously agreed-upon prorated salaries but playing as many as 100 games, not 82, which is perfectly reasonable!
This current fight, unfortunately, has been pitched as a “Billionaires vs Millionaires” battle by a lot of writers and members of the general public. To me, though, the framing is absolutely one of management vs labor.
Dayn Perry over at CBS Sports has a great breakdown of why the players are right to not want to meet the owners halfway here. Most notable? That the players are taking the risk.
We should also remember that this whole fight is taking place in the shadow of the looming CBA negotiations for 2021 with items like the way owners have manipulated service time rules of young stars (see: Kris Bryant, etc) and some strange recent free agent freeze outs (the owners were found guilty of collusion before, after all).
As so often happens, the owners are positioning themselves as the victims, trying to sell fans on the idea that, “Hey, it’s the PLAYERS who are the evil ones, rich, spoiled men who are looking to profit off of this pandemic and, hey, look, we WANT there to be baseball but these players are just too GREEDY and FOCUSED ON MONEY to agree to a deal to get baseball played in 2020! You, dear fans, have lost your jobs, your loved ones during this pandemic and you just want baseball as a saving grace but, no, these players just won’t MONEY.”
The stench of bullshit wouldn’t be so strong if:
Teams weren’t worth, literally, billions. What’s the smallest market team you can think of? The Kansas City Royals? Worth $1.025 billion. The Cleveland Indians? $1.15 billion.
My own beloved Chicago Cubs weren’t owned by a family whose evil patriarch literally shut down multiple publications rather than accept a unionized workforce. (Full disclosure: I’m a former employee of Gothamist thought I left the company in 2010, before Ricketts bought the company.)
The owners hadn’t previously been such shitheels about other financial treatments of players (see the above examples I gave, among others, like Charlie Finley’s entire career).
The owner’s proposal, in essence, creates a salary cap, the sticking point that led to the damaging strike 25 years ago.
Spoiler alert: I’m pro-union. And we have to look at this from a union and labor perspective. If the owner of your company reached an agreement with your workforce to cut pay to keep things going, you’d begrudgingly agree, probably, right? Now imagine that SAME owner, who is a billionaire making money off the back of your labor and you putting yourself at risk for his profit, comes back and says that he’s changed his mind and wants you to agree to make only 20% of your original salary. You’d laugh in his face and follow that up with a HELL NO. It says something about the state of the union and America that some people look at this situation and blame the players. SMH.
Oh, and this seems like a prescient time to point out that hundreds of minor leaguers are getting absolutely screwed by being cut and denied pay for their season which is very unlikely to happen at this point. It’s bad enough that MLB stars like David Price are donating money to these now-out-of-work players and, really, that’s going to be a huge long-term impact on MLB: how many minor leaguers come back, what teams survive, etc. It looks like MLB’s going to get their way on cutting those teams down.
But as for MLB players, we also have to remember THEY are the ones putting themselves at risk, not the owners. The owners can stay remote while the players (and coaches and staff and ballpark staff and hotel workers etc) are going to be the ones being repeatedly subjected to tests and exposed risks.
Washington Nationals closer, Sean Doolittle, Patron Saint of the Conference On The Mound newsletter, had an outstanding thread on the whole issue of playing the Pandemic Season from a player’s perspective that was filled with level-headed analysis, nuance, empathy, and logic (everything missing from a lot of coronavirus-related debate, including, probably, my own screeds).
It starts here…
…gives a great background about what we do — and DON’T — know about the coronavirus that creates a very important and solid basis in context for points like this…
I picked out a couple of tweets from his entire thread which is really worth reading in its entirety.
And the next day he came back with another thread in response to reaction from that first thread and it was, again, calm and rational (who knew you could do that on Twitter?).
The latest news is, well, there actually hasn’t been any news for the last few days while the players and owners play this game of back-and-forth. Meanwhile, soccer is back, the NHL has a plan, and the NBA is looking to announce its return any day now.
Baseball, meanwhile, is descending into labor strife because, well, that’s what baseball’s best at, I guess.
Again, there are bigger things going on in the world right now (donate here and here, if you can). So I don’t want things to sound out of whack. But the window for baseball to return is closing, logistically and emotionally. The owners, though, seem far more concerned with their bottom line than anything else.
If you disagree, there’s a comment feature here and feel free to let me know what you think.
Until next time, stay safe, stay home, and wash your hands.