There have been no games in either league for more than a month, but there has been plenty of conflict and drama in both Major League Baseball and the National Football League. On one hand, we had MLB locking out its players – delaying the start of the 2022 season – to put maximum pressure on the players’ association. On the other, the NFL is preparing its response to former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores’s racial discrimination lawsuit.
What’s the connection? Well, both situations involve entities that represent the interests of team owners – all fantastically wealthy – in very real public relations battles. In both situations, the NFL and MLB have acted as if they have the edge thanks to their very substantial financial resources. It’s entirely possible that they’re both right, although MLB may be pushing things further than it realizes.
Let’s start with Flores’s lawsuit which alleges, among other things, racially discriminatory hiring practices in the NFL. More specifically, it calls out the Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to consider a minority candidate when looking to make a head coaching change. Critics have long suspected that, in practice, the Rooney Rule is a loophole-filled directive that has mostly resulted in teams conducting sham interviews with candidates that they have no intention of hiring. The details in Flores’s lawsuit, particularly damning text messages from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, appear to back this up.
Flores, who currently has an assistant coaching job with the Pittsburgh Steelers, claims that he refused an offer worth millions of dollars to sign a non-disparagement agreement with the Dolphins. If true, it would be difficult to imagine this wasn’t a common occurrence in an industry swarming with high-profile scandals.
Throwing money at problems has worked for the league in the past. Remember the lawsuit filed by Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid alleging that they were frozen out of the NFL after they began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality? The league found the suit to be so potentially disruptive that it settled with the two under the condition that the public never gets to know the details.
The whole concept is a variation on the theme that “punishable by fine” doesn’t mean “illegal” but “legal for those who can afford it.” As Leverage writer John Rogers often comments on Twitter, “a fine is a price.” For most of us, a parking fine is a deterrent. If you happen to be Jeff Bezos, however, there’s nothing stopping you from making a mockery of such laws by paying off $160,000 worth of parking fines for a group of contractors you’ve hired.
In the NFL, it’s possible for those on top to buy silence, but often the league doesn’t even need to do that. There are only so many jobs in the NFL, so there’s a natural self-preservation instinct among its employees. The reason that the actions of Flores, Kaepernick and Reid are notable is that they actually put their careers on the line.
MLB also benefits from the one-sided nature of the employer-employee relationship. Under commissioner Rob Manfred, MLB made the decision to lock out its players in an attempt to tip the scales even further in the team owners’ direction. Thankfully for baseball fans, the league and the MLB Players Association have resolved their issues for the time being and the start of the regular season has only been delayed by a week.
The question remains: why did the league feel like it could risk losing an entire season in the first place? Well, it starts with the fact that the MLB teams have the financial upper hand: rich owners can absorb the lost revenue easily while the vast majority of their employees cannot. After all, April games aren’t typically hot tickets anyway.
If you look at the lockout from a financial standpoint, it seems like MLB was in danger of cutting off its nose to spite its face by putting the season in jeopardy. However, this isn’t all about money – if it were, Manfred wouldn’t have waited 43 days to make his first proposal to the MLB Players Association – this was part of a power play, possibly an overt attempt to break the union.
It was, in a way, an elaborate game of chicken, albeit one between a double-decker bus and a bicyclist. This time around, both sides emerged rattled but alive. In fact, this was probably the best possible outcome for those whose primary hope was for the work stoppage to end as quickly as possible. Simply by pressuring the players into accepting a deal this early in the process, the league can feel like it won. However, the incident raises the question of whether the league overplayed its hand in the process.
MLB, it needs to be emphasized, is nowhere near as invulnerable as the mighty NFL, which has easily brushed aside controversies that would be existential threats to less-established sports entities. Neither concerns about CTE and the lingering effects of concussions nor the polarizing culture wars that surrounded Kaepernick’s knee-downs have had much effect on the league’s popularity.
Even Flores’s lawsuit, released for maximum exposure during the lead-up to this year’s Super Bowl, was overshadowed by the cynical yet effective deployment of a halftime celebration of hip-hop.
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Meanwhile, professional baseball lost a significant amount of support after the 1994-95 players’ strike, to the point where a home run chase of dubious authenticity is credited as “saving the sport.” Although still highly profitable, baseball’s popularity, particularly among younger fans, has dipped during Manfred’s time in charge. Calling for a lockout so soon after the pandemic-shortened season of 2020 felt like a clear example of the league prioritizing short-term gains over the long-term health of the sport.
Not that there will be a reckoning any time soon. It’s likely that the owners don’t think MLB will suffer or they think they will be able to cash out before their audience starts dying out. When the least valuable team in the league (the Miami Marlins) is worth around $990m, team owners may be correct in thinking that MLB – like the NFL – is simply too rich to fail.