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MLB plans to experiment with fans’ safety during pandemic postseason

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Let’s travel back in time to June 8, 2020, for a moment, shall we?

According to Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News, MLB is considering allowing local governments to decide if there will be fans at their games. In Texas, this would mean 50 percent capacity attendance, as governor Greg Abbott announced that would be allowed as of last week. This opens up the opportunity for MLB or its teams to pressure other local governments into allowing fans to attend games, which would be unsafe, but even if MLB’s hands are clean in this regard, that doesn’t make the existence of fans in the stands any safer. There is a reason these two sides are negotiating for how safe they can make a 2020 season — one that was never truly expected to include fans.

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So, if this report is true, and MLB really is considering letting fans into their games in the states that are going to allow such a thing — the ones opening up before they should, the ones purposely messing with data to make the pandemic seem like less of a risk than it is, meaning the ones that are also going to be high-risk for further transmission because of a lack of precaution — then it’s even more clear than usual that MLB just cares about what kind of money they can make from 2020, and not the safety of anyone making or giving the money to them.

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How are MiLB players going to live during the offseason, mid-pandemic?

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Minor League Baseball players have to work in the offseason. Maybe not every minor-league player — a few early draft picks might have received large enough signing bonuses to avoid that fate, and the players on 40-man rosters are making a living wage thanks to being part of the Players Association with the protections and benefits that entail. But the vast majority of the thousands upon thousands of minor leaguers are making sub-poverty level wages, and for just a few months per year. In order to pay rent, eat, and continue to be able to train for their career, these players need to find second jobs to sustain themselves.

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MLB wants to keep the expanded postseason, ruin regular season further

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Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to an expanded postseason for the shortened 2020 season, as a way to make up for the revenues lost by not airing any games for the first three months of what would have been the regular season. Now, though, MLB begins part two of their expanded postseason plan: convincing you it is not just a temporary, pandemic-related bug, but instead the kind of feature you should be hoping sticks. Here’s commissioner Rob Manfred, in the Washington Post:

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The History of Baseball Unionization: When vaudeville ended a baseball strike

Major League Baseball players had few rights before the signing of the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968. They didn’t get all of their current rights all at once, either: the battle was, and is, an ongoing one. Before the Players Association, before Marvin Miller, there were other attempts to organize baseball players against the bosses. In this series, we’ll investigate each of those attempts, and suss out what went wrong. Here’s part 1 and part 2.

The Players Protective Association had a promising start when the budding American League used its desires for better wages and protections to steal players from the reigning National League, but it didn’t end up working out in the long run. That’s because the AL, like the capitalists investing in the Players League before it, ended up partnering with the NL and eliminating themselves as competition in the process.

A little less than a decade later, in 1912, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America formed, with former player Dave Fultz at the head. Fultz, like John Ward of the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, had a background in law thanks to an education at Colombia, and was a practicing lawyer at the time of the formation of the Fraternity. He also kept in close contact with active players and their concerns, and those conversations — some about their continued gripes about the reserve clause, which no one had been able to permanently get rid of to that point — helped lead to the formation of the Fraternity.

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That time the Padres nearly became San Diego’s forever

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Here is a fun little note about a particularly tumultuous time in Major League Baseball labor history: Joan Kroc, the principal owner of the Padres from 1984 through 1990, does not appear in the index of John Helyar’s vital work, Lords of the Realm, which details the history of the owners’ feudalistic system that organized players eventually stood together to dismantle. Her then late-husband, Ray Kroc, shows up a bunch of times, but that’s because the man who helped make McDonald’s national and then global was pretty standard as far as the kind of businessmen who owned MLB teams went. Joan, though, was different than her husband in a few respects.

Now, this is not the same as saying her time as an owner was different to the point that she is without sin or what have you — after all, she was running the Padres during the collusion years of the 80s, so even if she wasn’t doing the scheming and getting quoted by Helyar because of it she was still taking part in the scheme. Her own schemes, at least, seemed like ones that could benefit more than just the businessmen who felt MLB was their toy to play with. For example, Joan Kroc once attempted to truly make the Padres the San Diego Padres, by giving them to the city rather than selling them to some guy with the money to purchase them.

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MLB plans to replace MiLB teams with clubs full of unpaid players

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Major League Baseball still hasn’t unveiled what their plan is for replacing one-quarter of Minor League Baseball’s teams, but there have been enough leaks and reporting on the subject at this point that we’re still pretty clear on what’s next. Minor League Baseball teams that are being pushed out of MLB affiliations will still get to have teams of a sort, but the 1,000 players whose jobs are now on the line? They are being replaced
with a workforce that is somehow paid even less: independent players and college baseball players.

Baseball America has reported for months about how college wood bat leagues were one of the potential replacements for the disaffiliated clubs, and now ESPN is reporting, with a week to go before MLB formally proposes a plan to Minor League Baseball, that this and “encouraging” disaffiliated clubs to go independent with MLB paying the franchise fees for entry is the direction that’ll be taken:

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MLB teams can now open instructional camps, but only if they pay players

Shrinking the minors will cost more than players their jobs

The Chiefs removed some racist elements, Braves continue waffling

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The Atlanta Braves have been “in conversations” about the Tomahawk Chop at their games since at least the 2019 postseason, when it came under scrutiny from an opposing pitcher, Ryan Halsey, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation. Despite the obviousness of the racism that performing the chop entails, the Braves have hemmed and hawed their way through discussing it, pushing off actually doing anything substantive about it — like, say, getting rid of the practice — and wasted everyone’s time in the process.

More than just the chop needs to go for the culture of racism to be removed from the Braves and their fans, but it would at least be a start and a sign that they’re actually trying. Instead, we get Atlanta, in response to Washington’s NFL team removing the literal slur of a name from the franchise, that they won’t be changing their name, and oh, the only reason there is no chop this year is because there are no fans in attendance to perform it. Continue reading “The Chiefs removed some racist elements, Braves continue waffling”

MLB’s season has restarted, but not for struggling stadium workers

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Major League Baseball began its season last month, which meant television revenues could start rolling in once more. Owners and investors will be paid, players will be paid, coaches and trainers and clubhouse attendants and grounds crew will all be paid, too. Stadium workers, though, aren’t working these games: without fans, there was no need to bring them back into the fold just yet. Unlike with the minor-league players MLB teams are paying during the pandemic, though — at least during the timeframe their regular season would have happened — not all of these stadium workers are being helped out by their clubs.

And now that the $600 per week the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act has run out, that lack of assistance is even more apparent and harmful. Throw in that the Senate just left session without a sequel stimulus plan in place, and won’t be back to ignore or vote down the next plan until after Labor Day despite a literal pandemic impacting people who don’t make all the money they’ll ever need from corporate bribes and lobbyists, and times are even worse for folks like those who work at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

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