Players and owners each have a new weapon in their arsenal for this lockout

My mind today has been on former Boston Globe sportswriter Bob Ryan. The Globe used to have perhaps the finest sports section in the nation. The day that Ryan started working there as an intern, another guy you might have heard of, too, also started there – Peter Gammons. Anyway, Ryan’s forte was basketball and you’ll have no trouble finding people who claim him as among the best basketball writers ever.

Among basketball moments, the thing that stands out to me was Ryan, on live TV during the 1985 NBA Draft, declaring Alfredrick Hughes, the guy taken 14th overall after a good run in the NCAA Tournament, a “CBA lifer.” Hughes played one year in the NBA and was a non-factor on a team that went 35-47. When it came to basketball, Ryan knew his stuff.

However, Ryan also wrote about baseball. The one baseball column of his that stands out the most was during the 1994-95 strike, where he showed his true colors by mocking union leader Don Fehr and saying that there was no reason for the players not to accept the owner’s latest proposal because it was the best offer they were going to get. He opened and closed his piece with Fehr/fear riffs. It was a pathetic column all the way around.

I fired off a letter to the editor in response and pointed out all of the problems with Ryan’s column. Then, for fun, the letter closed with an order for the columnist, where he was instructed to stop his cRyan. To the best of my knowledge, my letter to the editor was never published.

All of this serves as backdrop for the current MLB lockout.

In the past, national coverage of MLB work stoppages was limited to columnists of newspapers, most of whom were not necessarily even-handed about the subject, much less favorable to the players’ side. We saw a turning of the tide when the players and owners were trying to figure out how to play the 2020 season. There were a bunch of writers who didn’t take the owners’ side of things. And in discussions now about the lockout, there might even be more writers sympathetic to the players than to the owners.

That alone would be significant.

But there’s another issue at play here – social media. Now, players have a forum to speak directly to the fans, in a way that players could only dream of in 1972 or 1981 or 1994-95. At least two Mets players have already used that outlet to express their opinions on how things have unfolded in discussions with the owners on labor matters.

Max Scherzer is a big wig in the MLBPA. He had this to say on what the players want:

We want a system where threshold and penalties don’t function as caps, allows younger players to realize more of their market value, makes service time manipulation a thing of the past, and eliminate tanking as a winning strategy.

— Max Scherzer (@Max_Scherzer) February 4, 2022

Trevor May is not the star that Scherzer is. To the best of my knowledge, he’s not a player representative, either. He’s just a guy directly affected by the lockout. Unlike Scherzer, May did a live stream to share his thoughts.

Trevor May (@IamTrevorMay) speaks his mind on Rob Manfred and the CBA negotiation.

We’re with ya, Trev. #LGM pic.twitter.com/CkizGM4GUW

— GENY Mets Report (@genymets) February 5, 2022

If you don’t care to listen to May, here’s part of what he said:

“I don’t know (MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred.) I don’t know him as a person. I just know that he does it over and over and over and over… It’s all just manipulation, and it’s all a chess board move. It’s just this big chess game, and this chess game needs to go to the very, very end to get the maximize benefits for the owners. So this is not gonna be in good faith negotiation. Not a single negotiation with the guy has been in good faith. He doesn’t do good faith things. Good faith things ‘I want you to come out in this situation where you’re happy, but I also want to be happy.’ This is more of, he goes, ‘As long as I’m happy, I don’t care if you’re happy.’ That’s the way that it’s being approached. ‘Good faith’ needs to stop being said. It’s bad faith. Good faith doesn’t exist, so stop acting like it was even a possibility. It’s not the way he operates.”

It will be curious to see if the owners do anything similar – taking their case to the general public outside of traditional mainstream media outlets. We all know Steve Cohen is a Twitter guy. It wouldn’t be a surprise if he weighed in at some point. Right now, it seems the owners are standing in unison behind Manfred. But the history of all of the MLB labor disputes that caused games to be lost shows the players sticking together and the owners doing the opposite.

Another thing that’s different in this dispute is that the minor leagues are now 100% under the control of MLB. We saw that in 2020 that while waiting for the MLB season to start in the Covid year, that people watched games played overseas, where they essentially didn’t know any of the players. Will the owners televise minor league games this time around and try to make some money that way?

Players on the 40-man roster would not be eligible to play in minor league games. For example, fans couldn’t see Ronny Mauricio or Mark Vientos in these games. But you would get to see Francisco Alvarez, Brett Baty, J.T. Ginn and other players at the top of the Mets’ prospect lists. You know fans would watch these games if the lockout was still in place when the minor league season started. That could be a factor in how quickly the lockout gets settled.

Finally, throughout his tenure as MLB Commissioner, Manfred has been a man pursuing a legacy. You’ve seen it with chasing ideas to drastically change how the game is played, whether good ideas – like an automated strike zone, – silly ideas, – like allowing batters to run to first if the ball gets away from the catcher at any count – or stupid ideas, like banning the shift.

Now, Manfred is trying to make his legacy by winning a lockout.

The owners have every right to try and negotiate the best deal they can get. But from a distance, it doesn’t seem like there’s much negotiation coming from management. The latest on this was the announcement that they were going to counter the players’ latest proposal and then instead choosing not to do that at all. Instead, they proposed federal mediation. That’s never been productive before in settling MLB labor issues. Bill Ussery Jr. didn’t help in the slightest in 1994. Some want to credit Ken Moffett in 1981 but the fact that the owners’ strike insurance ran out was the biggest thing that turned the tide back then.

My opinion is that the owners were right in testing the players’ resolve in 2020. No active player was involved in the last labor dispute that cost games and paychecks and it was an open question if these players would stick together like previous ones did. However, the players showed that they would not fold. It makes less sense to me in 2022 to test their resolve.

Here’s hoping this is the last piece from me on the lockout. These aren’t fun to write, even if it’s a necessary topic to cover. It would be 1,000 times more interesting to write Spring Training fluff pieces. Hey, Carlos Carrasco is recovering nicely!

Carlos Carrasco says on IG he threw his first bullpen session from the front slope of the mound today.

Carrasco underwent surgery back in October to remove a bone fragment from his right elbow. pic.twitter.com/oZjLkYhsmY

— John Flanigan (@jflan816) February 5, 2022