While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
Category: MLB
Unlock with PatreonMLB’s attendance is shrinking, and their solutions won’t make games cheaper
This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.
USA Today recently ran a feature on the declining attendance of Major League Baseball games, and the smaller stadiums teams have been and continue to want to build to contend with it. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the meat of it for our purposes comes about 1,700 words in:
With the in-game experience so key to building fan loyalty, wouldn’t it behoove teams to fill up empty seats at discount prices?
Perhaps not at the expense of undercutting season-ticket holders.
“Is value important? Certainly. But it’s not a silver bullet in terms of a single solution to ensuring we have the attendance that we want,” says the Indians’ [Alex] King. “Our season ticket holders are investing a significant amount in us and shown a lot of loyalty. We really value that and want to ensure that as the lifeblood of our organization, we protect the investment they’ve made.”
On the other end of the spectrum, smaller, successful stadiums can breed ticket scarcity, tempting teams to increase prices and potentially squeeze out fans of lesser means.
Teams have been de-prioritizing the experience of actually going to the ballpark and watching an MLB game, because the economics of the league are such that they don’t need anyone going to games in order to make money. Attendance helps, of course — ask the Marlins, who pull in less money than anyone else (before revenue-sharing) for a reason despite a new park in a major American city — but with multi-billion dollar regional and national television deals popping up all over the place in addition to the cash raked in by MLBAM’s offerings, no one needs to actually go to a baseball game in order for MLB teams to make a profit. For now, anyway.
Continue reading “MLB’s attendance is shrinking, and their solutions won’t make games cheaper”
25 years later, the 1994 strike is still the MLB owners’ fault
This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.
Twenty five years ago, on August 12, 1994, the last strike in Major League Baseball occurred. It’s unlikely to be the final strike or work stoppage in the league’s history, but there have been 25 years of what some would refer to as “labor peace” since the last one. You should expect to see takes floating around the internet today suggesting that the strike was a bad idea, or that it was a disaster, and maybe even asking who was to blame for the strike, as if it isn’t management pushing the workers into a strike whenever one happens.
After all, we didn’t get to see Tony Gwynn hit .400, or Matt Williams challenge Roger Maris, or the Expos get a chance to win the World Series because of the strike, which apparently are the things we should really care about. Not that the strike kept MLB’s owners from implementing a salary cap, or that a federal judge stepping in at the tail-end of the strike stopped MLB from putting replacement players — scabs — on the field for games that actually counted, which could have destroyed the power of the MLBPA and had much further-reaching, dire consequences for the game than adding another 25 years onto the wait for someone to hit .400 again.
Continue reading “25 years later, the 1994 strike is still the MLB owners’ fault”
MLB prefers younger, cheaper players, so it’s time to get them paid
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
On Betterball’s creation of talent, and its danger to MLB’s labor
This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to gain access to the rest of my work and allow me to keep writing posts like this one.
The July issue of The Atlantic features a review of Ben Lindbergh’s and Travis Sawchik’s recently released book, The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Noncomformists Are Using Data To Build Better Players. Jack Hamilton, the writer of this review, didn’t just look at whether the book was enjoyable to read, but also at the subject being covered itself, and the problems contained within it: in some cases, he even asked and tried to answer important questions the authors themselves did not.
We’re going to look at the review and those questions today, because they happen to be labor-oriented. Let’s open with this background quote from Hamilton, on recent revolutions in baseball:
The steroid and stat revolutions have unfolded very differently so far, but they arose from a common source: a desire to deploy scientific methods to improve the way baseball is played. Steroid use focused on player enhancement, whereas analytics focused on player value. To put it polemically, one was a revolution driven by labor, and the other by management, which is probably one of many reasons the latter has been more readily accepted.
Continue reading “On Betterball’s creation of talent, and its danger to MLB’s labor”
Please, somebody teach Tom Verducci about context
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
Pushing back MLB’s trade deadline is a pointless exercise
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
The MLBPA’s recent firing shouldn’t be controversial, and yet
This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.
The Major League Baseball Players Association recently fired a long-term attorney, Rick Shapiro, and as Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich report, it’s causing waves both internally and externally. Per that report, Shapiro was dismissed by the MLBPA as a way of shoring up solidarity. Agents, though, are concerned that this is the influence of Scott Boras, and that there will be downsides to getting rid of someone with Shapiro’s experience.
That’s the short of it, but something like this requires more than just a quick explanation. The Players Association and MLB are currently doing some early bargaining over economic issues, more than two years prior to the expiration of the current CBA, so the MLBPA getting a look at what is working and what isn’t with regard to their strategies and strategists comes with that territory. The MLBPA has a new lead negotiator, Bruce Meyer, and Shapiro was around and working on the previous two CBAs from 2012 and 2016, both of which have been derided — by myself and others in media, and some vocal players, too. Combine the unhappiness with those CBAs with the introduction of Meyer, and this bit from the report at The Athletic…
Continue reading “The MLBPA’s recent firing shouldn’t be controversial, and yet”
Trying to win is for losers
While the occasional article is free for everyone, the vast majority of this content is restricted to my Patreon subscribers, whose support allows me to write all of this in the first place. Please consider becoming a subscriber! -Marc Normandin
Here’s how a $15 minimum wage would impact minor-league pay
This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $15. Leaving aside that the bill in question wouldn’t actually raise the minimum to $15 until 2025, or that this won’t pass the Senate and become the law of the land, it’s worth exploring how this kind of change would impact baseball in the United States.
While a higher minimum wage wouldn’t impact MLB players, given the league minimum is $550,000 right now, it would change the salaries of minor-league players as well as those in independent ball. It might even succeed in killing indie baseball, but as I’ve written about before, that’s not the worst outcome, at least when we’re talking about the current format of independent ball. Give me municipal baseball teams and give them to me now, thanks.
A jump to a $15 minimum wage would be massive for MLB’s minor-league players, who currently, at the lowest levels, pull in $1,160 per month, and only for the months of the regular season. Despite working about 70 hours per week, none of them are receiving overtime, and won’t, either, thanks to MLB’s years of lobbying Congress to make sure that didn’t happen, which resulted in minor-league players being singled out in last spring’s $1.3 trillion spending bill. They have to get offseason jobs, split roach-infested, filthy, broken apartments with five other teammates, eat mac and cheese and ramen and Dollar Menu meals all the time because of the low pay and road-only $25 per diem, purchase their own equipment… you see what I’m saying. More than doubling the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 would be huge for these sub-poverty-level workers.
Continue reading “Here’s how a $15 minimum wage would impact minor-league pay”