MLB’s power dynamics, Mbappé for president, and more
The Out in Left Weekly: June 23, 2024
MLB
Baseball’s TV business creates interesting power dynamics
For once, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is with the fans. As ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez reported this week, the league wants a bankruptcy judge to shut down Diamond Sports Group, the company that holds exclusive broadcasting rights for twelve MLB teams. The company’s demise would allow MLB to move closer to Manfred’s dream of packaging broadcasting rights for all thirty teams under a single umbrella and broadcasting games without blackout restrictions. I pray.
The league’s desire to see Diamond close shop is a roundabout way to create leverage with the large market teams that cling to their exclusive regional broadcast deals. The Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees can more or less fund their entire baseball operation through their TV deals, to say nothing of revenue generated from gate receipts, concessions, real estate, licensing, and so on. These teams print money, while smaller market teams have to actually pay attention to their balance sheets to turn a profit.
Many Minnesota Twins fans, for example, can’t watch their team as a result of the Diamond bankruptcy saga, which imperils a critical revenue stream for the team. And thanks in part to MLB’s antitrust exemption, the Dodgers and Yankees are independent, monopolistic fiefdoms. Manfred can’t really make them do anything, let alone force them to relinquish their exclusive TV deals, so teams like the Twins are on their own for now. This is why Manfred is looking to the courts for help. In one corner are the Dodgers, Yankees, New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies, and Boston Red Sox. In the other is Manfred and the twenty-five other teams.
He can take on the large market teams head on, organizing the smaller teams to wield their collective power. But then the large-market owners will throw a few bones to their colleagues and cobble together the votes to fire Manfred, or at least put him back in his place.
He can chip away at the power of the large market teams by having the league assume broadcast rights team by team, as it has been doing during Diamond’s struggles. (The league now produces broadcasts for the San Diego Padres, Arizona Diamondbacks, and Colorado Rockies.) But then that would take too long. Manfred’s retiring in a few years and his legacy is top of mind for him.
He can go to lawmakers, arguing policy is needed to address the collapsing business model for small market teams, but then that would endanger and undermine his arguments for maintaining MLB’s antitrust exemption.
This is to say Manfred and the league are stuck between a rock and a hard place on baseball’s future on TV. It’s a conundrum of their own making. That’s because the goal of the league and its team owners isn't to beam its TV product into as many eyes as possible. Their goal is to make as much money as possible while maintaining their monopoly. As rich white men wring their hands in boardrooms, us fans sit in front of blank TVs, and we will do so until team owners become as interested in baseball as we are.
Other news
Kylian Mbappé for president
Ahead of the Euro 2024 soccer tournament this week, French superstar Kylian Mbappé urged his country, particularly its youth, to reject extremism at upcoming elections. “Today we see that the extremes are knocking on the door of power,” he said, “and we have the opportunity to shape the future of our country.”
Regardless of his politics—I believe he was rejecting the National Rally, a far-right party led by Marine Le Pen that’s poised to gain power—Mbappé’s words and the confidence in which he delivered them are striking.
Here is a global sports icon, set to make nearly $50 million a year playing for Real Madrid, unafraid to express a political thought that is important to him. And he did so not through the lens of ideology and policy, but through values and power, which is what politics is about. He clearly thinks about and has an interest in politics and has a skill for communicating about them. His is a desperately needed moral voice.
At the same time, I am embarrassed by how surprised I am by Mbappé. Wow, look, an athlete has a thought! He is articulate! It makes me conscious of how I’m not immune to society’s expectation for athletes being sporting robots. We get frustrated by their platitudes—“they just wanted it more than us,” etc.—yet we also decry, or at least deem it newsworthy, when athletes speak their mind. It is a point Mbappé throws in my face. “The Euros are an important moment in our careers, but I think we are citizens first of all, and we must not be disconnected from the world around us.”
Work often represents who we are. This relates to the ‘character mask,’ the concept that we are forced to assume the identity of our social/economic role. Asking “So what do you do?” is making polite conversation, but the question also reflects how we can or should get to know someone through how they sell their labor power. It’s a limiting way to view humans, and many would resist the notion that they are just a teacher, just a doctor. Mbappé is not just a soccer player. He is a person who plays soccer, and that’s something he reminds us of.
“It is often said that you must not mix politics and football,” he said. “But in a situation like this, it is very important. It is more important than tomorrow’s match.”
Out in Left programming note
I am going on vacation, so there will be less Out in Left over the next few weeks. To fill the void, I’ll repost an early essay in the annals of Out in Left, this time with a voiceover reading. A common refrain among this newsletter’s legion of fans is, “It’s really good, but it’s really long.” Hopefully, audio appeases the masses.
Recommendations
Because it is an excellent story about Tony Gwynn: “10 years after his passing, Tony Gwynn's fingerprints are still everywhere,” by AJ Cassavell for MLB.com (link)
Because you own your PTO, not your employer: take a vacation.
I especially enjoyed your observation Mbappe. Today it takes courage to speak out which comes of possessing moral compass.