Walker: Player Ranger

Woke up this morning to this late night tweet from Dodgers star pitcher Walker Buehler:

Walker Buehler @buehlersdayoff

PLEASE tell me how what we, the players, are asking for is crazy? Inflation happens. Markets rise. Money grows. Ask our owners. They know. Why would we agree to less than even inflation level income rises? Would you take that?

I probably don’t need to give you general vibe of the responses to this utterly reasonable tweet but I will — they seem to fall into four general categories:

1. Millionaires vs. billionaires, who cares.

2. No sympathy here for players who are getting paid all that cash and are completely oblivious to what it’s like in the real world (aka: “How will you ever make it on the millions you’re getting paid, there, Walker?”).

3. I can’t afford to go to baseball games as is, now you guys want more money — it will only make things more expensive for the average family (aka: “You are making SO MUCH MORE money than I am, Walker, I don’t want to hear your complaints”).

4. With everything going on in the world right now, you shouldn’t be talking about your so-called “problems” (aka: “I don’t care whose fault it is, we need baseball as a distraction and all I know is that you’re not playing”).

Now, it would be easy enough to attack such comments, as many have, but it seems to me they almost all come from a very real place of frustration and anger. Spring training should have started already. Spring training games should be happening in the next few days. Opening Day should be about a month away. Sports fans, many of us, are calendar creatures, we begin to crave baseball as March approaches, just as we hunger for football as August afternoons heat up, just as we feel that twinge of excitement for basketball and hockey as Halloween decorations come out.

The last thing any of us want to be thinking about as snowstorms blow in or as daylight fades out in the late afternoon is how baseball owners and players are splitting up our hard-earned money.

Walker Buehler is an excellent example of the absurd economic system in baseball. He just finished his third full season, and here’s what he FanGraphs has him worth in those three seasons:

2018: 8-5, 2.62 ERA, third in Rookie of Year — $25 million

2019: 14-4, 4.26 ERA, All-Star, 9th in Cy Young — $41 million

2021: 16-4, 2.47 ERA, All-Star, 4th in Cy Young — $43.7 million

In between there, in the 2020 COVID season, he was as pivotal as anyone in helping lead the Dodgers to their first World Series title in 32 years. But we won’t even get into that season.

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Now, here’s what Walker Buehler was paid in those three season and the percentage of his FanGraphs value (you can add in here that that he was given a $1.78 million signing bonus when he was drafted as the 24th overall pick in 2015):

2018: $500,000 or so (2% of FanGraphs value)

2019: $570,000 (1.3% of FanGraphs value)

2021: $3.75 million (8.6% of FanGraphs value)

Now, there are any number of ways to look at this. You can look at Buehler getting paid almost $5 million dollars in his career (and more than $6 million if you count his signing bonus) and that’s a huge sum of money, and he should not complain. That’s not an unnatural thought.

You can also look at Buehler and say, “Hey, he’s still paying his dues, he’ll get his big payday down the road.”

You can also look at Buehler and say, “That’s absolutely ridiculous, nobody should get paid such a tiny percentage of their value on the vague promise of a fair-market value deal down the road. And it’s not like the money he isn’t getting paid just disappears. It just goes to someone else who is not Walker Buehler.”

Or, finally, you can look at Buehler and say: Who cares?

It is the last of these that interests me the most because — why should we care about how much players get paid? Do we care how much movie stars get paid? Do we care about how much Bruce Springsteen or Beyoncé get paid? Do we care how much artists or writers or comedians get paid? If we do, it’s only out of celebrity curiosity: “Wow, Robert Pattinson only got paid $3 million for “The Batman”! Maybe it’s because ‘The Batman’ is a terrible name for a movie.”

But this gets at the point: The reason we care about how much Buehler gets paid, how much LeBron James gets paid, how much Patrick Mahomes gets paid, is because sports owners have very cleverly made us care. They have made player salaries front and center in the news, not only by announcing (to the penny) how much each player gets paid, but by closely tying that salary to the one thing fans care most about: the success of the team.

In other sports, that means a salary cap. Anthony Davis is probably still one of the dozen or so best players in the NBA, but right now he’s a salary cap anchor preventing the Lakers from having the flexibility they clearly need as the season gets away from them. If there were no salary cap and we didn’t know what Anthony Davis was making, all of that frustration and resentment that Lakers fans felt would be laser focused on team management and ownership and their inability to improve this team.

But now, it’s in the news every single day that their hands are tied. We hear about how they simply cannot do anything as long as Davis, LeBron and Russell Westbrook are eating up their salary cap. It’s THEIR fault, see?

This is one of the many reasons that baseball players have fought so hard against a salary cap, but the so-called Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) — even that name is a whole lot of bluster and nonsense since the tax is clearly meant to depress salaries and not to help competitive balance — serves in more or less the same way as a hard cap.

Buehler has a point, not that many people are interested in hearing it. (Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)

Competitive Balance Tax — wow, they pulled a fast one with that name. In 2021, according to Maury Brown over at Forbes, there was a $168 million drop in total MLB payroll — the fourth straight season in which total payroll fell (not counting the COVID season, which was obviously bad for everyone). This fall happened even as teams made more money from television, streaming, gambling and other revenue streams.

Put it this way: The latest CBA began in 2016.

In 2021, players on the whole made LESS than they did in 2016.

That’s clearly absurd and ridiculous — and that’s what Walker Buehler was saying. In fact, that’s all he was saying. He was not protesting about getting paid a tiny percentage of his worth. He was not demanding a complete teardown of the system. He was certainly not complaining about his lot in life … he later tweeted out what I feel sure is his honest belief: “We are EXTREMELY lucky to do what we do but the numbers don’t line up.”

They don’t. As I tweeted out, the owners locked out the players. Then they refused to negotiate. Then they made a big show of requesting mediation and trying to make the players look bad for refusing. Then they made a couple of lame and empty offers with the full intention of them being rebuffed so they could say the players were unreasonable. Then they gave a hard deadline of Monday as the last day to make a deal before they start eliminating games.

All of this is probably smart hardball negotiating, as you would expect from ruthless billionaires straight out of “Succession.”

And the players, alas, are stuck, because they get paid well, much better than the rest of us, and so their efforts to fight back are mocked by so many fans and so much media. You probably saw this tweet from The Associated Press:

AP Sports @AP_Sports

Mets' Max Scherzer arrives in Porsche, joins fellow pitcher Gerrit Cole and other players as union and MLB meet for a third straight day in an attempt to salvage opening day on March 31 amid lockout.

apne.wsMLB: Season to be shortened if no deal by end of MondayJUPITER, Fla. (AP) — Major League Baseball said only five days remain to salvage March 31 openers and a full season, telling locked out players that games would be canceled if a labor contract is not agreed to by the end of Monday.

Max Scherzer arrives in Porsche to negotiate with men who have jets, yachts and private islands.

You have to see it to believe it.

But that’s the general tone (though the AP, I must say, has been particularly bad about carrying water for the owners). I wrote the other day about how Marvin Miller told me that he flat out did not care about the fans because they have always sided against the players. It was a harsh judgment from an exacting and stern man … but I think his point was more right than wrong. The players will not get sympathy and support from most fans because they drive Porsches and make millions and are the public face of a game that isn’t being played.

There’s no question in my mind that the owners could end this thing right now, meet in the middle on every issue, and come out way, way ahead. But they won’t do that because that’s not how billionaires operate. They will push this as far as it can go; they know a winning fight when they see one. And the owners will count on the fans coming back after they’re done pillaging.

And if the players want to fight back and get more of their fair share, they will have to do so over the taunts and screams of jilted baseball fans who, like always, feel powerless because, for the most part, we are powerless.

In other words, the players are surely more right than the owners. But that doesn’t change the fact: They’re still on their own.