Column: Baseball can't afford another extended labor dispute

ATLANTA (AP) — Baseball's last labor dispute was devastating, but the comeback had two big things working in its favor.

Cal Ripken Jr. and steroids.

The sport won't be so fortuitous if this lockout lingers into the spring.

For the national pastime to maintain some semblance of its former glory, we better be talking about WAR and slash lines instead of the CBA and luxury tax rates by the time the Super Bowl is over.

The brouhaha that came to a head this week with the owners locking out the players is a mere sideshow at the moment, overshadowed by the NFL playoff races and the biggest games of the college football season.

With basketball and hockey also ramping up, there's plenty to keep sports fans distracted for the next couple of months while the two sides haggle over the details that most of us couldn't care less about.

“This is peak college football season, and the NFL has all sorts of cool narratives,” said Mike Lewis, a marketing professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “This is a good time from a strictly negotiation point of view for the owners to play a little hard ball."

All that changes if an agreement hasn't been reached by mid-February, when the dawn of spring training still serves as a symbolic end to the long, dark winter.

The situation is even more tenuous with baseball still trying to bounce back from the COVID-shortened 2020 season, which was played largely in empty stadiums.

“Losing two out of three opening days would be brutal,” Lewis said.

Some will argue the sport never fully recovered from its last labor dispute, which wiped out the 1994 World Series and dragged on for nearly eight months.

They're probably right, but baseball caught a huge break when two compelling storylines lured many leery fans back to the ballparks.

First, there was...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Column-Baseball-can-t-afford-another-extended-16673226.php