Baseball’s lockout, plus a completely one-sided diatribe against Owners and tanking…
There will be jokes so stick around for that...
Today is Monday, February 21st and the Olympics are over and the NFL is done and the NBA just finished their All-Star Game and won’t play again until Thursday and I don’t care about college basketball, so this would normally be the time I’d tune into some spring training games, but I can’t do that because the Owners have locked out the Players and spring training isn’t happening.
If you’re a baseball fan you’re probably already aware of the lockout (the Owners won’t allow the Players to use team facilities) and if you’re not a baseball fan you should keep reading anyway because then we’ll have something to talk about if we ever run into each other on the street, although chances of that aren’t good because after my bout of COVID I spend more time inside than Howard Hughes and while I haven’t started collecting my urine in jars just yet, it’s only a matter of time and the only thing holding me back is a shortage of jars.
Also…
I’m going to make fun of rich people so unless you’re one of them, you might want to stick around for that.
So let’s get started.
Team Owners
If you read Lords of the Realm (and I’m referring to the baseball book, not the video game) you already know a lot of Team Owners have made the mistake of thinking that if they’re smart enough to run a (fill-in-the-blank with a word like “shipping”) company, they are certainly smart enough to run a baseball team, which is pretty much like a heart surgeon figuring he must be smart enough to do brain surgery because they both involve scalpels.
In no particular order, these very smart Team Owners opposed:
1. Putting baseball games on radio.
2. Putting baseball games on TV.
3. Installing stadium lights.
4. And team merchandising.
Lords of the Realm also tells the story of one team owner getting frustrated at the slow pace of negotiations between his GM and a player and the Owner decided he would do the negotiating himself and signed the player after just one meeting and then told his GM that’s how you get things done, after which the GM informed the Owner he had just paid the player quite a bit more than the player had been demanding.
So the first thing to get over is the idea that people who own sports teams are geniuses.
Anytime someone wins a World Series or a Super Bowl or an NBA championship, they drag the Team Owner up on the podium to receive a trophy and pretty much without fail they seem befuddled and confused and make lousy impromptu speeches like, “This is for you, Cleveland!” and thank their great fans, which history has shown they’d happily run over in their stretch limo on the way to the after-party if it meant they’d make a buck-and-a-half more next season.
If Owners care about fans and the traditions of the game so much, why lockout the Players and change the game’s rules and make bases bigger or add pitch clocks or plant land mines in the outfield, which I just made up and hesitate to mention because someone who was reluctant to add lights to stadiums might think it’s a good idea.
“Fans would love it! Plus, maybe we could get rid of some of those free agents I overpaid.”
And the Owners often receive those championship trophies while simultaneously demonstrating they don’t have the first idea of how to wear a ball cap. Ask them to do Regular Guy Stuff and Team Owners generally resemble George H.W. Bush finding out how much a gallon of milk costs.
(If you’re currently thinking, “Gee, Lee seems prejudiced against the Owners” you are 100 percent right because I’ve known a lot of Poor Ballplayers and not one Rich Owner and if the Rich Owners want me to write more favorably about them, clearly one of them needs to invite me to hang out on their yacht and in return I’ll show them how to wear a ball cap without looking like a feeble-minded, retirement-home resident, out on a day pass.)
The lockout issues
So the original plan was to go through all the issues, but I’ve read half-a-dozen articles on them and it seems the media can’t get together on a comprehensive list of what the issues actually are, so if you want to read about them, here are three links:
https://www.sbnation.com/mlb/2021/12/2/22814019/mlb-lockout-explained-in-5-minutes
https://www.kansascity.com/sports/mlb/kansas-city-royals/article258235558.html#storylink=cpy
https://www.si.com/mlb/2021/12/01/mlb-lockout-guide-daily-cover
Short version: mostly, the issues have to do with money and who gets it and when they get it and if you actually read those articles you’ll see a lot of the arguing concerns what the younger players earn which is a point I made at length in a piece called A few inconvenient facts about those “Millionaire” Ballplayers and if you haven’t read it, but want to, here’s that link:
But there is one issue that affects us fans and the games we watch and that’s…
Tanking
Just in case you don’t know; tanking is intentionally losing so you get better draft picks and according to agent Scott Boras (and you might want to take anything Scott says with a grain of salt the size of David Ortiz) at any one time about half the teams in baseball are tanking which they usually won’t admit because they want you to continue to buy tickets for a team that isn’t actually trying to win.
Players don’t like tanking because they don’t like losing and teams that are tanking don’t have to spend so much on salaries. According to Forbes (which estimates what teams make because the teams won’t tell you) the 2013 Houston Astros who finished in last place in the AL West with a record of 51-111 were the most profitable team in baseball history.
That comes from a 2017 Sports Illustrated story so maybe some team has been more profitable since then because it turns out you can make a lot of money with a baseball team as long as you don’t spend too much on the players.
But if you actually want to eventually win, does tanking work?
Last Friday the KC Star ran a story that seemed to answer that question with the following headline:
“Tanking for higher picks isn’t pretty, but it works”
My first thought after reading that headline was: “Not for Michal Dukakis.”
Most people – and that definitely includes ballplayers – do not realize that the reporters who write articles do not write the headlines that appear above those articles and if you read the story the writer actually said tanking “can” work, which is a lot different than what the headline implied and if you follow sports you know tanking is not a sure thing.
The article’s author pointed out that three of the last six World Series champions had tanked to get there which, if you think about it, also means three teams didn’t.
Proponents of tanking tend to focus on the times it works, while ignoring the times it doesn’t. Google “teams that tanked and still failed” and you’ll have plenty of articles to choose from.
I looked up my hometown Sacramento Kings (and tanking in the NBA should have a better chance of working because a single player has more influence on a basketball team than a baseball team) and the website I looked at only went back to the 2014-2015 season and I pretty much lost interest after that, but the Kings have had losing records and been near the bottom of their division for seven years straight and all that losing has resulted in yet another losing record this year.
So, yeah, tanking can work, but not always.
Getting good draft picks is no guarantee of getting good players and to make that point I randomly selected an MLB draft and went with 2011 because those players have had 10 years to show what they can do and some of them did great.
Guys like: Gerrit Cole, Trevor Bauer, Anthony Rendon, Francisco Lindor, George Springer and Sonny Gray.
But the 2011 first-round picks also included players like:
Danny Hultzen, Corey Spangenberg, Taylor Jungmann, Jed Bradley, Chris Reed, Alex Meyer, Taylor Guerrieri, Sean Gilmartin, Levi Michael, Jake Hager, Kevin Matthews and Kansas City’s own Bubba Starling.
Worth remembering: first-round picks get every chance to succeed because someone in the front office bet their reputation on the player’s success and if the player fails, so did the guys who picked him.
Nevertheless, tanking remains popular because it’s cheap and if you’ve ever watched those nature shows where crocodiles eat gazelles and lions eat zebras, you might have noticed the safest place to be is in the middle of the herd and you don’t want to get out in front or lag behind so even though the analytics guys’ original claim to fame was their willingness to think outside the box, they built a brand-new box and climbed inside and nailed the lid shut, so if tanking is an accepted way to build a team, stay with the tanking pack and avoid having a lion take a big chunk out of your ass when you decided to zig when everybody else is zagging.
(Although the above picture makes me wonder if the lion is actually more horny than hungry.)
Why a lot of the Old-School ballplayers hate tanking
Teams talk about a winning culture and philosophy which can seem like hot air unless you’ve actually played sports and recently I heard NBA commentator and former head coach Jeff Van Gundy compliment the Miami Heat because they didn’t tolerate “low-energy players.”
An interesting comment which tells you some NBA teams do tolerate low energy players.
Back when the New York Yankees were winning the World Series on a regular basis and players were paid so crappy that Yogi Berra worked in the off-season as a head waiter in a restaurant and sold hardware at Sears, the Yankee players counted on the World Series money and if you were a rookie and missed the cutoff man, someone like Mickey Mantle might tell you that you were “getting into his wallet” with your shitty play and you better tighten things up if you wanted to play for the Yankees.
Which is one of the reasons teams like to have veteran players around, especially if the veteran player scares the living shit out of the young ones which reminds me that after my friend Jason Kendall retired he stayed around the Royals as a sometimes coach and when I asked him what his title was, Jason thought about it and said:
“Team Bully.”
Which I think you have to admit would look awesome on a business card.
Good teams want to establish a philosophy that emphasizes doing the small things correctly and having played on some very horseshit amateur baseball teams, I can tell you hitting the cutoff man on the glove side (so he can turn and make the next throw in one motion) doesn’t seem all that important when you’re already losing by 10 runs.
So the coaches who have to convince new players that they need to do all that little stuff right if they want to win, also say you can’t lose year-after-year-after-year and then suddenly flip a switch and install a winning mentality.
You’ve got to build a culture that insists on correct fundamentals and generally speaking that doesn’t happen on teams that are tanking.
In conclusion…
OK, this went way longer than I intended even after I cut out big chunks of it, but at least I killed part of your day while you worked you way through this because I’ve already checked the TV listings and the most interesting thing I can see on the schedule is the SEC Swimming and Diving Championships and if Scott Boras is right don’t be surprised if half the teams in baseball compete in the diving.
Have a nice day even though there’s no spring training baseball on TV.