These are Rob Manfred’s words, from four years ago: “If there is one thing I could wish for, more than anything else, it would be the ability to give our fans that frictionless experience of being able to watch what they want to watch, where they want to watch.”
This is what it means to be fan-friendly: enjoy your team on a cable, satellite or streaming service wherever you are, with no blackouts, and no need for subscriptions to as many as 10 outlets, most of which you do not want and some of which you may not be able to find.
Manfred, baseball’s commissioner, can solve this. The major league owners can solve this.
Does Shohei Ohtani have to solve this too?
Yes, according to the initial collective bargaining proposal the owners presented to the players’ union last week.
The union also made their initial bargaining proposal last week, the start of a long process that could jeopardize the 2027 season. At this point, the two sides cannot even agree whether baseball has a major predicament on its hands, let alone whether a salary cap should be needed to defuse it.
This is what MLB spokesman Glen Caplin said in a statement last week: “Too many fans in too many markets have too little hope their team has a fair chance to win.”
This is what union executive director Bruce Meyer said on a call with reporters Monday: “We do not accept the premise that there is some existential crisis going on.”
The league says players as a whole would make more money with a cap; the union says players would lose hundreds of millions. The league picks its preferred statistics to show why competitive balance is broken; the union picks its preferred statistics to show why it is not.
This back and forth is going to go on for months. So let’s skip it for now and get back to the television problem. The league and its owners sign broadcast contracts with media outlets, so why do the players need to be involved here?
That is: If the owners’ proposed solution to the purported competitive balance problem is to pool all broadcast revenue and split it equally among teams, why not just do it?
The short answer: revenue sharing is included in the collective bargaining agreement, so any change to revenue sharing must be negotiated with the players.
The long answer: The Dodgers already are contributing about $100 million from their SportsNet LA deal toward revenue sharing. If they’re going to contribute all of it — roughly three times as much — what’s their incentive?
The owners could try to find one of their own revenue sources to compensate the Dodgers and other behemoths, including the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs. But, first, how about trying to make the Dodgers whole from cuts in player payroll?
Under the cap proposal, the required payroll cuts could save the Dodgers in salary about as much as they could lose in local television revenue.
And, Caplin told me, all that revenue sharing would give the 12 teams currently under the proposed $171 minimum payroll a way to get there.
“You have to give small market teams the resources to get to the floor,” Caplin said.
That is the kind of talk that annoys Meyer, who noted the San Diego Padres used to take from the revenue-sharing fund and now pay into it. Under the late Peter Seidler, the Padres played to win and paid to win, and the team now ranks second in attendance (behind the Dodgers) and just sold for a league-record $3.9 billion.
“We want to encourage more San Diegos,” Meyer said.
The way the league tells it, not every owner currently has the ability to compete.
“Every team does have that ability, whether they concede that or not,” Meyer said.
As we said, the back and forth is going to go on for months. The blackouts should not.
“We want fans to see as many games as possible,” Meyer said. “We want them to remove the blackouts and maximize revenue in any way they can.”
The MLB blackout policies are not negotiated with the union. They are negotiated with broadcast partners and were primarily designed to prop up the value of contracts with cable and satellite companies, many of which have since withered and died.
Caplin said the league is not interested in waiving blackout rules on a team-by-team basis, even for those teams whose rights no longer are held by a cable or satellite entity. In order to resolve the blackout problem, Caplin said the league hopes to sell a national media package that would eliminate the need to preserve local broadcast territories.
At this point, no one knows whether a salary cap might actually come to pass, or whether an all-the-teams, all-the-time media outlet might come to pass. But, after years of promising that the league could find a way to give its fans what they wanted, there has got to be a better way than setting up a scenario in which Manfred might essentially tell fans, “You’re stuck with blackouts because Mike Trout and Aaron Judge won’t go for a salary cap.”
The post MLB’s wild pitch: Using fan-despised TV blackouts as leverage against players appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
