There is no baseball today because of a labor dispute in a business that generates $11 billion in revenue. Tom Verducci on baseball’s “profound, ominous loss.”
Several times Manfred while delivering his eulogy referenced the CBT as the owners “only mechanism” for addressing payroll disparity and competitive balance. It is a tax levied on high-payroll clubs from slowing down their spending. Without it, or with a threshold not high enough, the owners contend, teams such as the Dodgers, Yankees and now the Mets would pull ridiculously ahead of the Rockies, Rays and Marlins of the world.
Owners were flabbergasted. They saw the players’ incremental move as a poke in the eye. The owners came back with a final offer in which their CBT first threshold did not change. It remained at $220 million. That was the moment the season as we knew it was lost. But in the end, nothing seemed more out of place than making no movement on the CBT in their final offer. Small-revenue teams felt they were taking it on the chin in the proposed deal and they were not going to let Manfred push the CBT any higher.
That gap also is foreboding. The game has been retreating in the American consciousness because of the product on the field. Baseball keeps giving fans less action over more time, a recipe for irrelevance in today’s multi-screen world. Dead time in a game since Manfred became commissioner in 2015 has increased 17%. It’s not all on him. Players keep saying they don’t want to be told to hurry it up, cluelessly slow-playing their own way into oblivion.
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