Blog

In 1976, when the All-Star Game came to Veterans Stadium, the Yankees’ Catfish Hunter and Thurman Munson did a midgame interview about a historic collective bargaining agreement that was ratified the night before.

Now that was a celebration of baseball.

Fifty years on, this wasn’t so bad either. MLB pulled out all the stops — and tugged on a few heartstrings, too — Tuesday night, from Miles Teller’s pregame ode about the sport’s impact on a 250-year-old country to the fifth-inning recreation of The Sandlot, including Ray Charles’ rendition of “America The Beautiful,” with All-Stars and children watching fireworks together on the field like it was some magical backyard.

Go ahead and admit it: It got you.

“Oh, yeah, that was honestly one of my favorite parts of the game just because that was my favorite baseball movie growing up,” said Brandon Marsh, the Phillies’ first-time All-Star. “When I hear that song, it almost just brings tears to my eyes because it takes me back to being 5 years old.”

That was the point. And on that count, bravo, baseball.

All of which makes what will happen in less than five months so much more galling.

Because the owners and players agree on one thing — and one thing only: Baseball is thriving. Commissioner Rob Manfred and interim players’ union chief Bruce Meyer have the attendance figures and television ratings to prove it.

Yet when the collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1 without a new deal — the sides can’t even agree on an economic framework within which to work — the owners almost surely will lock out the players, inciting a work stoppage that threatens to shutter the sport not only during a long, cold winter but also for part or even all of the 2027 season.

Talk about hitting the self-destruct button. Or pulling the pin out of the grenade. Pick your metaphor. They all apply.

And if you didn’t already think baseball was headed to such a dark place, well, you should’ve been in the hotel ballroom where Meyer and Manfred met separately with members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America hours before the American League scored three first-inning runs against the Phillies’ Cristopher Sánchez in a 4-0 victory over the National League.

Start here: Meyer rejected MLB’s proposal to institute a salary cap, forever a third-rail issue for the players, on the union’s contention that baseball isn’t suffering from competitive imbalance as much as a subset of owners that aren’t trying to actually win. The players, then, are proposing changes to how revenue is shared between the teams.

“Teams in every market across the league can afford to compete; many of them are choosing not to,” Meyer said. “From our standpoint, that’s the biggest problem in the game right now.”

But the owners are “more united than any group in my entire time in baseball” in the pursuit of a salary cap, according to Manfred, who said they were influenced by internal polling of fans. (Here’s a secret: It’s really more about the owners wanting to control costs and raise their franchise values.)

And the players? Although it remains to be seen whether the union can hold — rank-and-file players with lower salaries might have different interests than superstars — the biggest names in the sport are steadfast in their refusal to accept a cap.

It goes back generations, in fact, to Philly’s 1976 All-Star Game, where the players won the right to become free agents after accruing six years of major league service. They played without a CBA for the first half, the sides trusting they would work something out.

“None of us talked about that stuff,” Larry Bowa said. “I hear it now [from players]. You hear a lot of talk about if there’s going to be a lockout. I do know that when we had these talks, [owners] always wanted a cap, and that was one thing that was embedded in our brains: ‘Don’t go for a cap. It’s not going to work.’”

And now?

“I think the opportunity for players to get paid is what this is all about,” Bryce Harper said. “That’s why we have no cap and what we’ve done for so long, starting with Curt Flood. He started everything. So, we owe it to the guys that have come before us to do the same thing and all the young guys that are going to go through it, as well.”

Said Mike Trout: “I think [a cap] is bad for the game. The game’s in a great spot right now, you know? I just don’t support that.”

With five months before the CBA expires, this is a time for rhetoric more than serious negotiation. But Meyer blasted MLB for its advertising campaign on MLB.TV — “Level the Playing Field” — to drum up public support.

“The supposed stewards of the game have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince fans that they shouldn’t have hope, or that the product they’re paying to consume in record numbers is somehow broken,” Meyer said. “I think it’s perverse.”

Manfred pointed out that a small-market team hasn’t won the World Series since the Royals in 2015. Meyer noted that the Brewers and Rays are leading their divisions at the All-Star break, with Milwaukee bound for its eighth playoff appearance in nine years, including four in a row.

“It gives Bruce talking points,” Manfred said. “But from our perspective, the more important issue is, what’s the aggregate data over time? Our view of the world is that over a very long period of time, there’s a very strong relationship between [payroll] and who gets into playoffs.”

It’s ugly. And it will only get uglier.

Five years ago, baseball went through a 99-day lockout before reaching a deal in mid-March and shoehorning a 162-game season into a compressed schedule. Back then, though, the owners and players settled their differences within the existing non-cap system.

Now, they can’t even agree on an economic structure. It’s as if the owners are speaking French and the players German.

“A salary cap is the ultimate excuse for an owner to say, ‘Gee, I would like to make the team better, but you know, I can’t,’” Meyer said. “Salary caps are bad for fans.”

Said Manfred: “I think the number from top to bottom in our sport, in terms of payroll, the gap is $441 million. It defies human experience to ask a fan to think that the bottom end of that gap has the same opportunity to win as the top end.”

And ‘round and ‘round they went.

Hours later, after that reenactment of The Sandlot, Marsh detailed the conversation with the boy who watched the fireworks with him in right field.

“We were talking about how his grandma is a huge fan of the Phillies,” Marsh said, “and how she was a huge fan of me personally.”

Then, Marsh asked the boy to take out his phone.

“Yeah, we sent her a video,” he said, “and hopefully made her night.”

Imagine shutting all of that down.

Now that’s perverse.