Commentary: MLBs wild pitch: Using fan-despised TV blackouts as leverage against players

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These are Rob Manfred’s words, from four years ago: “If there is one thing I could wish for, more than anything else, it would be the ability to give our fans that frictionless experience of being able to watch what they want to watch, where they want to watch.”This is what it means to be fan-friendly: enjoy your team on a cable, satellite or streaming service wherever you are, with no blackouts, and no need for subscriptions to as many as 10 outlets, most of which you do not want and some of which you may not be able to find.Manfred, baseball’s commissioner, can solve this.The major league owners can solve this.Does Shohei Ohtani have to solve this too?Yes, according to the initial collective bargaining proposal the owners presented to the players’ union last week.The union also made their initial bargaining proposal last week, the start of a long process that could jeopardize the 2027 season.

At this point, the two sides cannot even agree whether baseball has a major predicament on its hands, let alone whether a salary cap should be needed to defuse it.Sacramento wants Major League Baseball to stick around after the Athletics leave town, but a $4-billion price tag for an expansion team might be too much.This is what MLB spokesman Glen Caplin said in a statement last week: “Too many fans in too many markets have too little hope their team has a fair chance to win.”This is what union executive director Bruce Meyer said on a call with reporters Monday: “We do not accept the premise that there is some existential crisis going on.”The league says players as a whole would make more money with a cap; the union says players would lose hundreds of millions.The league picks its preferred statistics to show why competitive balance is broken; the union picks its preferred statistics to show why it is not.This back and forth is going to go on for months.

So let’s skip it...