The potential for labor strife has loomed over plans to put teams on the field this summer, threatening the sport with a potential long-term decline.
The best way to sell a product is to convince people that they need it. This concept fuels the overriding fear within Major League Baseball these days. The coronavirus pandemic shut down the league just before the regular season would have started. If baseball remains on hold until 2021, many people will learn to live without it. They will not need the product.
Maybe things would not play out that way. Maybe a 17-month gap between Game 7 of the 2019 World Series and the 2021 opening day would make people so desperate for baseball that they would return in record numbers. But those with long memories doubt it.
If baseball does not return until 2021, the gap between games would be twice as long as the eight-and-a-half-month absence during the strike that canceled the World Series in 1994. Teams averaged 31,256 fans per game before the strike and did not reach that level again for 12 years. People found other ways to spend on entertainment.
Yet the players and team owners appear headed for another labor impasse that could scuttle what might remain of the 2020 season. The league wants to split any revenue 50-50 with the players’ union, which views the idea as akin to a salary cap — the sticking point in the 1994 strike.
Unlike their counterparts in other major sports, baseball players have resisted firm limits on team payrolls. They seem as committed as ever to that principle at a time when returning to the game could endanger their health.
The sides agreed in March to “discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators,” but so far the league has not made a formal economic proposal.
While the N. B. A. and the N. H. L. have played most of their seasons, and the N. F. L. opener is still months away, baseball needs an agreement soon to avoid a protracted and painful disappearance.
Any proposal for a season this year would have to include a ban on spectators, at least early on. But whenever the game returns in full force, the effects of the pandemic on the economy presumably will limit fans’ ability to spend. And if players and owners scuttle this season over finances, that could devastate a sport that has already experienced four consecutive seasons of declining per-game attendance.
