Baseball’s Labor History Is Repeating Itself Once Again

Sarah Borus, writing for Defector, takes us on a journey of collective bargaining agreements of the past, while settling quickly on this upcoming one.

The question of “which side are you on?” is complicated somewhat by the fact that this is a dispute between the obscenely rich and the extremely rich; we aren’t dealing with the miner’s son against JH Blair here. But the question of where else this money would go is not complicated. It’s not going to the miner’s son, of course.

It’s going into the pockets of people like David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $475 billion in assets, responsible for buying up property and raising rents in New York City, participating in union busting and exploitative labor practices, and investing in the defense industry; he owns the Orioles. And also to Ray Davis, whose company, Energy Transfer, owns the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the subject of protests in 2016 due to its encroachment on Sioux land and disastrous environmental effects; Davis owns the Rangers. That money would go to Giants' owner, Charles B. Johnson, a billionaire who regularly donates to the political campaigns of right-wing fanatics. You get the point—this money is controlled by 30 cosmetically different versions of JH Blair, all of whom are trying to convince the public that they are on the side of fairness, unlike the greedy players union, which is made up mostly of players who will virtually all never have contracts even close to what Juan Soto is getting, and none of whom to my knowledge own even one oil pipeline. This makes deciding which side you are on a bit easier to answer.

Owners succeed when the public thinks of baseball’s labor struggle as separate from the political struggles happening all around them. It isn’t, and while the history of unionization in professional baseball has ebbed and flowed alongside the progressive political moments in United States history, the movement has been most successful when the players have realized that connection. What kind of moment does it feel like we’re in right now?

I fully expect the strike will kill the next MLB season. There needs to be a salary cap. There will never be a salary cap.

The only way a cap/floor could ever be implemented in a manner that is fair to players is two-fold. First, there needs to be a substantially overhauled revenue-sharing agreement among owners to ensure that teams like the Rays and Marlins can compete payroll-wise with the Dodgers and Yankees of the world. Second, the cap/floor needs to be set based on total MLB team revenue, which means teams would have to open up their books.

In other words, it’s never, ever going to happen.