The Major League Baseball Lockout was a Window into What’s Wrong with America: Billionaire Owners Who Put Greed before Community

Spring is just around the corner and with it comes the promise of beautiful weather, blooming flowers, and, if you love sports, baseball.  

Certainly, amidst the tidal wave of awfulness in the news, from the horror in Ukraine and the toxic wasteland of our own degraded political landscape to the looming threat of catastrophic climate change inching ever closer with each new IPCC report, many of us could use the blessed distraction that baseball brings.  

Baseball helps me live.  It’s perhaps the best American manifestation of the kind of daily ritual that enables us to achieve a small portion of the balance and harmony we need to provide ballast against the chaos of the world.  Whether it’s playing the game or simply contemplating it, baseball provides one with precisely the kind of focused yet purposeless activity that can take you out to the ballgame and into the heart of the moment.  

It’s the stillness at the center of the game that I love, the empty space out of which motion and grace emerge--the pregnant nothing that gives birth to the artful something.  And baseball, like art, is gorgeously useless and inefficiently slow.  

Perhaps that slowness is why baseball has given ground to the more brutal, time-driven, managerially efficient game of football.  We go from the Taylorized, competitive realm of the corporate world to a gladiatorial weekend on the gridiron that celebrates many of the same values.  

We move too fast and are too distracted for the grand old game, but that’s precisely why we need it.  What people find boring about baseball is what’s missing in their lives—unstructured time dictated by their actions rather than the tyranny of measured time.  

But sadly, this spring, those who own the game seemed bent on killing it and alienating a whole new generation of fans from America’s pastime.

As the world burned, they fiddled. 

Let’s be clear: this whole obscene spectacle was the owners’ fault, not the players or their union.  Indeed, the players said they would have been happy to play while negotiating but the owners insisted on maintaining the lockout.  

As Dave Zirin has pointed out in the Nation, this was a bosses’ lockout and our sympathy should be with the players:  

• This is not the wrangling of “billionaires vs. millionaires,” a bosses’ narrative that much of the mainstream media has dutifully parroted, but a lockout—not a strike, a lockout: The wealthiest parasites in the sport have unilaterally shut down the game. This is so obviously a “bosses’ strike” that it has baseball insiders sounding like Che Guevara . . . 

• But the owners in their cosseted isolation don’t care how any of this looks. They are banking on the players’ cracking under the weight of their lost paychecks and shortened careers. All the players have is their own solidarity, and Lord knows we need as many high-profile instances of labor unity in the face of bosses’ greed as we can get. At a moment when Starbucks workers across the country are trying to unite and hold together in the face of union busting, the players have a chance to show the world that solidarity is the only way to win . . . 

• So much of what once passed for community has been torn asunder over the past 50 years. If baseball and a day at the park is going to be added to the list, let it not go down without a fight. The players should not be slandered as co-conspirators in the destruction of the game. End the bosses’ lockout, and stop the corporate greed ruining baseball.

In fact, baseball’s billionaire class has made a killing while doing all they could to destroy the game.  As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, the list of baseball oligarchs is long and, despite their cries of poverty, their bank accounts are overflowing.  Nonetheless, during a grueling pandemic where they could have offered solace for a nation in need of some relief, they kept playing the role of Scrooge.  

Perhaps the poster boy for this was San Francisco Giants principal owner, Charles B Johnson, who laid off 10% of the Giants workforce while he was busy donating millions to right wing zealots and, as the San Jose Mercury News reported “Controversial Causes Including QAnon” : 

• Johnson donated the maximum allowable amount to the campaigns of three United States senators and at least 20 members of the House of Representatives who voted to overturn the results of the November presidential election.

• According to FEC filings, Johnson and his wife Ann each donated $2,800 to Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado who tweeted the whereabouts of House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi during January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. Aside from refusing to certify election results and putting the highest-ranking member of the house in danger, Boebert has also expressed support for QAnon, a set of far-right conspiracy theories alleging Satan-worshipping pedophiles are plotting against President Trump . . . 

• Reports in recent months have shown no owner in American professional sports has donated more to campaigns than Johnson, who gave out more than $4.2 million during this cycle and has donated upward of $10 million since 2015.

• Candidates around the country received a financial boost from Johnson around the same time the Giants announced they were laying off 10% of their full-time employees “due to the unprecedented impact and continued uncertainty of the pandemic on our operations.”

• Could the $4.2 million have saved those jobs? Could 50% of that total, say $2.1 million, have saved those jobs? The answer to both of those questions is yes.

Despite a significant outcry in the Bay Area, Johnson’s donations to candidates determined to undermine democracy continue, making him the most avid supporter of the wingnut wing of the GOP amongst professional sports owners.  As Around the Horn notes: 

• One thing is clear. SF Giants principal owner Charles B. Johnson prioritizes the Republican Party above his own employees. Even in the world of professional sports, which remains a particularly right-wing sect of American culture, Johnson is unparalleled in his fervor to donate money and support right-wing causes.

And while Johnson clearly stands out in his largesse directed toward reactionaries and racists, Major League Baseball’s billionaire owners as a whole, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis of political donations by professional sports bosses, throw more money into politics than any other league, and it goes to Republicans by a ratio of about 3-1.

So, when they are not eviscerating the minor league teams in small cities and towns across America, locking out their players, laying off ordinary workers, or bilking fans for their last dollar as they slowly destroy the game, many in baseball’s billionaire class are busy trying to push the country further to the right.  

Say it ain’t so?  Alas it is.  So much for the field of dreams.  

Footnote: Where do the Padres stand in all of this?  In terms of wealth, the owners of San Diego’s baseball team are multi-millionaires rather than billionaires.  As for political donations, the most recent available information on Open Secrets actually shows them donating a paltry $27,831 dollars to only Democrats in 2020, including $823 to Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders. 

I must admit that this will make me feel a bit more fondly towards them as I sit watching baseball again while sipping a $20 IPA, but for me, along with all the other long-suffering fans, this greed-fueled lockout will make that beer taste a little more bitter.  

So, play ball!  Finally.