It’s a game of who’s bluffing whom as Players Dare the League to Cancel the Season.
The Dispute
- The owners want to pay the players 37% of their salary for 44% of the games.
- The players demand prorated salaries based on the number of games played no matter what the attendance is.
The bitter negotiations have already cost baseball the chance to restart by the Fourth of July and play 80 games or more—about half of a normal season. If the two sides reached a deal now, about two dozen additional games could be added to the schedule for a total of about 75. Staging them would cost the owners, whose industry generated about $11 billion in revenue last year, about $20 million per team in player compensation.
Ticket Prices
Are CUBs Ticket Prices lunacy or Genius?
- In 2019, only two of the last 13 home games had more than 40,000 in attendance and three of those games were under 35,000 in paid attendance? The reason is simple — the tickets are too expensive!
- For a 19-game stretch from mid-June to early August, the cheapest STH ticket price (Upper Reserved Outfield) is $39. Speaking from a Southern California perspective, the Dodgers, Angels and Padres have traditionally had tickets from $10-15 for almost every game during the same period. Many families can not afford those prices, and as a result, the Cubs are not developing that next generation of Cubs’ fans.
That article was written on November 18, 2019, long before Covid-19 was an issue.
Baseball Attendance and Payroll
Table from Baseball Reference, highlights mine.
Lg Payroll: Sum of player salaries in our database.
This will not be a 100% accurate accounting of league finances
Payroll/Tm: Approximate Payroll Per team. Sum of player salaries in our database divided by teams. This will not be a 100% accurate accounting of league finances
Attendance Notes
Attendance peaked in 2007. Attendance is less than in 1999.
In 1999, payroll per team was $50,119,641. In 2019 payroll per team was a whopping $133,327,569.
Is the baseball any better? Is it more entertaining?
Play Ball?
I have no sympathy for either side if the entire baseball season is cancelled.
Mish
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What is the point of only playing a partial season. I say if they can not open up cancel the season. Baseball starts in spring not part way into summer.
All professional sports is a waste, enormous waste of money. If people want to get together locally and play games for fun and other go as spectators that is a legitimate social good, but pro sports of any kind is not good for a society.
the ’96 strike ruined baseball for my son (and his friends) who was just “getting into it”…. they switched to hockey stayed. i believe that MLB is losing another generation.
I will care. You are right, as a Cubs fan, I can only afford to go to a game a year. To take my family to the last two games cost me well over $500 to enjoy beautiful Wrigley Field. I love my Cubbies and wish I could love them some more with more frequent visits.
I’ve played sports, as well as my x spo, & children, way back in the 80/90’s. You either like them or you don’t. We love them. If we get rid of sports, like plenty of schools, & countries,have been trying, then; how are we to stay physically fit? It keeps reminding us, to get up off the couch & go have fun!
Not saying sports in schools are bad or anything, but I don’t know about holding Americans up, as examples of a school system producing physical fitness…….. 🙂
Proving the whole broken clock thingy, the Soviet Union may well have had some of the most sophisticated, and successful, physical education regime in schools anywhere. Mainly by focusing specifically on activities designed to prevent common ailments among adults, like back problems, lack of flexibility and fragility when exposed to sudden impacts. Like proper lifting techniques, jumping, landing from jumping off benches etc.
Andrew McCutchen parodies MLB owners/players negotiations….
I agree I will never attend a game I did all I could to keep my kids out of baseball!
I would say you are seeing some inflation in baseball salaries. Inflation is everywhere except where the Fed calculates!
This is getting pretty good and more fun than baseball to watch. Trillions not billions of dollars are being thrown at financial problems that will be 10’s of trillions this time. I can’t wait to see the next melt down it will be many 10’s of trillions.
hmmmmm.. sing along. C’om Mish!
take me out to Wall Street,
take me out to pay
Buy me some ENRO and AIG
I don’t care if I never get paid back
Let me rout, rout rout for my pension plan
If they gone on it will be in a sham
For its one, two, three trillion you’re out
at the old Wall street game!
I lost interest when the White Sox threw the World Series.
The only sport more boring than baseball is golf. Good riddance.
Have you ever watched a Cricket test match?
A single “at-bat” can last for over an hour.
Elliott Wave has written about the correlation between baseball and the economy. Baseball is a bull market sport. The fact baseball attendance has been in a steady decline (bear market) since the housing bubble burst tells me the past 11 years of economic recovery there are large negative shifts in social mood occurring. The rise of Ultimate Fight Club confirms the negative mood shift in sports.
Amazing. I look at the chart of league and team payroll and people still say INFLATION has been low for the last 20 years.
Hilarious.
I lost most interest after the 1996 strike cancelled the World Series.
First of all, Major League Baseball may be cancelled. Baseball itself will go on.
MLB is an abomination, frankly. It can go to hell, wouldn’t miss it a bit.
Youth baseball is where it’s at. Get involved in your community. Tell the millionaires and billionaires to pound sand.
Good point. MLB doesn’t own baseball just like NASCAR doesn’t own stock car racing.
Right, so anyone who wants to fly a Confederate battle flag at a drag race can do it at their hometown track.
The only impact baseball ever had in my life was pre-empting programs I liked to watch as a child.
The great American sport of baseball. With players like Rodriguez, Gonzales, Martinez and Sanchez.
You left out a few great “All-American” names there, I’m sure it was just an oversight.
Italian: Berra, DiMaggio, Campanella, La Russa, Lasorda, Lazzeri, Lombardi, Piazza, Rizzuto
French: Boudreau, Durocher, LaJoie, Marquard
German: Doerr, Faber, Frisch, Gehrig, Gehringer, Heilmann, Hoffman, Klein, Medwick, Newhouser, Schalk, Schmidt, Schoendienst, Snider, Spahn, Stengel, Wagner, Waner, Wilhelm
Polish: Comiskey, Covaleski, Mazeroski, Yastrzemski
Jewish: Greenberg, Koufax, Holtzman, Green, Braun, Rosen, Ausmus
Irish: Too many to list
You list their heritage but where were they born? 25% of players in MLB are foreign nationals. The median salary is over a million dollars. It’s a North American league – shouldn’t a high paying job like this be given to someone in North America?
No.
This type of answer means you’ve convinced yourself of your argument but you can’t say it in a way to convince others. Best to figure it out in the woodshed before replying.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, there are many native-born American MLB players named Rodriguez, Gonzales, Martinez and Sanchez. OP either forgot to clarify or really doesn’t consider them American, probably in the same way that Irish players in the early 1900s weren’t considered American.
I’m making the same point – most of the names listed were American born. Why do domestic sports leagues recruit from other countries, outside its market? Isn’t this taking away a career from someone born and raised within the league? It’s an “Entertainment Event” after all.
Ok whatever. Job protectionism. H1B visas are more of a problem but let’s worry about millionaire entertainers.
BTW, baseball is wicked popular in Latin American and Japan. Having Latino and Japanese (and Korean) players in MLB is not only egalitarian, it’s damn good marketing.
My original point stands. OP wrote a very “open to interpretation” post.
High profile professions acceping foreign born applicants, resulted in America recruiting Einstein.
While the one profession which explicitly bans foreign entry, netted us Trump and Obama….
Tell me about it! Where’s Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse??
Well, Tommy John surgery ended Crazy Horse’s career early.
Lol. Too easy.
I would not care one but, you need to ask the mainstream the question. They will care.
They may riot…
I care! I love baseball — minors, college ball, pros, American Legion. Sad to see what’s going on right now, but I do care!
Well I do care, long time baseball fan, and feel the playoffs have been great drama in recent years (particularly as a Sawx fan). HOWEVER, if these two groups of greedy millionaires and billionaires need to fight so hard over how to take so much of our money, then screw them. I love fantasy baseball, played for 20+ years. I can let all that stuff drop in a hot second because of their reasons for petty squabbling. Some things are way more important than holding on to a game I love.
Greedy bastards, one and all. They may have gone to far this time. Cancel the season already.
Hard to believe that many of these teams are profitable. How can they be?
Good question.
Profit sharing and TV contracts.
If teams aren’t profitable, why not sell them? The fact that teams seldom come up for sale, coupled with the huge increase in franchise values, indicates that the owners are crying wolf.
Tax free deals with local counties. Counties sponsoring bonds for stadium builds. Anti-trust exemption… The list goes on. If you have the money to own a team you have the money to bribe the local sycophants.
but but but where will people go to get $8 hot dogs and $10 foamy crappy beer??
DoorDash.
Very few people will care.
I was a huge fan for a long time. However, I gave up on the game long ago when they decided to start interviewing people who weren’t fans and trying to make changes to the game based on what those people saw as “wrong” with it.
Plus, I think a lot of sports fans aren’t necessarily fans per se – they are gamblers who used the sports to drive their cravings. However, most of them have discovered the never-ending punch bowl that is today’s stock market and because of that, they may never go back to betting on sports.