Remember These Days During the Next Lockout

For the first time in a long time, it seems all is right with baseball. Every day seems to bring a flurry of transactions with some of the game’s best players, leading to spirited discussions among fans debating if their favorite team made the right moves or not, and how all teams’ chances have been affected heading into the 2022 season.

Of course, most importantly, we’ll have actual real games to watch in three weeks.

So I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer today, but I would like to remind you of something, as experience has taught me baseball fans have VERY short memories: MLB owners are lying, disingenuous, exploitative frauds, and I’m going to need you to remember that the next time there’s some crisis in baseball, whether it be a work stoppage, pandemic, or pretty much anything for that matter. MLB owners started lying a few years after the Civil War and basically haven’t stopped since. When someone shows you who they are the first time, believe them.

More specifically, any time MLB owners tell you that there are big market and small-market teams (there’s no such thing, I wrote about it HERE) and that revenue sharing is necessary (as they do during every CBA negotiation) in order for the “have nots” to compete, they’re full of sticky stuff. It’s just drivel meant to divert our attention away from the real issues: It’s usually an owners versus owners issue, rarely an owners versus players issue. Secondly, it’s never about fairness or parity, it’s about maintaining a system that virtually allows teams to print money regardless of whether or not they’re good at their jobs. Heck, in this system they don’t even have to try to be good at their jobs in order to be profitable.

26 years ago, Bud Selig and a few of his friends – in the face of contradictory evidence, mind you – convinced the media and fans that the “little guys” of MLB couldn’t compete with the teams in the big cities and revenue sharing among MLB owners began. Now, we don’t have the time today to fully explore the topic starting from the advent of free agency in 1976 through 2022, but we do know this:

The theory that revenue sharing will help teams with lesser resources compete with their even wealthier friends is nonsense. The Reds and As are proving it as we speak by recently parting ways with some and most of their best players respectively, for no other reason than to save even more money to increase profits even further. Because make no mistake, the revenue for those teams is still coming in from various sources – one of which is in the form of handouts from other teams. (Ironic considering that John Fisher and Bob Castellini aren’t particularly big fans of socialism outside of baseball ownership.)

This is horrible for baseball as it decreases competition, and it’s worse than horrible for the fans of those teams (as well as the fans of the franchises in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Miami, etc., etc.)

Again, I’m not here today to fully explore this or to propose a solution. This is just a reminder that revenue sharing was instituted by MLB owners 26 years ago to help the small market teams compete. 26 years later, the plan obviously hasn’t worked by their own admission as we see “small market” teams just throwing in the towel before Spring Training has even begun, claiming they don’t have the resources to compete – while still receiving and pocketing the financial aid they receive from other teams.

So when the next CBA negotiations begin in a few years, and you’re listening to the owners and their paid actors posing as journalists tell you that there’s a competition problem in baseball and that the solution is revenue sharing to help the poor small market clubs, just remember They. Are. Lying.

If revenue sharing were the solution to this imaginary problem we wouldn’t be watching the As and Reds doing what they’re doing today.

Did I miss something? Let me know.