Blame owners, ban closed leagues, and more
Blame owners, ban closed leagues, and more
The Out in Left Weekly: June 9, 2024
MLB
Blake Snell is hurt and Jordan Montgomery is bad—but don’t let owners off the hook
Guided by superagent Scott Boras, ace lefties Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery waited until the end of March to sign free agent contracts with the San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks, respectively, which has proven to be a strategic blunder.
Snell is on the injured list for the second time this season and that’s probably best for everyone, except for opposing batters. In just 23.2 innings pitched, he’s 0-3 with a 9.51 earned run average. Montgomery didn’t make a start this season until April 19, and he’s barely gotten anyone out since. He owns a 6.80 ERA and has just 29 strikeouts.
Montgomery has blamed his missing spring training for his troubles, something Molly Knight highlighted in The Long Game. Fansided told Montgomery to blame Boras. A Padres blog thanked the team for not re-signing Snell. Just Baseball even wondered whether the Diamondbacks would release Montgomery ahead of his next start, before a contract option for the 2025 season vests.
It’s a view supported by David Samson, who on his podcast bashed Montgomery in a virulently anti-player rant. It’s worth noting that Samson helped drive the Expos out of Montreal, ran the Miami Marlins into the ground, and fleeced Florida taxpayers of billions to build a stadium no one goes to.
Conspicuously absent from all the stories on Snell and Montgomery are the owners. They are the ones that maintain a system of “team control,” an employment model that should be illegal. Snell’s and Montgomery’s free agent contracts were so high-stakes because they earned relative peanuts in the first several years of their careers, which happen to be the primes of their careers.
When Snell won the American League Cy Young Award in 2018, he earned less than $600,000 as a third-year player, according to Spotrac. Snell earned $16 million last year, when he won the National League Cy Young Award. That’s a lot of money, but that made him only the 67th-highest paid player in MLB. Boras deserves blame for not reading the market better. The players deserve blame for not performing. But by not also implicating the owners we aren’t telling the full story and it perpetuates the mainstream media’s anti-labor bias.
The Athletics are why closed leagues must be abolished
The Nevada Independent reported this week that the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas Athletics are negotiating how many “home” games they can play away from Las Vegas, to which they’re slated to move in 2028. Not only is it a public relations disaster, but it can also have a real financial impact. With fewer games in Las Vegas, Nevada officials are concerned about the A’s plans impacting their ability to pay for stadium bonds used to finance a new ballpark. Those bonds are backed by taxpayers, of course, which imperils public services should revenues fail to meet debt obligations.
Why any city would want to host the A’s is beyond my comprehension. They are run by a cheap, incompetent owner who operates in bad faith. The A’s as a baseball team are going nowhere under John Fisher, and they exist right now only to transfer wealth from taxpayer coffers to Fisher’s pockets. But MLB’s monopoly over baseball creates scarcity, and public officials desperate to make a mark during their tenures will sacrifice the public purse at the baseball altar. This will happen as long as American sports leagues are closed.
Prohibiting closed leagues would immediately end the subsidization arms race. In this world, baseball teams would play where market opportunity is, not where the interests of incumbent monopolists lie, and because cities could host multiple teams it would be politically and fiscally impractical to subsidize each one. In the current construct, team owners are able to prey on human fallibility, and we have a mechanism to address that. It is called government. We can rein in private interests and protect the public trust by passing laws, a novel concept in 21st-century America.
Other news
The New York Times reports that sports fans exist
“... in recent years, leagues have embraced the charms of smaller markets,” The New York Times’ Ken Belson wrote this week about the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes relocating to Salt Lake City. “Teams have moved to cities like Oklahoma City, Las Vegas and Winnipeg, Manitoba, in search of financial incentives, newer arenas and stadiums, and more devoted fans.”
Belson goes on to explain why a hockey team is viable in Salt Lake City, framing every detail as a surprise. People in Utah like sports! Can you believe it?
There is no mention of major leagues in the U.S. using its closed league structure to purposefully ice out smaller cities. Leagues carve up the map into media markets, then team owners disallow other teams from infringing on their territory and extract wealth from areas without major league teams. This is most prevalent out west, where teams have wide swaths of land to broadcast their games. Could an MLB team set up camp in Portland or Spokane, for example? Probably, given an ownership group savvy enough to succeed in a mid-market city, but it’s not possible when the Mariners “own” all of Washington and Montana, northern Oregon, and western Idaho.
The NHL is moving to Utah not out of a newfound embrace of smaller markets or because they lifted up a rock there and found fans. They are doing so because Phoenix refused to pay for a new arena for the Coyotes, incumbent owners would never allow another team to infringe on their markets, and a Utahn had a billion dollars to spare. Belson mentions NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman still prefers Phoenix as an NHL market.
The story was about a single, small-ish city getting a major league sports team. The real story is that there could be teams everywhere, in small and mid-sized cities across the country, if only capitalists in the U.S. actually believed in competition.
Recommendations
Because you might have missed Out in Left’s best-read piece:
Because Bruce Springsteen is my guy: “Red, White, and Misused: How ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ Became an Anthem for Everything That It Wasn’t,” by Alan Siegel for The Ringer (link)