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Major League Baseball players and owners have been unable to strike a deal for a new collective bargaining agreement and announced last week that resulted in the cancelation of opening day.
Rob Manfred, the commissioner, announced that teams will miss their first two series. Opening day had been set for 31 March. He told The Associated Press that the league “exhausted every possibility.” He said players will not be paid for the games missed.
The average salary in the league is $4.17 million a year, which represents a 4.8 percent drop since 2019. AS.com reported that the average salary does not show the full picture because there are many player with massive contracts that inflate the numbers. (Mookie Betts, a Los Angeles Dodger, helps lead the way after signing a 12-year, $365 million contract.) The league minimum was $563,500 in 2021.
“The game has suffered damage for a while now,” Tony Clark, the head of the union, told The AP. “The game has been manipulated. The value inherent and how players are respected and viewed has changed. players have been commoditized, monetized in a way that is really hard to explain.”
These players join millions of Americans—many with far smaller salaries—to demand fair wages from super-rich owners. The service industry seems to have the biggest pull to unionize. (See “UNIONIZATION ON-TREND: AMAZON WORKERS VOTE TO UNIONIZE,” “STARBUCKS STORE TO UNIONIZE, A TOP TREND FOR 2022?” “ACTIVISION STUDIO GROUP WILL FORM A UNION, SOLIDIFYING TRENDS JOURNAL FORECAST,” “POLITICO JOURNALISTS FORM UNION. A TREND OF THE TIMES” and “REI: UNIONIZATION TREND EXPANDS AS FORECAST.”)
The lockout started three months ago and it is not immediately clear when they will begin again.
Ross Stripling, the pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays and union representative, accused MLB of “tying to sneak things through us, it was like they think we’re dumb baseball players.”
“They did exactly what we thought they would do,” Stripling, who is also a financial adviser, said. “They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed, and then they tried to sneak some **** past us at that deadline and we were ready for it,” he said.
TREND FORECAST: Like Bob Dylan’s song goes: “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” Bleacher Report said this strike is different from the one in 1994 because the players have the ability to communicate directly with the fans through social media and the owners are unable to just spin the story in the press.
Manfred has argued that owners have not made a killing in recent years and “below what you’d get in the stock market” due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The report called the claim “hooey” and pointed to a CNBC report that said the average return price of an MLB club was 669 percent from 2002 to 2021. The report said that it beats out the S&P with its 458 percent returns.
Unionization will continue to be a Top Trend; the more limited the supply of workers (made worse by “No Jab, No Job” mandates; (see “WANT TO KEEP YOUR JOB? GET THE JAB!” and “NO JAB, NO JOB. VACCINE MANDATES ‘WORKING’”), the more powerful the trend toward unionization will be.
And, as inflation continues to rise faster than wages, corporations that wish to incentivize their workforce to do and give the best they can, will raise the pay scale to levels higher than inflation rates. In doing so, they will create atmospheres of mutual appreciation.