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MLB commissioner Rob Manfred can say whatever he wants about the need for a lockout as something of a routine part of collective bargaining. And he certainly has, as evidenced by a recent interview with The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. A pertinent excerpt:
But one action looks virtually certain. Manfred said an offseason lockout, as there was in 2021-22, should be considered the new norm.
“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” he said. “There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA works based on leverage. The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”
To which MLBPA executive director Tony Clark’s responded by saying that, “Players know from first-hand experience that a lockout is neither routine nor positive… It’s a weapon, plain and simple, implemented to pressure players and their families by taking away a player’s ability to work.”
Manfred actually ran with this line, saying that lockouts are a weapon as Clark suggested, only “like using a .22, as opposed to a shotgun or a nuclear weapon.” Well first of all, there’s a bit of a gap between a shotgun or a nuclear weapon there, in terms of damage. But even leaving that aside, a shot fired from a .22 can still kill! And even if it doesn’t kill right away, there’s more than one round in the thing: over time, you’re going to do a ton of damage, and it might even be irreversible. Such as if each pull of the trigger was actually the enacting of a lockout. Does Manfred believe there will be no long-term consequences from such an action? That the league, that its fan base, will remain healthy and whole after repeatedly being blasted with a little lockout every five years? Hey, be grateful, MLB could have nuked you, but instead they shot you in the stomach with a smaller weapon. And they’ll do it again, and again, as they feel is necessary, which it turns out is always.
Manfred can say that a lockout is useful for “leverage,” that it can facilitate bargaining — he can say whatever he wants. The truth of the matter is that, before 2021’s lockout, MLB spent months and months that they could have been bargaining in good faith doing… not that. Instead, they purposefully wasted the time of everyone involved believing they’d have more luck taking negotiations seriously only if they occurred while a lockout was in place.
Let’s rewind to the announcement of the previous lockout, which Manfred revealed was going down with a letter published to MLB’s website. A letter I took to Baseball Prospectus to rip apart, because that’s the only kind of attention it deserved:
“Despite the league’s best efforts” is an odd thing to say when we have records of how often MLB showed up with economic proposals (not very), what was in those proposals (nothing that should be taken seriously), and how completely unwilling they were to engage with the players at all on a number of issues. To the point that MLB simply refused to show the Players Association the rest of a proposal at one point unless the PA dropped a number of items they wanted to bargain over from their proposal. If those are MLB’s best efforts, everyone involved is in far more trouble than we all realized.
None of this should be a surprise, though. Within the above-linked articles that I’m responsible for writing are references to how MLB’s plan with their leaked proposals was most likely to generate headlines, support, and something to point to once they had forced a lockout into being. This was all the sort of thing you could see coming from miles away, but it’s the game plan, so Manfred stuck with it regardless of how transparent it is.
And, of course, no one “forced” MLB to stage this lockout: there is nothing that causes a lockout to begin when a collective bargaining agreement expires outside of the owners voting to begin a lockout when a collective bargaining agreement expires. If anyone forced the lockout, it was MLB itself, and I don’t just mean in the “they alone had the power to announce a lockout” way. Their lack of engagement on economic issues made it very clear the plan was to wait until the CBA expired so they could lock the players out and force a resolution that would harm the union’s chances of changing the status quo.
The next section in my response dealt with Manfred treating a lockout as if it were a defensive measure rather than an offensive one. Which is as untrue now as it was then. Which, given the “well it’s more like a .22” strategy he’s deploying in 2025, seems like something he’s going to go back to next December when the league does this again. If it’s defensive against anything, it’s defending against the possibility of a strike. But a strike can only be called if it’s deemed that the league isn’t bargaining in good faith. So the solution would be to simply bargain in good faith, and to engage with the proposals of the PA, to actually negotiate, to show movement, to work together to craft a new CBA. A lockout is preemptive, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually defensive. A lockout is the league telling on themselves: on their disinterest in bargaining in good faith, on their wanting to take away the most powerful tool that the MLBPA has at its disposal to tip the balance of negotiations in their favor.
Everything else is public relations. Manfred is out here talking about the value of lockouts and trying to spin them as a positive so that you believe this is the only acceptable course of action, so that you don’t judge them negatively when they enact another one. It’s January of 2025, nearly two years before the current CBA expires. Is Manfred trying to say that he truly believes that there is simply no way the two sides can meet each other productively and work toward a new CBA in those two years? That locking the players out, which just so happens to conveniently keep them from striking if the need arose another five months after the expiration of the existing CBA, is the only way that either side will show any movement? There’s no way he believes that, but he wants you to, and it’s worth thinking about why that is.
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