Another Bleak Week In Major League Baseball Heightens The Nostalgia For The Good Ol’ Days Of 2014

As far as coping mechanisms for trying times go, nostalgia is pretty harmless, even if it’s flawed. Looking back with fondness invariably emphasizes the good times and glosses over or entirely ignores the decidedly imperfect moments that we might have self-medicated with nostalgia.

How many of us listen to the music and watch the movies of our high school days and fondly recall how much easier and simpler things were back then, even though our real-time thoughts were consumed by self-doubt and awkwardness and a desire to graduate as soon as possible so that we could get to college and begin establishing ourselves? Speaking of the music of our youth, it was Billy Joel who sang “The good ol days weren’t always good and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

Still, after another dispiriting week in Major League Baseball, it’s hard not to pine for the good ol’ days of 2014.

Six years ago, of course, we had actual baseball games played in front of actual human beings. Depending on the day lately, it’s harder to tell which concept sounds more foreign in 2020.

Baseball was unusually competitive in 2014, when there was no team with 100 wins nor no team with 100 losses — the third and most recent time since 1996, the first full season following the most recent work stoppage, that no one has reached triple digits in wins or losses. The Orioles won 96 games and the AL East, both for the first time since 1997. The Pirates made the playoffs for the second straight season following 20 consecutive losing seasons, the longest streak in the history of the four major North American pro sports leagues.

The Royals not only made it to the playoffs for the first time since 1985, they made it all the way to the World Series, where they fell in seven games to the Giants and their every-other-year dynasty. The Fall Classic clash rewarded an old-fashioned approach, one in which teams were put together in the front office and managed in the dugout by baseball lifers.

The summer of 2014 was also the 20th anniversary of the players’ strike that resulted in the cancelation of the World Series, and a series of interviews throughout the ’14 season with the men whose careers were marred by the strike yielded an optimistic outlook for player-team relations going forward.

“Most of these guys, they’ve never been through anything like it,” then-Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson said. “Hopefully it never happens again Seems to be pretty good parity and everything’s open to both sides. There’s been labor peace and let’s hope it stays that way.”

“The game is extremely healthy financially,” then-Padres manager Bud Black said. “I do think that ownership, management, and the players — the communication is much more harmonious than ever before. The dialogue has been great. That’s a tribute to, obviously, the union leaders over the past 10 to 15 years and the owners engaging.”

As the 2014 season wound down, so, too, did the stewardship of commissioner Bud Selig, whose tenure included leading the owners into the aforementioned 1994 work stoppage and then turning a blind eye to rampant PED abuse until the subsequent power surge had revived the game enough so that he felt comfortable trying to shed his fox costume and take up guard outside the henhouse.

Imperfect, to be sure. (Even more imperfect: Selig’s Hall of Fame induction speech in 2017 in which he said that serving as commissioner during the strike meant he “…began to experience what Harry Truman meant when he said ‘The buck stops here.’” Uhh, no Bud.)

But his attempts to level the playing field did result in a more competitive game (prior to 2000, the only 162-game season in which no team won or lost 100 games was 1992). And while Selig’s folksy demeanor could be a little grating and manufactured, his humble beginnings as the owner of the relocated Brewers at least hinted at some actual fondness for baseball and an appreciation for the history of the game.

Can we say the same things about competitiveness and a desire to maintain the game five-plus years into the tenure of his replacement, Rob Manfred?

In 2019, a record four teams won 100 games and a record-tying four teams lost 100 games (and not by a little, either — the Royals, Marlins, Orioles and Tigers all lost between 103 and 114 games). Those four, plus the Blue Jays, White Sox, Mariners and Pirates, were in the midst of full-on tear-downs, with only the White Sox expected to have a shot at contending during over the course of a full 2020 season.

We are, of course, a long way from seeing baseball in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the odds of not seeing baseball in 2020 because of financial issues grew more likely this week, when owners, rebuffed by their earlier salary cap-like proposal of a 50/50 split of revenues this season, proposed paying players a percentage of their pro-rated salaries — a plan that would have the highest-paid players taking the biggest pay cuts.

A cynic could suggest that trying to divide the union is a pretty savvy move with the Collective Bargaining Agreement due to expire in a little more than 18 months, though if Max Scherzer’s Tweet Wednesday night is any indication, the players appear emboldened and not divided.

Virus permitting, it is more likely than not that there’ll be baseball this season. Having a work stoppage before the CBA expires — in the midst of a chaotic year in which America is, at the very least, sliding into a deep recession — would deliver a far more permanent blow to baseball’s standing than the 1994 strike.

But even if we’re firing up the grill and watching baseball on July 4, baseball’s decision-makers still inflicted long-lasting scars last week. Hundreds of minor leaguers were released Thursday, with hundreds more expected to be released shortly. There mass cuts happen at the end of spring training and usually go unnoticed by all but the most hawk-eyed of minor league observers.

Except, of course, spring training ended for everyone at the same time Mar. 12. And the ecosystem that would normally be in place for freshly unemployed minor leaguers isn’t likely to exist this season and is likely to exist in a far different and leaner form the next time there’s a minor league season. The pandemic is almost surely going to make it far easier for Manfred to go through with his plan to cut 42 mostly lower-level minor league affiliates prior to 2021.

Next week’s MLB Draft — shortened from 40 rounds to five rounds due to the pandemic and the lack of an amateur baseball season — will yield only 160 players. Thereafter, teams can sign as many free agents as they want for no more than $20,000 apiece. MLB also has the right to shorten the 2021 draft to 20 rounds.

In other words: There will be far fewer players in the minor leagues once some sense of pre-pandemic normalcy returns to baseball. One has to wonder if slashing the minor leagues — and thereby making big league jobs even harder to obtain than before — is one way to defang the union in the future without actually breaking it. If players are conditioned on their way up to be grateful for what they have with minimal complaint because there are so few jobs to be had, what are the chances they’ll strike back, a la Scherzer, at what they perceive to be unfair practices by ownership in the majors?

Not every team is already embarking on the slashing and cutting. At least four teams — the Reds, Royals and Twins and, somewhat surprisingly given their cold reputation, the Astros— have announced plans to pay their minor leaguers through Aug. 31.

The contrarian stance was most eloquently stated by Royals general manager Dayton Moore, who put together the team that took the Giants to the limit in 2014 and went back and won the World Series over the Mets in 2015.

“The minor league players, the players you’ll never know about, the players that never get out of rookie ball or High-A, those players have as much impact on the growth of our game than 10-year or 15-year veteran players,” Moore told local reporters on a conference call Friday afternoon. “They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as those individuals who played for a long time because those individuals go back into their communities and teach the game, work in academies, are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches in pro baseball, They’re growing the game constantly because they’re so passionate about it.

“So we felt it was really, really important not to release one minor league player during this time, a time we needed to stand behind them.”

If only the rest of baseball had decided around the middle of last decade to follow the lead of Moore and not former Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, whom the New York Daily News reports was behind the plan to reduce the minor leagues before he got suspended for not doing enough to stop the Astros’ cheating scandal.

Luhnow’s methods — high on ruthless efficiency dictated from the general manager’s office and a little, ahem, lacking in the human touch — were already turning into the standard at the big league level, and even if he never works another day in affiliated baseball, they’ll live on in the minors the next time there is a minor league season.

Oh yeah, and once again, that CBA expires at the end of 2021, so if there’s no work stoppage this summer, well, hang tight. Maybe the good ol’ days weren’t always that good, but they were sure better than what lies ahead for Major League Baseball.