I’m walking into City Hall from one direction while Mayor Adams comes from the other. Before I can get a word in, he says “This is New York, we don’t wear Boston hats.”
Jay Jaffe: My recent piece about Dave Stieb’s Hall of Fame case (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-born-in-the-fifties/) and the first installment of Jon’s four-part documentary series on the great Blue Jay () coincided so it seemed only natural for the two of us to nerd out together.
2:04
Jay Jaffe: Anyway, let’s get to it! A word of warning: between my Hall of Fame coverage and the negotiations, I haven’t thought about transactions very much since early December. Things could be a bit rusty.
And on the 99th day of the owners’ lockout, shortly after the umpteenth deadline set by commissioner Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association finally reached a deal on a new Collective Bargaining agreement, just in time to preserve a 162-game schedule. Players will report to camps by March 13 (except for those with visa issues); arbitration figures will be exchanged on March 22, with hearings taking place during the season; Opening Day is set for April 7; the regular season will be extended by three days to absorb one of the two previously canceled series, with nine-inning doubleheaders and off days used as a means of absorbing the other; and players will receive full pay and service time. We’re a long, long ways from all being right with the world, or even within the baseball industry, but yes, there will be a 2022 major league season.
BREAKING: Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have reached a tentative agreement on a new labor deal, sources tell ESPN. While it still needs to be ratified by both parties, that is expected to be a formality, and when it is:
Two days of close-but-no-cigarnegotiations had the two sides drawing closer on core economic issues, but MLB’s insistence upon pairing the creation of an international draft with the ending of the qualifying offer system (aka direct draft pick compensation) set things back on Wednesday. Manfred responded by postponing (but notably not officially cancelling) another week of games, and the league stopped short of delivering a full counterproposal in the late afternoon, instead presenting the union with three options. Via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers:
[1] “Sign the CBA, including eliminating draft pick compensation [the qualifying offer system], and take some time to examine the international draft. If the union won’t implement within a couple years (by ’24?), the league can re-open the CBA.
[2] “Do the entire package without the draft which means without draft pick compensation.”
[3] “Take the original deal. League gets the international draft and draft pick compensation is eliminated.”
The union rejected the premise but made a counterproposal to remove the qualifying offer this year, contingent upon the two sides studying the parameters of the international draft further and setting a deadline to reach agreement or return to the status quo of qualifying offer and no draft. The union proposed November 15 for the date, but mere minutes after my morning update went live, The Athletic’s Evan Drellich reported that the two sides had agreed to a July 25 deadline instead. After a bit more back and forth on the numbers, the proposal was put to a vote, but while the union’s executive subcommittee unanimously voted against the proposal (8–0), the 30 team representatives who round out its executive board voted 26–4 in favor of it, with the Mets, Yankees, Astros and Cardinals dissenting. The owners ratified the agreement shortly after 6 pm ET by a unanimous 30–0 vote, and the lockout officially lifted just after 7 pm ET.
As for the details, not all of them are immediately clear, nor have all of them been fully reported. Here’s what we know so far. Read the rest of this entry »
At least from the outside, on Wednesday it appeared possible that after another marathon session of negotiations the owners’ self-imposed lockout might end in time to meet commissioner Rob Manfred’s umpteenth deadline and squeeze in a full 162-game season. The dollar figures from proposals by the league and the union pertaining to the new collective bargaining agreement’s core economic issues had converged into “split the difference” territory. Yet since Tuesday night, it had become apparent that the path to a deal suddenly hinged upon the union agreeing to the implementation of an international draft, in exchange for which the qualifying offer system (a.k.a draft pick compensation) would be eliminated. Long sought by the league, and long reviled by the players, the international draft was suddenly of vital importance for one side and simply too complex for the other to agree to under the pressure of deadlines and ultimatums. And so, around 6:30 pm ET on Wednesday, Manfred snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by announcing the postponement of Opening Day to at least April 14.
Manfred didn’t actually use the phrase “officially canceled,” as he did on March 1, nor did he hold a press conference. This time, he said via a statement, “Because of the logistical realities of the calendar, another two series are being removed from the schedule, meaning that Opening Day is postponed until April 14th.” Given what transpired in the days leading up to this week’s artificially-imposed and then delayed deadline, it’s clear not only that the schedule still has a bit of wiggle room via potential doubleheaders (likely with seven-inning games) and juggled off-days, but that the league understands that it can’t unilaterally dictate the length of the season. The ramifications for shortening the slate with regards to salaries, incentives, and service time will require another layer of negotiations, guaranteeing more headaches — particularly with the union having indicated that anything less than pay and service time based on 162 games could mean withholding approval an expanded playoff format for 2022.
As noted in my coverage on Wednesday, the now-familiar pattern — MLB leaking details of its proposal to the media in the dead of night, in time for the next day’s news cycle but before the players, wary of being pressured into accepting an agreement in the wee hours, could consult their executive board and respond — had the potential to create unfounded optimism about a deal. The international draft, which on Wednesday morning USA Today’s Bob Nightengale called “the last big remaining obstacle to reach a labor deal today” proved to be no small hurdle, either. Read the rest of this entry »
Remember back on March 1, when Rob Manfred canceled Major League Baseball’s March 31 Opening Day and the first week of games? And the week before that, when a league spokesperson threatened that canceled games would not be rescheduled, saying, “A deadline is a deadline. Missed games are missed games. Salary will not be paid for those games”? Apparently that wasn’t the real deadline to fit a full 162-game season into the calendar. No — and we’ll pause here so as to be heard over the sound of goalposts being dragged — that deadline was apparently Tuesday, and it’s been extended yet again. After lawyers for the league and the union huddled on Monday, MLB offered its latest formal proposal, and the two sides went back and forth for over 17 hours on Tuesday before pausing around 2:30 AM ET on Wednesday morning so that the union could speak to its board and respond with a counterproposal.
The two sides have converged on monetary issues, but significant gaps remain both there and on other matters, most notably the international draft. It’s possible that a deal could come Wednesday… or that the whole thing could fall apart, with more finger-pointing, and Manfred announcing the cancellation of more games.
Before digging into the details, it’s worth noting again that the length of the season and the ramifications that carries for salaries, incentives, and service time isn’t something that Major League Baseball can decide unilaterally. It’s subject to negotiation, which was why the passage of the March 1 deadline felt so significant, as any attempt to shorten the season would add another layer of complexity to the already contentious proceedings. Complicating matters — or calling the league’s bluff, depending upon how one looks at it — the union has indicated that anything less than pay and service time based on 162 games could mean that they won’t approve an expanded playoff format for 2022. Read the rest of this entry »
The Competitive Balance Tax threshold has been central to the contentious collective bargaining agreement negotiations and the ending of the owners’ self-imposed lockout. The league and the players union have been further apart on that issue than on any of the other major ones, which helps to explain why last week’s optimism regarding a last-minute deal proved to be unfounded. Even with the owners’ offers to raise the minimum salary and improve the lot of pre-arbitration players — albeit not to the levels that the union was seeking — the minimal growth of the CBT threshold meant the owners’ final pre-deadline proposal was dead on arrival. Yet according to The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, four of the 30 team owners objected even to those threshold levels.
As noted several times in my coverage of the negotiations, the CBT threshold has not kept pace with revenues over the past decade and has increasingly been treated as a salary cap by owners. Recall this oft-circulated graph from The Athletic”
It’s small potatoes in the context of what’s going on (or not) in the baseball industry and the rest of the world, but so far as the Hall of Fame goes, the problem in a nutshell is this: Half of the starting pitchers who are in the Hall and were born in the 1950s are named Jack Morris. While there’s no need to relitigate the polarizing battle that forestalled his eventual election — been there, done that — the real issue, to these eyes, is that the gruff ex-Tigers workhorse is the only starter in the Hall born after 1951 and before ’63. When stacked up against other enshrined starters, his credentials are modest at best, and so his presence in the plaque room feels like an indictment of the quality of his peers.
The reality is that Morris won battles of attrition, first against the forces that reshaped the role of the starting pitcher following the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973, and then against the voting bodies that were slow to recognize the strength of those forces. He was a throwback, and in the arguments over his merits he became a symbol for a bygone era. Backed by strong offenses, he piled up innings while having less success preventing runs than his the best of his peers, but more success avoiding injuries or replacement by pinch-hitters and relievers. Plus, he won a few big games in October.
For all of that, I did not have Morris or any specific pitcher in mind when I began exploring ways to modernize JAWS to better account for the changes in starting pitcher workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half. After nearly two decades of using my Hall of Fame fitness metric, I know the contours of the position-by-position rankings reasonably well, and so I had a pretty good idea in advance which ones would be helped by whatever adjustments I settled on — that while knowing that those changes wouldn’t be so radical as to upset the entire system. That said, I suspected that shining a brighter light on some of those players would particularly resonate with fans of a certain age, particularly as I worked my way through history and reached the frame of reference of players I’m old enough to have watched. I don’t cross paths with a lot of fans of Jim McCormick or Wes Ferrell these days, but Luis Tiant is another matter. Read the rest of this entry »
So much for commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated desire to avoid a “disastrous outcome,” and so much for the urgency of the owners’ “defensive” lockout, which was supposed to jumpstart negotiations towards a new collective bargaining agreement — albeit in a most curious manner, with 43 days of radio silence and just one formal proposal to the players over a 71-day span. On Tuesday evening, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season — a total of 91 games, constituting five to seven for each team — after the players union and the owners failed to meet his artificially-imposed deadline for a new CBA in time to preserve the season’s scheduled opening on March 31.
“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” said Manfred on Tuesday. Citing the two sides meeting in Jupiter, Florida for nine straight days, he added, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”
If indeed those games are lost, they would be the first regular season games missed due to a work stoppage since the 1994-95 players’ strike, and the first due to a lockout by the owners. When the owners locked the players out of spring training for 32 days in 1990, the resulting settlement included an Opening Day pushed back by a week, a season end date extended by three days, and all but two of the 26 teams playing 162 games. The 91 games would instantly leapfrog the 86 missed at the start of the 1972 season due to a players’ strike. As in that year, Manfred has said that games won’t be made up, even if that means competitors playing uneven numbers of games — a situation that helped to decide the AL East that year, with the Tigers (86-70) finishing half a game ahead of the Red Sox (85-70). Read the rest of this entry »
On the day that commissioner Rob Manfred set as a deadline for the completion of a new collective bargaining agreement that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and keep a March 31 Opening Day on schedule, no deal was reached. For the eighth consecutive day of negotiations, representatives for the owners and the players’ union met at Jupiter, Florida’s Roger Dean Stadium, going back and forth so many times over the course of 16 1/2 hours that the calculations of steps traveled strained FanGraphs’ servers, to say nothing of the brains of the handful of reporters staked out outside the gates. Enough progress towards a deal was made before the two sides broke for the night at 2:30 AM ET that Manfred agreed to extend the artificially-imposed deadline to 5 PM ET on Tuesday.
While nothing has been finalized, the reports of where the key components are heading do not paint a particularly pretty picture for the players’ side. After a decade in which they have largely been shut out of massive revenue growth, with new television deals falling into place, they appear to be improving the lot of their rank and file — no small matter in an industry where 47% of all service time went to players making the minimum salary — but while achieving only modest gains in areas where they initially sought more radical change.
Based upon the drips and drabs that have emerged from various reports, the battle to expand the postseason has loomed large, with MLB presenting alternative proposals based on whether it’s 14 teams (their preference) or 12 (the union’s preference).
Sources: Deal not close, but not impossible. CBT thresholds, prearb pool big issues, among others. MLB has proposed two choices:
A: 14-team expanded postseason, minimum of ~$700k, ~40m into prearb pool
B: 12-team expanded postseason, ~$675k minimum, ~$20m into prearb pool
The 12-team format appears to be the route this deal will take, though according to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, the gap between the two formats amounts to only a $15 million difference in what ESPN is offering ($100 million for a 14-team format, $85 million for a 12-team one). Whether the “ghost win” concept — giving the division-winning team that does not receive a first-round bye a one-game-to-none advantage in a best-of-five series — survives is unclear at this writing. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s February 28, the deadline set by commissioner Rob Manfred to have a new collective bargaining agreement in place that would end the owners’ self-imposed lockout and allow the season to open as scheduled on March 31 following an abbreviated spring training. To the surprise of no one, there’s no deal yet, even after seven straight days of negotiations between representatives for the owners and the players union in Jupiter, Florida, talks that have stretched into Monday. Negotiations have yielded incremental progress regarding some core economic issues and other matters, but the two sides remain far apart nonetheless. While a league official characterized Sunday’s talks as “productive” after both sides voiced considerable acrimony on Saturday, it would take something on the order of a miracle to have a deal in place by the end of the day.
What’s more, if the league intends to treat the February 28 deadline as a hard one, living up to its threat to cancel games without making them up, and not paying players for a full 162-game season, a deal may become even harder to reach. That would create another issue to settle via negotiations, because the length of a season is subject to collective bargaining; the league can’t unilaterally reduce it. One need only to dial back to 2020 to recall what a fiasco that can become once service time and contract incentives come into play. What’s more, the cancellation of games would raise the possibility of the players answering with some hardball of their own by not agreeing to expanded playoffs for the 2022 season. The union indicated that was possible earlier this month, when the specter of cancellations arose. The value of those expanded playoffs is estimated at $100 million. Read the rest of this entry »
Though the owners could end their self-imposed lockout of the players at any time and allow the baseball season to proceed on schedule, the first week of spring training games has been scrubbed. Odds are that more cancellations are to come, and commissioner Rob Manfred’s February 28 deadline to reach an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement that would preserve Opening Day is fast approaching. With a newfound sense of urgency that stands in marked contrast to Major League Baseball offering one formal proposal in the lockout’s first 10 weeks, representatives for the owners and the players union have been meeting on a daily basis in Jupiter, Florida this week to discuss core economic issues — and those meetings have lasted more than 15 minutes at a time! But even with the more frequent back-and-forth and some minor movement here and there, including a formal proposal from the players on Tuesday, the two sides still appear to be far apart on the most central issues.
If there’s optimism to be had, let us know, because we could sure use some. In the meantime, here’s an attempt to capture where things stand as of Wednesday morning.
Competitive Balance Tax
The lack of optimism regarding an impending resolution to the lockout centers on the players making the tax “the lodestar” of negotiations, to use Jeff Passan’s term, and so far this week, neither side has budged from where things stood as of the owners’ February 12 proposal. I broke down the recent history of the CBT — the threshold for which has not kept pace with the growth of revenue over the past decade — in my previous analysis in the wake of that proposal.
The short version is that the players believe the CBT functions as a salary cap. With teams’ total payrolls down 4.6% from 2017 (from about $4.25 billion to $4.05 billion), and with most of the biggest-spending teams pulling up just short of the threshold in 2021 — the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Astros were all within $4 million of the $210 million bar, with only the Dodgers and Padres paying the tax — one can understand their frustration. In Tuesday’s proposal, the players didn’t budge from their previous position from January 24. While generally preserving the previous CBA’s tiered penalties for teams exceeding the thresholds by more than $20 million and more than $40 million, they’ve sought an increase in the base threshold from $210 million to $245 million, growing to $273 million by 2026. That jump in part makes up for the threshold’s meager growth over the life of the last CBA (from $195 million to $210 million over five years, an average of 2.1%), while revenues grew at a quicker rate. The only real difference in that aspect of their proposal is that there’s no draft-related penalty involved, where the previous CBA bumped the draft place for the highest pick of any team with a payroll at least $40 million above the threshold down by 10 spots (unless it was a top-six pick). Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and HAPPY BASEBALL SEASON!
