Rozner: Baseball headed for catastrophic shutdown

There hasn't been a work stoppage in baseball for 25 years, something less a labor peace than a truce with tensions always bubbling just below the surface.

Bud Selig figured out he couldn't break the union, which was his goal all along, and after they canceled the 1994 World Series, most of the owners finally understood that they couldn't beat Don Fehr and the legacy of Marvin Miller.

Thus, they gave up and gave in.

But since Fehr left in 2009, and successor Michael Weiner died of cancer in 2013, the players under new boss Tony Clark have given back far too much in regards to the luxury tax.

The result has been increasingly frozen free-agent markets, except for the very few at the top of the food chain.

Clark has been clobbered by Rob Manfred, who has a long history as baseball's labor lawyer, and the players have become unhappy with the union's bargaining position.

As that has occurred, the biggest agents have come to the forefront and they are now running the union, Clark serving as an expensive figurehead, always screaming about how terribly unfair the owners have been.

When the pandemic hit a year ago, the owners tried desperately to work with the union and complete some sort of season, but the union's unbending attitude cost them at least another 30 to 40 games, and the salary associated with that.

It was the kind of posture the players exhibited when they were really pounding the owners, a power they no longer possess as a fractured group doesn't want the most powerful agents in charge of their tactics.

The owners eventually threw up their hands last year and played it the way the union wanted, albeit after much wasted time.

Recently, the owners have again come in with an offer that is hardly perfect, a delayed and shortened season - with full, 162-game pay - but requiring concessions on both sides. Just like last year, the union refuses to acknowledge the financial impact of the pandemic and every response has the next CBA in mind.

In no other major professional sport has a union been so unwilling to acknowledge the economic disaster. Some of that is due to many decades of baseball owners hiding profits and moving revenue from one pocket to another, while crying poor in the process.

The distrust on both sides grows and the animosity skyrocketing by the day.

The owners have again given up and given in, just like last year, and everyone is apparently headed to spring training on time. The players will get their full benefits under the CBA in 2021, and dig in for what is certain to be the nastiest battle between the two sides since 1995.

I always qualify this by saying I'm a players' guy, a capitalist who believes in the free market and that players should make every dollar they can, just as Tom Cruise should be paid $25 million for a movie if someone is willing to pay it, and Will Smith should earn $100 million from "Men in Black III" if he can engineer that kind of a deal.

Good for them. That's the way it should work, if indeed this remains a free-market economy and capitalist society.

In baseball, one side does not exist without the other and the problem with the MLBPA is it's being unreasonable at an unreasonable time in this country's financial history, and it's more than just the terrible optics.

The other leagues and their unions are working together to keep sports afloat when scores of millions are suffering terribly, but baseball is back to a place it was in the '80s and '90s, when the two sides hated one another, couldn't trust one another and were willing to shut the game down to make a point and get what they wanted.

This is where we are. This is where we are headed. And this time, unlike all the earlier versions, it's the union - pushed by agents - that is threatening the future of the game.

There will be a 2021 season, probably with fits and stops and positive tests, and ultimately there will be a champion crowned again.

Enjoy it because there might not be a 2022 season. Both sides are more hardened by the day, and the vitriol from the union does not at all match the reality of what's occurring.

They seem more focused on winning the battle of public opinion, which is so absurdly tone deaf as to be entirely unaware that no one is listening and no one cares.

Go ahead, shut down the game when the CBA expires Dec. 1. You will do more damage than you can possibly imagine, mostly in the name of proving that you're right and the owners are wrong, and at great cost to those at the bottom of the salary scale.

You have given back too much in the past and that ship has sailed. The owners aren't going to give away a de facto salary cap that you, the union, has given them.

It is that, not collusion, that has stifled salaries the last few years.

If the ultimate goal is to remove those taxes, if that's the hill the union intends to die on, there might be no baseball at all next year as the biggest agents argue for the richest players, at the expense of the rest.

And when there's no baseball, it won't be the usual "plague on both your houses." This time, instead of the owners, it's the union that wants a fight and will back itself into a corner it can't escape.

The loser, as always, will be the fan.