Currently, more than 75% of major-league teams — 23 out of 30, to be exact — play their home games in stadiums publicly owned by a local government entity. Each of these relationships between the franchise and its host municipality is, in turn, governed by a contract specifying the terms under which the government has leased its stadium to the MLB team.

As one might expect, disagreements between the franchises and their local communities occasionally arise under these lease agreements. Recently, two such disputes — one involving the Atlanta Braves and the other involving the Arizona Diamondbacks — progressed to the point that the team or local municipality opted to file a lawsuit against the other in state court.

S.M.P. Community Fund v. Atlanta Braves

In late December, the Atlanta Braves were sued in local state court by the S.M.P. Community Fund, an entity formed by the City of Atlanta to distribute funds generated by the Braves’ former stadium — Turner Field — throughout the local community. Under the terms of the Braves’ lease agreement, the team was obligated to contribute 8.25% of the parking revenue it generated at Turner Field, along with 25% of the net revenue generated from any special events held at the stadium, to the Fund. The Fund would then use these proceeds to benefit the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Turner Field.

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What type of contract would Mike Trout have commanded this offseason had he been a free agent? Coming off an MVP-award-winning campaign in which he compiled 9.4 WAR and about to enter just his age-25 season, Trout would have easily been one of the most sought after players ever to hit the open market. And given the state of this year’s historically weak free-agent class, the bidding for Trout may very likely have ended up in the $400-500 million range over eight to ten years.

Considering that Trout signed a six-year, $144.5 million contract extension back in 2014 – an agreement that runs through 2020 – this is just an interesting, but hypothetical, thought experiment, right?

Not necessarily. A relatively obscure provision under California law — specifically, Section 2855 of the California Labor Code — limits all personal services contracts (i.e., employment contracts) in the state to a maximum length of seven years. In other words, this means that if an individual were to sign an employment contract in California lasting eight or more years, then at the conclusion of the seventh year the employee would be free to choose to either continue to honor the agreement, or else opt out and seek employment elsewhere.

Although the California legislature has previously considered eliminating this protection for certain professional athletes – including Major League Baseball players – no such amendment has passed to date. Consequently, Section 2855 would presumptively apply to any player employed by one of the five major-league teams residing in California.

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After nearly a year’s worth of negotiation sessions, and with little more than three hours remaining before the deadline, Major League Baseball’s owners and players came to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement Wednesday evening. Not only does this agreement avert a possible work stoppage, but it also means that teams will head into next week’s Winter Meetings with a better sense of the economic ground rules under which they’ll be operating in the coming seasons.

It will be at least a few weeks, if not a couple months, before the final written version of the new CBA is released publicly. Indeed, while the owners and players reached a consensus on the core components of the deal last night, many of those verbal agreements must still be reduced to writing, a process that will take some time.

Still, many of the core components of the deal have already been reported in the press. Here’s what we know so far about the new CBA:

Duration of the New CBA

To begin, the new agreement will last for five years, covering the 2017-2021 seasons. This means that by the time the next CBA expires, MLB will have enjoyed an unprecedented 26 years of uninterrupted labor peace. Considering the state of the sport’s labor relations following the 1994-95 players’ strike, that is quite an impressive accomplishment for the game.

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This post is being republished after appearing at FanGraphs earlier this month — as it seems particularly relevant given the lack of a new CBA ahead of the December 1 expiration of the current one.

In two weeks time, on December 1st, the existing collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association is set to expire. While the two sides have been working for the better part of a year on negotiating a new agreement, to date they have not yet been able to come to terms on a new CBA.

Based on existing media reports, it appears that the hold-up over the new agreement centers around two primary issues: raising the luxury-tax threshold and creating an international draft. Both topics were expected to be among the most important — and thus potentially contentious — issues discussed during the CBA negotiations. So the fact that the parties have not yet reached an agreement on either point is not particularly surprising.

Still, with only two weeks left until the old CBA expires, some are beginning to speculate about whether a potential work stoppage could be looming on the horizon. That, in turn, raises questions regarding the potential legal ramifications of the two sides failing to agree to a new CBA before December 1st.

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For the last three years, the overwhelming majority of baseball fans in Los Angeles have been unable to watch the Dodgers play on television. In 2014, the team partnered with cable provider Time Warner to launch SportsNet LA, a network dedicated to the franchise. Citing the excessive price that Time Warner was demanding from other cable providers for the rights to air SportsNet LA — such as an initial asking price of roughly $5 per subscriber per month — other service providers like AT&T, DirecTV, and Cox have subsequently refused to carry the network.

As a result, since 2014, upwards of 70% of Los Angeles residents have not had access to televised Dodgers games. Indeed, because Time Warner only offers cable services in parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, in many cases even if fans were willing to change cable providers to gain access to the Dodgers, they were nevertheless still unable to do so because none of the available providers in their neighborhood carried SportsNet LA.

Given its high asking price for the network, it’s not surprising that the public has typically painted Time Warner as the bad guy throughout this ordeal. According to a lawsuit filed last week by the U.S. Department of Justice, however, Los Angeles sports fans’ anger may have been misdirected, as it now appears that DirecTV — now owed by AT&T — may in fact be largely to blame for the Dodgers’ three-year blackout across much of Los Angeles.

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If Canadian indigenous-rights activist Douglas Cardinal had had his way, the Cleveland Indians would have been legally prohibited from playing Games 3 through 5 of the American League Championship Series in their standard road uniforms. According to a lawsuit filed by Cardinal on Friday in Ontario Superior Court, both Cleveland’s Chief Wahoo mascot as well as the “Indians” team name itself are racially offensive and discriminatory, in violation of Canada’s Human Rights Act (which generally prohibits businesses from “differentiat[ing] adversely” between citizens on the basis of race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation).

Although Judge Thomas McEwen announced on Monday afternoon that he would not be issuing an injunction blocking Cleveland from wearing its normal uniforms during the ALCS, the legal proceedings have nevertheless brought renewed attention to Cleveland’s use of what are, in the minds of many, racially insensitive team insignias.

This raises the question of whether Cleveland’s — or, for that matter, the Atlanta Braves’ — team name or logos are at risk of being successfully contested in the United States. Indeed, considering that a U.S. federal court ruled last year that several trademarks belonging to the National Football League’s Washington Redskins must be cancelled due to their disparaging nature, it is entirely possible — and perhaps even probable — that Cleveland or Atlanta could soon face a trademark challenge of its own in U.S. federal court.

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One can be forgiven for having forgotten about the Wyckoff v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball lawsuit. The class action case — filed back in July 2015 by Jordan Wyckoff, a former scout for the Kansas City Royals — accused Major League Baseball and its teams of violating both federal antitrust and employment law by colluding to deprive amateur and professional scouts both of the minimum wage and overtime compensation. Specifically, the case contended that MLB teams have unlawfully agreed not to compete with one another for the services of their scouts, with the result that wages for these employees have, in some cases, been depressed to as little as $5 per hour once all of their various job duties have been accounted for.

Late last year, MLB filed a motion asking the court to dismiss Wyckoff’s antitrust claims under its historic antitrust exemption. At the same time, MLB also argued that the suit’s minimum-wage claims should be dismissed against all but the Royals, since Wyckoff — the only plaintiff named in the suit who was asserting a violation of the minimum-wage and overtime rules — had never been employed by any of the other 29 MLB clubs.

Since then, the parties have waited… and waited… and then waited some more for the court to issue a ruling. That wait mercifully came to an end this past Thursday when Judge Paul Gardephe finally released his long-anticipated decision, more than nine months after MLB’s motion had first been filed.

In his opinion, Judge Gardephe granted MLB all of the relief it had requested, dismissing the overwhelming majority of Wyckoff’s case. As a result, while Wyckoff can continue to pursue his claim for back-pay from the Royals, any hopes he may have had that his suit would spur more systemic changes to the market for MLB scouts appear to have fallen short.

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Seattle Mariners’ backup catcher Steve Clevenger is not particularly sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. Rather than keep his feelings on the matter to himself, however, he decided to share them with the world on Thursday afternoon in the following tweets:

Not surprisingly, the public response to Clevenger’s comments was swift and unforgiving. Within hours, the Mariners released an official statement distancing the team from the remarks. And although Clevenger later apologized for the tweets, the Mariners nevertheless announced on Friday that the team was suspending him without pay for the remainder of the season.

On the one hand, the impact of the suspension on Clevenger will be relatively modest, as he was already on the 60-day disabled list with a broken hand, and thus was unlikely to play again for the Mariners this season. On the other hand, however, by being suspended without pay, Clevenger will forfeit the roughly $32,000 he would have earned over the season’s final 10 games.

It does not appear as though Clevenger will challenge his punishment, according to a report by Maury Brown. If Clevenger were to change his mind and file an appeal, however, then it is possible that he could get his suspension reduced by an arbitrator. Specifically, although Major League Baseball and its teams generally have the legal right to punish players in this manner, Clevenger could argue that a suspension of this length is at odds with those handed down in similar, prior cases.

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Like any multi-billion dollar business, Major League Baseball is consistently defending itself from at least a handful of different lawsuits at any given time. And while we at FanGraphs attempt to keep you, the loyal reader, appraised of any major happenings in these cases, throughout the year a number of less noteworthy developments occur in these suits that, while potentially significant, nevertheless do not warrant a standalone write-up of their own.

The purpose of this post is to update you on several such recent developments in two ongoing lawsuits against MLB, those challenging the league’s minor-league pay and fan-safety practices, respectively.

Minor-League Wage Litigation

Back in July, I discussed the significant victory that MLB secured in the litigation challenging its minor-league pay practices under federal and state minimum-wage law. Specifically, as I noted at the time, the court refused to certify the case as a class-action lawsuit due to several important differences between the work experiences of, and compensation received by, minor-league players.

Given the significant setback that this decision represented for the minor-league players — removing more than 2,000 players from the case — it appeared inevitable that the plaintiffs would seek to have the decision overturned on appeal. Rather than immediately pursue an appeal to a higher court, however, the plaintiffs have instead opted to take a second crack at convincing the trial court to approve the case for class-action status.

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On Tuesday, we learned that Prince Fielder’s career has come to an end following his second major neck surgery in just the last three years. Jeff Sullivan provided a fitting eulogy for Fielder’s career a couple days ago. While the news is certainly devastating for Fielder on a personal level, this post concerns another matter — namely, the potential financial implications of Fielder’s injury, both for the Texas Rangers and Fielder himself. At the heart of the matter: the nine-year, $214 million contract Fielder signed in 2012, a deal that guarantees him another $24 million annually from 2017 through 2020.

For starters, it’s important to note that Fielder is not officially retiring from baseball, but rather has been declared medically disabled and therefore is no longer considered to be physically able to play the game. This is an important distinction legally, because had Fielder voluntarily decided to retire, then he would have forfeited the roughly $104 million remaining on his contract. Instead, by being declared medically unable to play, Fielder remains entitled to the full amount he’s owed under his contract.

Because Texas reportedly has an insurance policy covering his contract in the event of injury, the Rangers will not be on the hook for the entirety of the team’s remaining financial obligation to Fielder. Instead, the club will apparently only be responsible for paying Fielder $9 million per year from 2017 to 2020, with the rest of his salary covered by the team’s insurer (who will reportedly contribute another $9 million per year) and the Detroit Tigers (who are on the hook for the final $6 million per season, based on the terms of the trade that brought Fielder to Texas in exchange for Ian Kinsler in 2013).

That having been said, although the precise terms of the Rangers’ insurance policy are not publicly available, it appears likely that this $9 million in cost savings will not come without some strings attached for the club. Moreover, it’s also possible that the team’s insurance company could still yet find a way to avoid paying some or all of its share of Fielder’s contract.

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