Whatever shape the MLB season eventually takes, baseball has already lost

Management-consulting types like to say you don’t get what you deserve in this life. You get what you negotiate.

Can’t it be both? Because Major League Baseball is eventually going to end up with something negotiated, however fractiously. Whatever that result looks like, it will definitely be what everyone in MLB deserves.

Last weekend, the baseball players’ union broke off negotiations with ownership. In a public note, union boss Tony Clark asked commissioner Rob Manfred to tell his membership “when and where players should report [for spring training].”

“When and where” became an online mantra for some players. They weren’t agreeing to anything, but they were apparently willing to play baseball.

Except they weren’t.

Further negotiations were held. Baseball insiders announced a deal had been agreed in principle. And then it fell apart.

When Manfred delivered the latest official offer – a 60-game season – the union rejected it. Then it submitted a counter-offer.

Put in historic terms, the union was repulsed outside Moscow, began its retreat through Russia in winter and then decided to turn around and invade Moscow again. Because why? Who knows?

You’re starting to worry these people have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just determined to do whatever it is they are doing at the highest possible volume.

It is widely accepted that the people who run sports are smart. Baseball has guys from NASA building algorithms that will separate a career .280 hitter from a .270 hitter when he’s still in high school. The money being thrown around on boiler-room quants is enormous.

But these people are smart at baseball. They are not necessarily smart at life. Which is how baseball has ended up as one of our few punchlines in the midst of the pandemic.

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On Friday, Manfred had refused the union’s offer – 70 games – out of hand. Those 10 extra games represent US$275-million in additional salary.

They also represent the 10 games no one cares about. They’re the 10 games in the middle of a season so short it’s just an excuse to get to the playoffs. Those 10 games push the campaign a couple of weeks closer to the pandemic’s second wave. Which means those 10 games put the real cash register here – the postseason – in jeopardy.

So, no. No one’s doing those 10 extra games.

If the union wanted those 10 extra games so badly, it should’ve pitched the idea a month ago. Not tacked them on as a ‘Screw you’ after it had already rolled over and declared itself dead.

However silly the union looks, Manfred isn’t coming off much better. A short while ago, he was “100 per cent” sure there would be a season. A few days ago, he declared himself “not confident” that was true.

You can imagine working for Rob Manfred:

“Mr. Commissioner, am I getting paid this week?”

“One-hundred per cent.”

“So that translates as what in real life? Sixty per cent? Seventy? How about you just give me whatever you’ve got in your wallet and we’ll call it even.”

A sports commissioner’s tenure is defined by his or her ability to remain invisible. The more they are being talked about, the worse things are going, ipso facto.

Manfred is now the most talked-about league boss in the world. He will be remembered as the labour lawyer who had no clue how to lawyer labour.

In his video appearances, Manfred is increasingly wan, like this back-and-forth is slowly causing all the blood to drain from his body. You could almost – almost – feel sorry for him.

But that would lead you back to the mistake everyone in sports makes when it comes time to negotiate their deal.

Just because millions of strangers like you or love you, or, in some cases, worship you, no one feels sorry for you.

Average people can and do feel bad for grocery-store clerks and nursing assistants. The work is hard, the pay is low and society would seize up without them. Average people do not feel bad for people who own jumbo jets, or the 28-year-olds who fly around in them so that they can do something we all like, but don’t need.

There can be villains in a sports business squabble, but no heroes. The only thing you have any control over is how big a villain you want to be.

Most leagues and players’ unions have figured that out. The NHLPA had to be beaten senseless a couple of times before it absorbed the message, but it got there.

Smart leagues and smart unions do their negotiations quietly. When they do talk about it, they make sure that money – which is always the primary consideration – is hardly mentioned. No one wants to hear how rich everyone got. They want to hear that you love the game so much you’d play it for free.

But not baseball. No, no. Those involved in the sport are still strutting around like they’re on a picket line outside a rendering plant in Chicago in the 1910s.

Somehow, baseball players have deluded themselves into believing that because they work for a living, that qualifies them as working class.

Despite all the posturing and ineffectual threats, there will be a baseball season. Because the players will eventually take whatever they’re given, and ownership can’t be seen doing what you strongly suspect it would like to do – cancel everything in order to save itself a few bucks. That would be unpatriotic. It would be too nakedly selfish.

So there will be baseball. People will watch it. Whenever they re-open the stadiums, they will be full in some places and empty in others.

But the slow erosion of the game’s special designation as the national pastime has quickened because of all this. There isn’t much romance in any of this.

It’s clear baseball can’t compete with its 21st-century competitors. It’s too slow, goes on for too long and is too monochrome. It’s a relic of a past time.

That used to be a sort of protection. Baseball was a nostalgic exercise, somehow removed from petty concerns of the present day. It’s the only sport that routinely compares its best players from a century ago with the best of today. That chain was, in the imagination at least, unbroken.

But when petty, present-day concerns assume control of the narrative, that protection begins to fade.

That, rather than a few million bucks this way or that, is what smart baseball people should be worrying about.