fred klein on sports

               If you follow this space you know I used to share my Kentucky Derby picks and thoughts the week of the annual Big Race, but I haven’t done it the last two years and won’t be doing it this year. That’s because, again, I won’t have seen most of the prep races leading up to it.

               I’m still a fan of thoroughbred racing, and haven’t gotten lazy (about that, at least). It’s that a dispute between Arizona racing authorities and the Stronach Group have denied Arizona betting outlets the simulcasts from Stronach’s Santa Anita and Gulfstream Park tracks, the sport’s two most important winter venues. The beef is in its third year with no end in sight and the racing public, or what’s left of it, be damned. Those guys make Major League Baseball look good.

               And that’s just one of the black eyes the erstwhile Sport of Kings has inflicted upon itself in recent years, a strange practice for an enterprise that’s in bad shape to begin with. The sport’s biggest problem is an intractable one: an aging fan base that goes against the grain of our quick-thrill culture by poring over the tiny numbers in the past-performance charts in an effort to make intelligent bets.  Rather than allowing us to peter out in peace, it heaps indignities upon us, almost without number.

               Exhibit A on that list is the Derby itself, the one race the general public has when it’s having only one. Amazingly, the horses that crossed the finish line first in two of the race’s last three editions have not turned out to be the winner, shaking confidence in what once was a verity. Maximum Security, the 2019 winner, was taken down for interfering with other horses by briefly veering out of his lane in the home stretch. Last year’s winner, Medina Spirit, was disqualified just last month when tests revealed he'd had a banned substance in his system.

               Question marks remain over both outcomes. Disqualifying actions usually are blatant and obvious, but in the Maximum Security case Churchill Downs stewards examined race tapes for 22 minutes before announcing their verdict, as did millions at home via TV replays. Their decision was heartily booed at the track and elsewhere, mostly because a lot more people held winning tickets on Maximum Security at 9-to-2 odds than on the 65-to-1 winner Country House, but also because it’s rare that the winner of any big race is taken down. That hadn’t happened in the previous 144 runnings of the race. That Medina Spirit’s penalty was almost a year in coming made some question its formulation.  My advice for the next Derby, on May 7: Hold all tickets.

               The Medina Spirit verdict, and the animal’s sudden death in December (the announced cause was a heart attack), took on further import because the animal’s trainer was Bob Baffert. If the race had stood it would have been Baffert’s seventh Kentucky Derby victory, a record. Good-looking, glib and accessible, and with a distinctive shock of white hair, he’s been the sport’s dominant figure of this century, not only in the winner’s circles but also on the sports pages. There he’s been a proponent of stricter health and safety rules for the sport.

               That stance, however, has been in conflict with Baffert’s history of doping-violation penalties (30 by one published account) and the high number of horses that have died in his care. He’s currently under suspension in New York and Kentucky, and the most buzz as another Derby approaches is over what will happen to the half-dozen prospects in his barn. Like many a very-rich man, Baffert has fought actions against him by suing everyone in sight and appealing adverse rulings. He’s doing that now in an effort to get back his Kentucky license in time for the Louisville classic. Given the sport’s record of convoluted legal proceedings, he just might succeed.

It's worth noting here while Baffert can’t race in Kentucky or New York he’s still golden in California, where he’s the leading-money-winning trainer at the Santa Anita winter meeting.  In late 2020 the U.S Congress, in a rare, bipartisan display, passed the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, which would unify thoroughbred racing’s rules and administration under a single, national agency. When it’s supposed to take effect July 1, things like that won’t happen.

The law was a long time coming, mostly because entrenched interests in many of the 38 states that permit the sport—and create a jurisdictional hodgepodge-- wouldn’t let it. What turned the tide were the training or racing deaths of 24 horses at the 2018-19 Santa Anita winter meeting, something that stirred an uproar beyond parochial circles.

 Congress created the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) to enforce the new law and make it part of the Federal Trade Commission. Its jurisdiction would extend to track safety and maintenance, injury-data collection, disciplinary processes and sanctions and drug policy and testing. A crucial part would have taken drug testing out of the hands of the states and given it to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), the nation’s preeminent, independent testing lab.

But racing being racing a smooth transition was unlikely, and in December it was announced that the two entities had failed to come to agreement and suspended negotiations, leaving HISA to find a testing agency that, by statute, is “equal in qualification.”  There is no such agency, which puts the entire project in doubt. That would satisfy industry groups such as the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, which has filed suit to block it.

It's not yet clear how it’ll all come out, but it’s never been a mistake to expect the worst from the sport. As Paddy Bauler, the late Chicago saloon keeper and alderman once said about his home city, maybe racing “ain’t ready for reform.”   

               “Inside Baseball” describes the tactical use of singles, walks, bunts, sacrifice flies, stolen bases and squeeze plays to manufacture runs.  It’s pretty much a relic of the past, the polar opposite of today’s dominant playing style, in which strikeouts are accepted and even welcomed in exchange for the big bangs they sometimes produce.  Sports metaphors being virulent, the term also has been used for the minutia of any field, the mastery of which can bring results when frontal assaults fail.

               The term is further apt for the issues that divide baseball owners and players in the contract talks in now progress, ones that could shrink the 2022 season. This blog is not intended to handle breaking news, so I wrote this piece yesterday (Monday), and the thing could be settled by the time you read it. But the lockout it engendered has taken a big chunk out of the game’s spring training, which is economically important in Arizona and Florida, and imperiled the scheduled opening day of March 31, so at best it’s an exercise in brinkmanship, and damage already has been done.

               My point is that the matters that divide the sides qualify as technical, ones that won’t much affect the game on the field or inflame popular emotions, and it’s remarkable--even mind-blowing--that baseball’s actors are willing to risk alienating a dwindling fan base for intramural gain. Annual attendance for the erstwhile National Pastime slid to 68.5 million in 2019 from 78.6 million in 2008, and cratered to 45.3 million in 2021 after the truncated, no-gate plague year of 2020. Instead of putting out the welcome sign now that the epidemic is waning, baseball has emersed itself in its own quarrels, and the public be damned.

               The last time baseball had a work stoppage was 1994, and it wiped out the last 50 games of the regular season and the year’s playoffs and World Series, and spilled into 1995. That was a strike, not a lockout, but there’s no practical differences between the two. Whatever the cost, the issues were obvious and important: the owners wanted team salary caps and an end to salary arbitration. The players resisted and neither demand was met. There’s no demand for formal team caps this time around, and only arbitration tweaks are being discussed.

               Ironically, the one issue that would change the game in the current talks is one on which the sides reportedly agreed to early on. That would be the National League’s adoption of the designated hitter. The two leagues have been split on the matter since 1973, and while the difference once helped the game by enlivening Hot Stove League discussions, that time is long past. Every baseball league save the National has had the DH for many years, and it’s about time it became universal. 

               The list of issues that are on the table is about as long as Randy Johnson’s left arm. I don’t know which are intended seriously and which are not; as a former labor reporter and bargaining participant as a union member I understand that some issues are not dear held by either party and are raised only to be dropped once the end-game trading starts. Things like a pre-arbitration bonus pool, ironing out service-time kinks and whether to limit the number of optional player assignments teams can use don’t raise temperatures anywhere I know.  

               What’s new about this bargaining round is the weakness of player salaries over the last several years.  Not only has the average annual salary stagnated at about $4 million but the more-important salary median—the 50-50 dividing line-- has dropped to $1.15 million last year from $1.65 million in 2015, according to the Associated Press.

The players at the top are doing very well, thank you—the top 50 accounted for fully one-third of the game’s 2021 payroll, and given the record $43 million-a-year the New York Mets pledged to pitcher Max Scherzer for the next three years they’ll continue to do so. But 70%-plus of last year’s players grossed less than $1 million a year and while, say, $700,000 is a princely wage in the real world it’s not that impressive in a profession with high qualifications and a typical career length of about five years.  Meanwhile, the market value of teams, which is the real measure of owner success, continues to skyrocket with the value of TV “content.” To take one example, the Arizona Diamondbacks, a failure on the field and at the gate in recent years, currently is worth $1.32 billion according to Forbes magazine. That's more than 10 times the $130 million owner Ken Kendrick paid for them in 1995.

A couple of issues stand out in the current talks. One is the minimum salary, which just about all rookies get. It stands at $570,500 now but the players want to boost it to $775,000 in 2022 and $875,000 in 2026, each of which figure is about $100,000 more than the owners have been offering (don’t hold me to those figures, they change by the day). Another is the “luxury tax” big-spending teams pay when their payrolls exceed a certain limit, but which also serves as a de facto payroll cap. It stood at $210 million last season and the players want to boost it to $245 million this year. The owners want it to rise to $214 million.

Chances are that the differences will be split, as they usually are in collective bargaining. It may happen in a day or so and the season could play out pretty much as scheduled, or not. No strike or lockout lasts forever and this one won’t be an exception. But so what?, it might be argued. It’s their money, not ours. But it’s also a reminder not to love your teams more than they love you.