Good morning baseball fans!
As we approach the beginning of the season, we’re going to be doing some questions for y’all about your thoughts about the San Francisco Giants and baseball in general!
Keeping with the theme of the week (the potential work stoppage after the upcoming season), today’s question: Who would be to blame if there is another work stoppage?
This is a tricky question, because there’s politics involved. Theoretically, if both parties are operating in good faith, the blame would fall equally if they failed to come to a mutually beneficial agreement.
But that is rarely the way these things play out.
So for me, I look at who has the power. While the players ultimately have the ability to strike if a deal can’t be reached, they are (generally speaking) approaching negotiations in good faith. But I don’t feel like I can say the same of the other side. And they have the power.
They have the power to push a media narrative about players just being “greedy,” or “difficult,” or whatever else they want to say about them to get fans to turn on them. They have the power to implement a lockout if they want to. And they have the ultimate power to get a deal done either way; they just tend to choose not to in order to wear the players down and extract concessions from the union.
As always, that’s just my opinion after watching the way things have played out over the last decade or so for both the sport, and labor issues in general.
Who would be to blame for another work stoppage?