After more than a month of silence, talks between the league and the Players Association have finally heated up. Over the past week, the parties have exchanged proposals and counters, a welcome change from the negotiations’ previously slow pace; 42 days elapsed between the owners’ initiation of the lockout and their first proposal to the MLBPA. Yesterday, the two sides reportedly focused their discussion on players who have not yet qualified for salary arbitration, a key sticking point in the negotiations. Let’s go through each of those proposals and see what they would do to change the way young players get paid.

Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that the two sides each recently dropped aspects of past proposals that the other disliked. The league had previously proposed changes to the arbitration system, including the elimination of the Super Two classification that allows some players to reach arbitration a year early, a non-starter with the union. The union had proposed an age-based free agency system that would shorten team control in many instances, which was similarly unpopular with the league. Each side dropped those long-shot ideas in this round of bargaining. Now, on to what was proposed yesterday.

First, both sides proposed instituting new salary minimums. The MLBPA suggested a new minimum salary of $775,000. The league countered with a tiered structure – $615,000 for players with less than one year of service time, $650,000 for players with between one and two years of time, and $700,000 for everyone else on a minimum salary.

“Players on a minimum salary” might not sound like a key part of the structure of baseball, but they absolutely are, as FanGraphs alum Travis Sawchik has covered. These players aren’t a huge part of the money, of course – “minimum” is a helpful word there. In 2021, teams spent roughly $3.842 billion on player salaries, per Spotrac. Minimum salaries accounted for roughly $289 million of that, or 7.5% of the total outlay. Read the rest of this entry »

After a quiet 2020 offseason, and in advance of the ongoing lockout, the early 2021-22 free agency period saw a sudden burst of activity. Teams shelled out more than $1.5 billion in new contracts, a record-breaking pace. Not only did they act earlier in the winter than we’re used to, they also spent far more than last offseason. Is free agency fixed? We’ll need to dive into the data to find out.

See, “how much money was spent on free agents” is an inexact measure of teams’ spending appetites. Imagine an offseason where, due to strategic contract extensions and a wildly immoral use of cloning technology, the only players on the free agent market are 37 versions of Alcides Escobar and 25 copies of Jordan Lyles. Free agency spending would crater, and it would be hard to blame teams for it. It’s not as though you have to give the best player on the market a $300 million deal; contracts are, obviously enough, affected by the caliber of player signing the contract.

Rather than come up with some new form of analysis, I decided to use a methodology advanced by former FanGraphs writer Craig Edwards. The idea is straightforward: take players projected for 2 or more WAR by Steamer in the upcoming season, apply a naive adjustment for aging, and project how much WAR each free agent will accrue over the life of their contract. Like Craig, I applied some discounting for playing time projections. That lets us create expected $/WAR numbers for each year’s free agency class:

Read the rest of this entry »

With Major League Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) set to expire at 11:59 p.m. Eastern tonight, the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) are currently meeting in Dallas to exchange various proposals in an attempt to reach a deal. Unfortunately, media reports suggest that no new agreement is imminent, meaning that the sport is facing the very real possibility that it will experience its first work stoppage since the infamous players’ strike of 1994-95.

While it is certainly possible that tonight’s deadline could pass without triggering a labor stoppage — indeed, the two sides can elect to continue to negotiate with the existing CBA governing the sport in the interim — MLB commissioner Rob Manfred seemed to suggest prior to Thanksgiving that the owners will lock out the players if no agreement is reached this evening.

Consequently, this post explores the various options available to the MLBPA should the owners implement a lockout at midnight tonight as anticipated. Along the way, I will borrow from a similar post I wrote back in 2016 during the last CBA negotiations. While that labor-stoppage primer ultimately proved to be unnecessary, barring a miraculous turn of events in the coming hours, it would appear that fans are unlikely to be so lucky this time around. (Meanwhile, for anyone looking to understand the basis for the current dispute between the owners and players, this preview from a couple weeks ago may prove helpful.)

First, some basic legal background. A lockout is a legally sanctioned tool in which management (in this case, team owners) announces that it will refuse to allow its unionized employees (presently, the players) to work until an ongoing labor dispute is resolved. This means that the players will not be paid, or allowed to report to work, until a new CBA has been agreed to. In the interim, there will be no major-league free-agent signings, trades, or games played. A lockout is thus the ownership equivalent of a strike by the players. Read the rest of this entry »

Following the completion of the World Series last week, all eyes in the baseball world will now turn to the sport’s next major showdown: the negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association. MLB’s existing CBA is set to expire at 11:59 p.m. EST on Wednesday, December 1, a deadline that many anticipate could trigger the sport’s first work stoppage since 1994. Indeed, while a strike or lockout is by no means guaranteed at this point, the possibility certainly appears more likely than it has at any point in the last two decades.

This post will provide an overview of the upcoming collective bargaining negotiations, briefly summarizing how the parties got to this point, what are likely to be the major issues to be hammered out in a new CBA, and what baseball fans can expect in the coming weeks (and, perhaps, months).

How We Got Here

In many respects, the seeds of the present discontent between the players and owners were sown during the negotiation of the sport’s last several CBAs, and perhaps most notably the soon-to-expire 2016 agreement. Although there was ample reason to believe that MLB’s financial model was moving in an unfavorable direction for the players, the union has been perceived by many as having failed to sufficiently prioritize the pursuit of significant economic modifications from the owners in 2016 (a claim that at least some in the union would dispute). Instead, to many, the MLBPA appeared to focus more on quality-of-life issues in the 2016 agreement, such as more humane travel schedules and clubhouse perks like private chefs. Read the rest of this entry »