Padecky: Baseball owners, players show their greed

The baseball train is barreling toward the brick wall. What do the owners and players decide? Make a quick call to mom? One more toke from Jack? Hit the KILL switch? Nah.

Let’s see how fast this sucker will go.

In the most remarkable combination of acrimony, ignorance and selfishness, this sport has placed itself clearly outside of what’s happening in America right now. While this country screams and yells, shoots and loots, while a semi-truck barrels into crowds and someone shoots an arrow into protesters, the sport’s billionaires and millionaires are just as angry.

Over money.

The societal disconnect is as wide as their grasp on reality. Nothing is as unseemly as very rich people squabbling over who shares the gold in the midst of the most disturbing social unrest in America we’ve seen since the ’60s. This leads us to rewrite an old bromide. No longer is it enough to say: “The very rich are different than the rest of us.”

This phrase has been updated to be more relevant: “The very rich don’t care about the rest of us.”

Of course, there’s something that can be done about that.

Stay away. Once fans can re-enter stadiums and buy overpriced hot dogs and beer, once they can pay for their over-priced parking spot and seat in the upper deck, don’t. Stay away. It’s the only way to get the attention of the money grabbers.

Otherwise the owners and players will assume they can take fans for what they always have - suckers. We can burn down the house like we did in 1994 but they’ll rebuild it for us. The fans come back. They always come back. Of course, we had to give them a bunch of Popeyes playing shortstop. We had to run out a bunch of steroid freaks out there. Muscle Beach and the home run saved us. Fans ate it up.

However, this time it’s different. Seasonal attendance has been dropping four consecutive years. The game now displays the unholy and boring trifecta of home run, strikeout, walk. Stolen bases? Complete games? Er, strategy? What, old-timer, you must have been around to watch Babe Ruth to believe that? You’ll probably want them to wear woolen uniforms, too, you knuckle-dragger.

“For me to take a pay cut,” said Tampa Bay pitcher Blake Snell, maybe the best left-handed pitcher in the game today, “it’s not going to happen. I gotta get my money.”

Blake is working at a coal mine all right. He’s on a five-year, $50 million contract. Fifty million large just doesn’t go as far as it once did. Obviously.

Blake was not yet two years old when the 1994 work stoppage occurred. So of course he doesn’t remember the hostility that passed for negotiations. He has no memory of why the players have an instinctive and well-deserved distrust in owners. He also has no frame of reference either of what it’s like to be worth $4.9 billion as Giants’ owner Charles Bartlett Johnson is.

Like every MLB owner, Johnson can sit this one out. Ain’t gonna see any MLB owner running into a looted Target to snatch a television. Then again, Snell won’t have to either. Both can sit comfortably in their recliners and shoot the stink eye at each other from across their well-manicured lawns, ones that could pass as a putting green.

That’s why this optic plays out so poorly. Twenty percent of Americans have lost their jobs. Seems at least that many people are in the streets at night with a heat on. Everyone in an uniform feels like a target.

Except the baseball player in a uniform and the one who dresses him there. Hey, stop griping, the owners will say. Player salaries have gone up 40 percent in the last 10 years. Oh yeah, say the players? Franchise value has increased 300 percent during that same time. So there. Pffft!

You may have read some of the issues being pulled in so many directions as if they are chewy toys. Big money guys take big money pay cuts. Players agree to prorated pay reductions but not additional cuts. The billionaires agree they have to do that otherwise they’ll lose money. How much, the players ask? Just like in ’94, we’ll get around to that soon, the owners say.

And so it goes, this merry-go-around that never stops spinning. It gets dizzy to try to keep up. Many of us already have stopped, concentrating on other issues like paying the rent, staying alive and watching the city of their dreams being treated like a piñata.

One and only one exit makes sense, suitable for all viewers.

An economic deal is reached. Both sides reach across the table, smiling, happy. The season, however, is cancelled because health issues can not be resolved. Too complicated. Too many lives are at risk. Don’t expect a 25-year old single man full of testosterone to remain in his hotel for three months. Don’t expect wives and children to jump at the chance to check into Hotel Incubation and go to the Petri Dish restaurant and swim in an HazMat suit at the hotel’s pool.

That ending, that’s acceptable, reasonable, understandable. Makes sense.

On the other hand the season is cancelled because the two sides have done everything including Rock, Paper, Scissors and still can’t agree. That, and the knife wounds are slow to heal. Plus, Blake Snell looked at me funny.

If that’s what the owners and players decide, they shouldn’t be surprised at the response from the people who make all this possible.

Go back to your sandbox, the one encrusted with diamond inlay, and leave me alone. I don’t have time for this foolishness. I gotta look for a job.

To comment write to bobpadecky@?gmail.com.