The MLBPA on Friday offered modest financial support for ballpark workers affected by the owner-initiated lockout, now in its third month and already having claimed much of spring training and at least the first two series of the regular season.
The union said it was launching an initial fund of $1 million to pitch in for the estimated 40,000 workers who were left in the lurch by the first loss of regular-season games in 27 years. The owners, put on the defensive, responded with a similar fund to match the players.
The move was a nice gesture by the players, but still it's hard not to see it as cynical and opportunistic given recent historical developments, not to mention that those funds won't go very far once divvied up.
Coming on the heels of at least a couple public pleas from players directly addressing fans, it seemed to be part of a stepped-up PR campaign to win over public support.
Considering the circumstances and the parties involved, the players shouldn't have to work very hard to achieve such support, as the owners bear sole responsibility for the lockout in the most literal sense, since they started it, refuse to end it, and by all accounts have negotiated in bad faith.
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After all, many fans rightly view baseball's owners as the same parasitic class largely responsible for the immiseration of the middle and working classes in recent decades.
Indeed, many baseball owners are the same titans of business responsible for the manipulation of the political and economic systems that has resulted in the kind of wealth and social inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century.
Instead, the ploy to leverage solidarity with working-class people could be interpreted as a recognition by the players that many workers are ambivalent toward professional athletes and their insular, self-interested unions.
And in reality, most of the major trade unions claiming to represent workers are led by compromised upper-middle-class managers who in recent decades have overseen the outright elimination of countless jobs and the erosion of living standards for their remaining memberships.
Baseball players said little to nothing about these undeniable trends, all while continuing to fight for their own narrow interests.
In 2020, the players union voiced rhetorical support for laid-off hospitality workers, endorsing a bill passed by the California State Legislature that would have compelled hotels to re-hire all workers who were let go at the outset of the pandemic.
The bill was vetoed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom before he later approved a watered-down version, proving once again that rhetoric only goes so far without action, a lesson baseball players are all too aware of.
The hollowness of MLBPA's Friday announcement was laid bare by the coordination of the initiative with the AFL-CIO, long a leading collaborator with big business and government in attacking the rights of workers both in the US and abroad.
Of course none of this changes the importance of unions for workers, but rather it underscores the urgent need for rank-and-file committees, which can operate free of the constraints and bad faith of the AFL-CIO's and other unions' high-paid managers, who have long shored up their own cushy positions by brokering sellout deals at the expense of workers.
Amid an unprecedented upsurge in the class struggle in recent years -- largely marked by wildcat strikes and other actions from rank-and-file groups of teachers, nurses, food and auto workers, and countless others -- baseball players have been conspicuously silent.
Yet the MLBPA has a real stake in supporting such worker actions, since workers and the players share a common enemy that threatens them both and, indeed, all of society and the rest of the world.
Players seem vaguely aware of this but are unable or unwilling to fully grasp and articulate it, seeking instead to find a "golden mean" whereby they can preserve their own place among the One Percent while still presenting themselves as laborers sympathetic to the working class.
At the height of the pandemic in 2020, veteran relief pitcher Sean Doolittle famously said sports are the reward for a functioning society.
The two-time All-Star was absolutely correct, but his comment came in the fairly narrow context of public health, and he failed to make the connection that the US' homicidal virus policies were not simply the result of vague "politicization," but specifically driven by the profit interests of the ultra-wealthy.
What the players are now learning in a new, unvarnished way is what workers have always known -- there can be no long-term golden mean with a billionaire class hellbent on taking everything for itself while leaving the masses to fight over the crumbs.
The return of labor militancy outside the confines of the collaborators in the official union apparatuses, along with broader movements for social and economic justice, have terrified the ruling classes. It partly explains the owners' attempts to not only shrink the players' slice of baseball's vast revenue pie, but also to break the union and to score a very public "win" against the rising tide of these movements.
A sincere reorientation toward labor by the players is not just the right thing to do, but the only way to save baseball and, indeed, more importantly perhaps the world at large, which is increasingly beset by multiple concurrent existential crises such as the pandemic, climate change, and the drive to global war involving nuclear powers -- all of which are the result of policies embraced by the ruling class and the politicians they own.
No doubt these are big asks of ballplayers, but surely they must have some sense of the stakes for working people, since the players themselves have seen their take decrease in recent years, even as revenues have increased sharply.
It shouldn't require much imagination to see what those losses mean, proportionately, for all workers. That is something very far from a functioning society, and if such a world is to be achieved, the players of the national pastime should want to play a role in seeing it come into existence.
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