Baseball’s Labor History Is Repeating Itself Once Again

Major League Baseball’s upcoming CBA negotiations have generally been framed around the question of the salary cap. Owners want it. Players don’t. The rest of it—Juan Soto makes $50 million a year, a third of the league’s teams keep forgetting to try, so on—is both true enough and primarily noise made for the sake of making noise. Every CBA negotiation is at least a little bit like this.

The question of “which side are you on?” is complicated somewhat by the fact that this is a dispute between the obscenely rich and the extremely rich; we aren’t dealing with the miner’s son against JH Blair here. But the question of where else this money would go is not complicated. It’s not going to the miner’s son, of course.

It’s going into the pockets of people like David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $475 billion in assets, responsible for buying up property and raising rents in New York City, participating in union busting and exploitative labor practices, and investing in the defense industry; he owns the Orioles. And also to Ray Davis, whose company, Energy Transfer, owns the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the subject of protests in 2016 due to its encroachment on Sioux land and disastrous environmental effects; Davis owns the Rangers. That money would go to Giants’ owner, Charles B. Johnson, a billionaire who regularly donates to the political campaigns of right-wing fanatics. You get the point—this money is controlled by 30 cosmetically different versions of JH Blair, all of whom are trying to convince the public that they are on the side of fairness, unlike the greedy players union, which is made up mostly of players who will virtually all never have contracts even close to what Juan Soto is getting, and none of whom to my knowledge own even one oil pipeline. This makes deciding which side you are on a bit easier to answer.