MLB fans may not want to come back if it’s a long lockout

The negotiations that failed to land a new collective bargaining agreement are just about to, of all things, become really difficult.

The baseball Hatfields and McCoys who have been sure of just one item persistently so far in talks — that the failure to reach an agreement is wholly the other side’s fault — now have more issues to overcome with commissioner Rob Manfred’s announcement Tuesday that the first two regular-season series have been canceled.

Because these two sides are, well, these two sides, part of the additional squabble will almost certainly include whether Manfred actually has the authority to cancel games or if a schedule is a collectively bargained matter.

It won’t stop there. Players will lose pay and service time in MLB’s view if games are not played, and the union’s lead negotiator, Bruce Meyer, said Monday he expected the games to be rescheduled or the players paid in full. Rhetoric will intensify, certainly with players continuing their social media takedowns of Manfred, in particular. The hawks in both factions will probably feel further emboldened now that a week-plus of face-to-face talks between the sides in Jupiter, Fla., led to the sides failing to finalize a collective bargaining agreement and get back on the field.

For now the sides have broken off talks. So the degree of difficulty is about to rise for a couple of outfits that have yet to show they could work through the preexisting degrees.

And that is not the biggest problem for the sport.

MLB is venturing into a dangerous zone. There are those that will say the sport was here a quarter of a century ago. But the last time that the MLB was shut down for labor-related reasons “to Zoom” meant to go fast. Destiny was an outcome and not a first-person, online, multi-person shooter game — all terms that would have been mostly gibberish in 1994-95. And if I offered up “TikTok,” you would be criticizing me for abysmal spelling.

The announcement by Manfred of canceled games led to fury among consumers, which is actually great news. The death knell is indifference. And that threatens to come on a lot faster in 2022 than 1994-95 as attention spans have shortened, choices have widened and baseballs hold on the national radar has slipped.

I worry even the fury I sense is from my bubble that is filled still with folks who cover and/or love baseball or live in New York, where the sport still resonates intensely. How about elsewhere? How about in a few days and weeks and after the calendar flips to April and games aren’t being played?

There has been a theory that a group of MLB owners, in attempts to kneecap the union, are willing to miss April. After all, salaries are the same that month as all the others, but ticket revenues are lower with school still in session and bad weather in many areas, notably the Northeast. Take away two paychecks amounting to four weeks of pay and let’s see how desperate the players become to settle.

Except that is short-term savings for long-term what? It won’t be good to come off the consumer shelf.

For the good of the sport, the two factions have to recognize they did come a long way toward each other in Jupiter and get back at it.

The owners insist that their final offer, rejected by the players, would have brought nearly $500 million over the course of the agreement to the players. But I am not sure that is an additional $500 million, as much as it is simply rearranging $500 million currently being spent from older to younger players. Also to get the “nearly $500 million,” players have to accept expanded playoff and uniform patches to help grow MLB’s revenues. But even if this were a newly incorporated $500 million spread over a five-year collective bargaining agreement among 30 teams, that is $3 million-ish additionally per team.

So even among the most favorable viewpoint there is room to grow there by ownership. If the sport ever gets around to playing a full season, it would take in about $11 billion in revenue, with gambling and streaming possibilities promising more in the future. This at a time when player salaries have stagnated.

Ownership can — and should — call players back to the table and get a spirit of cooperation going better by following the last best offer of this round with an even better offer. The players can respond in kind. Further concessions are needed because this isn’t 1994-95 any longer. Neither faction should want to wade too deeply into out of sight, out of mind in this environment.

It just might create a degree of difficulty too problematic from which to come all the way back.