MLB owners and players no closer to deal

After two months of a standoff between the MLB team owners and the MLBPA, talks have barely crept closer to resolving the issues on the table. After the owners rejected the Players Association revised offer, which was not much changed from the previous offer, the MLBPA rejected an offer by the owners to bring in federal negotiators. The chances of spring training getting started on time are now vanishingly small.

Long-suffering fans are turning their attention to the NCAA. Despite the unsavoury way in which the NCAA profits from the unpaid student-athletes, college sports are held up as the antidote to any pay dispute in professional sports across the board. Division I college baseball starts on the 18th of February, and after last year’s exciting College World Series win by Mississippi State, all eyes are on the SEC teams, who make up eight of the top 25 teams in the country.

The last time there was a pay dispute of this level in MLB, fan support dropped to record low levels. Attendance fell by over 20% across all ballparks and the credit for “saving” baseball has often been given to the record-setting surge in steroid-fuelled home runs in the mid-to-late nineties by the likes of Mark Mcgwire and Barry Bonds which brought the fans back to the ballparks.

Baseball had been the undisputed king of American sports for over a century when player strikes in the seventies and eighties disgusted fans so much that the baseball’s popularity fell below that of football, a position that has never yet been regained by the sport.

Perhaps in this dispute, it is perhaps worth remembering that it is not the players who voted to strike, but the owners who locked them out. Fans who feel hard done by would do well to keep this distinction in view. For those who don’t care about the details but are just hoping for a resolution, maybe watching a bit of college baseball isn’t such a bad idea after all.