The main one is, of course, money. The owners are sick and tired of doling so much of it out to the players nowadays, and the players seem to want still more of it.m This has been the eternal issue here. For many decades, the owners had the players in a state of basic indentured servitude, where they had shit for rights as employees. Yo had the reserve clause, which was something that bound a player to a particular team for the duration of his career, unless the owners did something like trade him or whatever. This kept player salaries way down, and severely restricted player movement. This was such a blanket thing that even the superstars were not above this. Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, no matter how great they were on the field, they were not able to break these restrictions. Not too many jobs were as restrictive as this, but there was a reason for it. After baseball had its Black Sox scandal back in 1919 1920, they were in deep shit. Their reputation had been trashed, and they were in danger of going extinct. At that time, professional athletes were still though of as bums that had no real jobs. Many people looked way down on them, and there were reasons for this. After all, these dudes did only work six months a year, and spent the rest of the time doing shit like drinking, fathering illegitimate kids, shit like that. Baseball had to fight against this image in order to survive in the early years. There was also the specter of gambling. Since the players only worked part time and hardly ever had any money, they were easy prey for gamblers intent on fixing the outcomes of games. This shit came within an inch of wrecking baseball. They thought hat they were past it by 1919, but the Black Sox proved otherwise to everyone. So baseball had to fix its act, and fast. So they decided what to do. They went to the Federal Government for help. Specifically, to the Federal courts. They went to judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was a judge in Georgia or somewhere like that, and asked him if he'd like a new job being the total autocratic head of baseball. He would have total power to rule as he saw fit over the game as its first Commissioner. The Judge was a power crazed man as it was, so he said hell yeah. He wielded that absolute power in his new job too. He kicked anyone's ass out that he even thought had something to do with the Black Sox scandal. His iron fisted rule and Babe Ruth's exceptional talent saved baseball's ass. The game went on to thrive. However, baseball wanted something more than an iron fist to run their scene. They had something else altogether in mind. This was still the era of anti-trust actions that were meant to break up big businesses, as opposed to today, where the trusts are being re-assembled under the guise of corporate mergers. Baseball was worried that they could be targeted as a trust and busted up, so they needed to stop this. Since the Judge had Federal connections, he was able to get the ear of the Government and get them to pass an anti trust exemption for the world of baseball. This meant that the owners could run things any way that they wanted to. The reserve clause was then made kosher, because they could have made the players outright slaves if they wanted to. They were able to keep the color line drawn in baseball because of this exemption too. So everything was going swimmingly for the owners.
That is, until 1968. That was the year that Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause in court, saying that it was unconstitutional. Some say that he did this under the tutelage of a dude that was in reality Leon Trotsky, one of the founders of the USSR. Whatever, the courts agreed that baseball had gone beyond even anti- trust shit and was flat-out violating the Constitution. This started to change things for the players, especially Curt Flood. He was basically blackballed from baseball, and died a very embittered man. By the time we got to 1972, there was a player's union in place for the first time ever, and they were going to have it out with the owners about things. This led to the first work stoppage, the lockout of 1972. This took place right at the end of Spring Training, and it delayed the start of the 1972 season. This work stoppage shit freaked the owners out big time. They never thought that the players would go to these lengths. They did, and it hit the owners in the profits, and they panicked. The players were not at all sure what they could get out of this. They just wanted things to be a little bit more fair between the two sides. The owners thought that the players were on to them about shit like how much money they really were making and where it all was and all that shit. So instead of just letting the players have a bit more of the pie,. They basically shit bricks and threw their financial books to the union and let them see everything. The players then did finally have a good idea of what was really going on with the money. The owners were real red-faced when they finally realized what they did, but it was too late. The players had them on the run at last. From then on, when the players threatened work stoppages, the owners caved every time. This led to shit like total free agency for players, salary arbitration, and every other kind of perk that you could imagine. This is how the players al became rich. How the minimum wage for their profession became the highest in the world. How their player's union became the most successful labor union in the history of the world by getting the gains for its members that it always did. This went on and on up until now.
So here we are at another impasse scene between the two sides. Al the owners from the old days are long gone now, mostly replaced by corporations. These are all ownership groups that came into baseball knowing full well what went on in it in terms of labor-management shit and adjusted accordingly. Or did they? They seem to by increasing their revenue streams so that they could meet the demands of the players. They haven't seemed to by having the same attitudes and problems that they always have with the labor union. They hate what it has done, and they want to flat-out break it. They are doing what they think they need to in order to achieve this objective this time around. They are doing it in ways like imposing a gag rule on all owners about everything. Any owner that says shit about the situation is fined $1,000,000. Only the Commissioner, Bud Selig, can say anything for the owners side. This is supposed to ensure solidarity amongst the owners. The biggest way that they are trying to bust the union is through this bullshit talk of contracting teams from 30 to 28. The owners are saying that too many of the teams are doing poorly financially, so they need to get rid of a couple for the good of the rest. If this is true, why did they expand the number of teams in 1993 and again in 1998? Just to give us two world champion teams that were less that five years old when they did it? I don't think so. If the owners didn't feel that they could make a go of things with 30 teams, they never would have had that many to start with. This contraction thing has another meaning behind it.
There aren't to many things left that the owners can do without having to get an OK from the player's union. Everything from meal money to sending players up and down from the majors and minor leagues has to have the player's union approval. Except for the issue of contraction. That they can do on their own and deal with the player's union later. This gives them something to hold over the player's heads, mainly the loss of jobs, 50 of them. That's not much, but there are only 750 jobs available to begin with. This lets the owners say that they are indeed going broke, and they have to cut jobs, just like United Airlines and other corporations are these days. The way that they are going about this contraction shit speaks volumes about their real motives. They can't even get it straight which teams are going out of business. Is It Montreal and Florida, Montreal and Tampa Bay, Montreal and Minnesota, who is it?It is whoever does the most for the owners by going under. Montreal is the leader here because they are based in Canada, and the Canadian dollar is worth 70% or so of the american one, and all the players get paid in American dollars, which automatically increases the payroll by 30%. Plus, the revenues are all in canadian dollars, so they will obviously need more of them. They also play in one of the worst sports stadiums ever built, Olympic Stadium. S They also have no TV contract at all. You can't see them on TV in Montreal or much of anywhere else. So, no one shows up,and revenues are tiny, and expenses huge, and they are a losing proposition. So baseball is willing to buy the owner of Montreal out and let him them take the money and lots of his players and go take over the Florida franchise, which is basically the same thing as Montreal. They are in the same situation except for location. Then there's Minnesota. They are owned by this 86 year old dude that is obsessed with money and not much else. He runs the team on the cheap, he pockets the revenue sharing money that baseball gives him that he's supposed to use for his team, shit like that. All he feels that he has left in life is to become a billionaire, because he's never made that yet. So baseball offers him a $250,000,000 buyout that will put him over the top for this, and the old fart couldn't say yes fast enough. So he wants to kill the franchise just to make himself a billionaire, and fuck the fans. This is how the owners are going about this contraction shit.
None of this is necessary. Baseball's anti-trust exemption is still as good today as it was when the Judge got it for them many decades ago. This means that they can still run things the way they want to and fuck anyone else. No team should go out of business in a situation like that, because baseball itself could just assume the ownership of a team until another buyer was found. There don't even have to be any owners, baseball could run all 30 teams itself like some sort of Soviet thing with no problem. No one could cal them on it, they have the law on their side. Why then are they threatening contraction? Purely to try and break down the union like the union broke them down many years ago. They want to atone for the errors of the 70's. The players want things to at least stay the same, or, ideally, get even better as they have every other time that we did this. This is where we are starting from this time, and that is why baseball is heading straight into an abyss that they may never fully get out of.