Major League Baseball is trying to pitch fans on parity in advance of new labor talks

MARK BRODIE: As the pennant races heat up across baseball, some people are looking beyond the playoffs and World Series. That’s because the current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball owners and players ends on Dec. 1. And many observers are predicting the owners will lock the players out when the agreement expires.

There are a lot of areas of disagreement between the two sides, but the biggest one appears to be a salary cap. The owners want one, and the players do not. And at least so far, neither side has been willing to budge on that. But the league has been trying to get fans on their side.

[AUDIO CLIP FROM MLB AD]

METS FAN: Like to see a little bit more parity, man. A little bit more competition.

CUBS FAN: Let’s give these young guys like a salary floor.

BLUE JAYS FAN: One hundred percent needs a salary cap. That’s the biggest issue in baseball right now.

MARK BRODIE: That’s from an ad that’s been running on MLB.tv and elsewhere. It’s part of a campaign called “Level the Playing Field.” It shows baseball fans explaining why they support a salary cap, arguing it would increase competition and parity, especially among the smaller-market teams.

Earlier, I talked about this approach with Evan Drellich, a senior writer at the Athletic, where he covers the business of Major League Baseball. And we started with whether it’s unusual for MLB to try to get its message across in this way.

EVAN DRELLICH: I am not aware of any past example of the league literally putting together a commercial to try to communicate with fans over what it wants to do in collective bargaining with the players union. It it certainly seems a new level uh of engagement and a new level of public relations campaigning to try to sway people to come over to to the league’s side.

And there’s been social media posts in the past, uh but this round of talks in baseball is shaping up to be potentially different and more contentious than we’ve seen before.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of talk about a potential lockout, maybe missing games next season. Is this seen as sort of a preemptive, "don’t blame us" kind of thing by MLB and the owners?

EVAN DRELLICH: You know, at the end of the day, collective bargaining is about the two parties at the table. Neither the league nor the players are ultimately looking out for fans above their own interest, and and I think that’s an important thing to understand. That said, the more public support you can have, the easier it might be to convince the other side to make the changes you want.

Uh, you know, how much of an influence public opinion will have on these talks is is really hard to say because at the end of the day, it’s all about whether players are going to be willing to miss games or owners are going to be willing to miss games uh in the instance where owners say, "We want a salary cap," which baseball uniquely does not have among professional sports, and the players continue to say, "No, we don’t want one."

Um, so you know, how much of an impact this ultimately has is is unclear, but uh they certainly, by the fact that they’re doing it, feel that there’s some ground to be gained, that that it doesn’t hurt to have fans on their side as they enter what could be a pretty ugly battle.

MARK BRODIE: Well, and when you listen to the messaging, I mean, I think you’d be hard-pressed, and you would know this far better than I, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find baseball fans in, let’s say, Cincinnati or Tampa or Pittsburgh who wouldn’t say, "Yeah, I’d love for my team to be able to spend what the Dodgers and the Yankees and the Mets spend."

EVAN DRELLICH: That’s right. I think the smaller markets, the smaller media markets, smaller cities that have less lucrative television deals, that have lower payrolls, you know, the fans there have I think for a long time sought a more even playing field. It is true that a salary cap would make things a little more fair. You really have to dive into some specifics to answer the question, well, how much more fair? How large an impact would this be? How many more playoff appearances would this mean, you know, for a team like the Pittsburgh Pirates?

And and the answers get they get hazier, and they’re really hotly contested once you once you really dive into it. But you have people who have for years seen the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the three other major men’s sports leagues in the U.S., all have salary cap systems.

And it is certainly the case a lot of fans don’t fully understand the economics of it. These are not simple mechanisms, um, and and they take a lot of time and study to really understand the impacts, but at the end of the day, people see this in other leagues uh and look at baseball and say, "Well, we see it everywhere else. Why can’t we see it here?"

MARK BRODIE: Well, and I think to your point, I mean, basketball fans, for example, will see cities like San Antonio and Oklahoma City making the finals and thinking, "If I’m a Kansas City Royals fan, like why can’t that be us?"

EVAN DRELLICH: That’s right, and you know, there are dueling statistics between the players union and the league over what is the state of competitive balance in baseball. Baseball’s rather unique compared to the other sports in that it’s just more random. The the best teams in football really aren’t likely to lose uh, you know, in the in the early rounds of the playoffs. Does it happen sometimes? Sure.

But in baseball, the the easy example is a team like the New York Mets that spends a ton of money, hasn’t won a championship in 40 years here. And so, you know, how direct that correlation between winning and money is in baseball is something that’s been studied and and frankly fought over for a long time.

MARK BRODIE: So what are the players doing? Like, do they have some kind of messaging campaign? Are they trying to counter what the the MLB owners are doing in some way?

EVAN DRELLICH: The union has had more press conferences thus far. They are using social media just as the league is using social media. I am not aware of the players union taking out any dedicated commercial time at this at this point. That that seems to be a step that only MLB has taken. But both sides are trying to argue their messaging.

And the the players’ message is, look, there are ways to improve the sport. We want to change the way owners share money between themselves, which is something the league also wants to do, the owners also propose doing. The key difference is the players don’t want the hard limit on salary. They don’t want the capped labor cost.

And you know, it’s important to understand that all of these issues are ultimately economic issues. It is not as simple as, as much as we might like to think, what is best for the game of baseball? That’s just not the calculus that is applied when there are billions of dollars on the line.

MARK BRODIE: And what’s so interesting about that is, you know, when you watch the spots from MLB, they couch it in the, "Hey, we’re listening to the fans. You know, you wanted faster games, so we put in a pitch clock. You wanted, you know, these different different things, so, you know, we change the rules." But to your point, those are on-the-field issues. The labor stuff is almost entirely off-the-field economics stuff.

EVAN DRELLICH: I frankly think the "we listen to the fans" argument that MLB posits here falls falls apart pretty quickly with with pretty much just a cursory examination. For example, I think if you were to poll most fans, they would say, "You know what I’d really love? I’d love beer and hot dogs to to be $5 maximum at every baseball game." And you’re never going to see MLB taking out an ad campaign that says, you know, "We’re pushing a lower price." It’s about money, uh, and and I it’s unfortunate in that reality, but that is just like the outside world.

You know, and there’s a storyline separately here about just how much baseball has become a business in bold, capital, underscored letters. Um, it is it is about the money.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Evan Drellich, a senior writer for the Athletic. Evan, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

EVAN DRELLICH: Thanks for having me.