Just How Far Apart Are the League and the MLBPA?
As you’ve probably heard, Major League Baseball canceled the first two series of the 2022 season yesterday, after a self-imposed deadline to finish negotiations with the Major League Baseball Players Association on a new collective bargaining agreement passed with no deal reached. The two sides didn’t appear to be close to an agreement before negotiations ended; indeed, they remained far apart on several key economic issues.
The gulf between them is significant, but it doesn’t seem unbridgeable. Negotiations in three areas – compensation for young players, the competitive balance tax, and postseason expansion – will be key to reaching an agreement when talks resume. Those are far from the only issues that separate the two sides, of course, but they dwarf the rest; presumably a compromise in those three areas would precipitate a deal. Or at least, that was my assumption when I began to look at the differences. Let’s see just how far apart MLB and the MLBPA actually are.
Young Player Compensation
There are three parts to this aspect of negotiation: minimum salaries, the pre-arbitration bonus pool, and changing arbitration eligibility. The gap in minimum salaries isn’t significant. The final MLBPA offer was a $725,000 minimum salary beginning in 2022 and increasing by $20,000 per year. The owners countered with a $700,000 minimum salary, increasing by $10,000 per year.
The league paid roughly $289 million in minimum salaries in 2021. If they adopted their proposed minimum salary schedule over the next five years and the number of players receiving the minimum remained the same, the league would pay an average of $364.7 million per year over those five years. If they adopted the MLBPA proposal, they would instead pay an average of $387.5 million. That’s a total difference of $22.8 million per year or $760,000 per team per year, an easily bridgeable gap.
The sides have agreed to the concept of a bonus pool that would reward high-performing pre-arbitration players. The league proposes to pay $30 million per year to those players out of central revenue, while the MLBPA now wants $85 million per year. That difference, $55 million per year, would presumably be shared evenly by each team, as the money comes out of a central revenue pool. That’s a gap of $1.8 million per team per year. The aggregate differences in the minimum salary and pre-arbitration bonus pools come to roughly $75 million per year league-wide. That’s less than 2% of the overall salaries paid to players in 2021. It’s hard to imagine those two numbers in aggregate could keep the two sides from finding an agreement.
One potential sticking point: an MLBPA proposal to significantly expand Super-Two arbitration eligibility. Currently, the top 22% of players with more than two but less than three years of service time are eligible for arbitration. The union initially proposed granting arbitration eligibility to all players with more than two years of service time. They slowly walked that number back to 80%, then 75%, and finally 35%. In the final flurry of bargaining, the MLBPA reportedly agreed to leave eligibility unchanged, but it’s unclear whether that offer is still on the table, as it was contingent on the rest of the deal working out to their liking, which clearly didn’t happen on Tuesday. In the event that the union returns to their 35% proposal, it would mean roughly $20 million more in player salaries per year.
Competitive Balance Tax
The gap in CBT proposals has narrowed significantly since negotiations began. MLB’s initial offer was wildly more restrictive than the current regime: Exceeding the CBT by any amount would carry a 50% tax penalty, up from 20% currently, and rising to 75% and 100% at $20 million and $40 million above the tax line.
MLBPA countered with a tax structure that matched the existing one of 20%, 32%, and 62.5% for those three levels. As of the frantic negotiations on Monday night, the league had agreed to accept the unchanged tax structure proposed by the union, though they reportedly made some fine-print adjustments that altered the deal. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ll assume the league relents on those points and accepts the union’s proposed tax structure exactly.
At that point, the remaining difference is the level at which the CBT kicks in. The league proposed a structure that starts at $220 million and grows to $230 million over the course of the agreement. The union proposed a structure that starts at $238 million and grows to $263 million. As these two sides have the same tax structures, I estimated the potential increase in payrolls based on the number of teams that either exceeded the tax or behaved as though they were constrained by it, stopping payrolls within $5 million of the first penalty level. (It seems likely that the escalating repeater penalties of the last CBA would remain in place, though it’s not clear at this juncture. It doesn’t alter our math much anyhow.)
In 2022, the difference in expected payroll expenditure due to different CBT levels comes to roughly $100 million. That number rises to $125 million in 2023, before leveling off around $150 million in 2024 and beyond. That works out to an average of $135 million per year in expected spending gap due to differing CBT thresholds, though there are wide error bands around that number due to my estimation method. That’s $4.5 million per team, though it wouldn’t really work that way; the vast majority of that increase would be borne by the teams that already choose to spend near the tax line. The Bob Nuttings of the world would bear zero increased costs due to the changed tax level; it’s simply not a binding constraint for most of the league.
Playoff Expansion
In 2021, 10 teams qualified for the playoffs. The league proposed expanding the postseason to 14 teams with the top team in each league receiving a bye; the players countered with a 12-team field that features additional structural advantages for higher seeds. The league appeared to accept a 12-team compromise in exchange for other concessions in their latest rounds of bargaining, though the exact details were never settled.
Going from 14 teams to 12 amounts to a $15 million difference in TV revenue (ESPN has reportedly offered $100 million for a 14-team format vs. $85 million for a 12-team one), though the changes in competition incentives would likely be more significant. Broadly speaking, the two proposals are the same, but I believe there’s still a meaningful gap here. The MLBPA has consistently suggested playoff formats that give meaningful advantages (byes, “ghost wins,” full-series home field advantage) to higher seeds. The league has generally pushed for a flatter structure that treats every team but the highest seed equally. That’s a major gap in spending incentives — less meaningful benefits for getting a higher seed means less reason to spend in an attempt to net one.
Other Issues
The CBA negotiation isn’t solely about these three main points. I’m not sure how to mathematically estimate all of the other issues on the table, but they’ll be worth monitoring when negotiations resume. The league has proposed an international draft, and was reportedly willing to drop draft pick compensation for free agents in exchange for concessions, though it’s unclear if that made it through to their final offer. The two sides still differ on revenue sharing, with the MLBPA wanting to revamp its structure to reward teams in the revenue sharing pool for winning and spending. There’s the matter of a draft lottery, though the differences there are exceedingly small now that both sides have agreed to have one at all.
In addition, the two sides will have to come to an agreement on service time manipulation. The league proposed awarding a full year of service time to the top-two Rookie of the Year finishers, while the MLBPA proposed awarding a full year of service time to a broader swath of top rookies. The league proposed bonus draft picks that might marginally increase teams’ incentives to call their best players up early — a proposal that the Union doesn’t seem to have issued a direct counter to, potentially because any such rule would establish a precedent that service time manipulation is the norm. Finally, the league has reportedly asked the union to drop its grievance against the Pirates, Rays, Marlins, and A’s for failing to use revenue sharing money “in an effort to improve [the club’s] performance on the field,” as is required by the terms of the revenue sharing agreement.
If the only differences between MLB and the MLBPA were pre-free-agency compensation and the CBT thresholds, the monetary difference in the two proposals would work out to roughly $200 million per year in player salaries. That’s a bargain for the league; total payrolls have barely budged in the last five years even as revenues have trended ever upward. If payrolls increased by $325 million in 2022 – a high-end estimate of what would happen relative to the previous CBA terms if the league simply accepted the union’s offer – that would mean aggregate league-wide payroll growth of 6.7% since 2017, the first year of the last CBA. That’s not an annual growth number, it’s a total – equivalent to a 1.3% annual growth rate. On a per-team basis, the difference in the two proposals works out to roughly $5.5 million in new spending in 2022 relative to last season. Increases in TV deals alone more than cover that, and low-payroll teams would bear less of the burden than high-payroll teams due to the amount of money that a higher CBT is expected to contribute to the overall total.
If the league wanted it, they could lock in a very gradual increase in payrolls, one that wouldn’t really do anything to jumpstart the stagnant payroll growth from 2017-21 and that would increase at a rate of roughly 1% per year thereafter. Given that every team is bringing in at least $100 million per year before selling any tickets or receiving revenue sharing, losing games over the sliver of a difference that exists between their proposals and those of the union seems foolhardy. But apparently $5.5 million per team — plus whatever other gains ownership feels it can make that I haven’t estimated monetarily — is too much for the league to concede despite the huge and uncertain cost associated with canceling games and delaying the season.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
It’s wild to see just how hard the MLBPA has folded at the negotiation table. This was supposed to be the year they really played hard ball and instead they’ve already left themselves with a “more of the same” deal after giving up structural changes like an international draft and expanded playoffs.
Yeah, it looks to me like the Union has surrendered on every point of importance, and the owners are refusing to declare victory and go home.
This only makes sense to me if they are trying to break the union, and I don’t think that is going to happen, which makes this pointless.
If I were the players, I would be seriously talking to various networks about forming a new league with new owners.
I think there is an anti-trust exemption for MLB that prevents that exact scenario.
The antitrust exemption does not prevent the formation of a competitor league to MLB. The exemption is of course relevant, as MLB’s freedom to act as a cartel provides it market advantages that likely would enable MLB to crush any competitor in its infancy.
But, and this is where I would love to see a Fangraphs article written by smarter people, I have read some chatter to the effect that MLB’s unilateral cancellation of games is an absolute breach of contract, and that players should be, and indeed are now, free to pursue opportunities elsewhere.
Not certain this is true (again, I would love to see a Fangraphs story about this). If it is true, MLB has created a situation where a potential pop-up league, comprised of ML and high minor-league talent, could exist.
So many gaps in knowledge here, so many things I have not considered.
Caveats included, this has been my fantasy for the past several days. Any pop-up league likely won’t make money. The players would likely find the facilities sub-par (I am thinking municipal stadiums, college ballparks). Incorporating and compensating minor league players would be almost impossible. But…I can’t help but wonder if it could be accomplished. (Again, please, Fangraphs, consider writing an article!)
Even if it were just a one-year, barnstorming-style, union-organized league, there is no question it would capture the interest of the fans. By doing so it would threaten to depress the MLB franchise valuations, which is the ultimate bargaining lever that the players can ever pull.
It’s unfortunate the union didn’t put that framework in place in anticipation of all this – but if they do in fact have what amounts to spring training facilities set up in both Arizona and Florida, imagine what something like that might look like. Two leagues, all in close proximity. It’d be like a fantasy league come true. They could name managers (all former players to be sure), draft from scratch (imagine the media coverage!), and keep all the revenues and expenses centralized while Manfred and all the MLB owners sit on the sidelines. 100 game regular season and then playoffs. Sure the uber-rich players wouldn’t make their MLB-valued contracts, but the narrative of the union’s position is that this is all for the pre-arb guys. So ok, put your money where your mouth is – everyone shares equally in whatever net profit the venture generates, which would be signficant enough to at least pay all the players what currently amounts to the MLB league minimum salary.
Obviously it’s only a pipe dream for so many reasons but it’d be spectacularly exciting and it would result in the union crushing the owners, which is exactly what they deserve.
The anti-trust exemption does nothing but protect MLB from lawsuits under the Sherman Anti-trust Act. And in fact, it applies to EVERY baseball league rather than just to MLB. Every independent league has the same immunity, it just doesn’t matter to them because no one accuses them of being a monopoly.
Basically, the exemption means that MLB is ALLOWED to be a monopoly, but it does nothing to make MLB a monopoly, it just enables them to do things to try to keep a monopoly that would be actionable by a normal business.
Wanting to break the union is the only thing that makes sense. If the owners agreed to all he players current requests on minimum salaries, CBT threshold, playoff expansion, and even increasing the Super-2’s, their share of the pie would still continue to grow over time and the player’s would still shrink. It wouldn’t even grow all that much more slowly than it has over the last 5 years.
Basically, the owners are ahead by 6 runs with two outs in the ninth and peak Mariano Rivera on the mound, but they are taking their ball and going home because they aren’t going to win by 12.
It’s jaw dropping. The players basically gave the owners 2 extra teams in the playoffs (one of their major goals) in exchange for normal wage-scale stuff. They just gave it away, basically, and it’s still not good enough for the owners.
Not sure about the international draft, that was leaked so it’s entirely possible the league was willing to accept in exchange for earlier arbitration.
*sorry, that the MLBPA was willing to accept it in exchange for earlier arbitration
_below average_ wage scale stuff. In my not-so-humble-opinion.
I’d add that it isn’t the same game that is played during the season. Particularly for teams playing in the north at night and on the west coast in those weird mid-afternoon games, the weather and the light situations are different than you encounter in the rest of the season. Winds probably change, too. Making things even more of a crapshoot.
I don’t know how I would feel about a 14-team playoffs. More non-division winners than first-place teams. Wow. Now that really makes the regular season meaningful. /s. I don’t like this idea; it’s bad enough when a wild card team wins the WS if they backed into a playoff spot. If every year the odds were that an also-ran would be the champion, I would have to wonder, “the champion of…what?” Snake Plissken style.
But playoffs have long been largely a crapshoot. Regular season determines that to a better extent. Playoffs are more about who was good at the right time. Of course certain team builds can favor playoffs over other builds, but it’s a variance fest anyhow. Seems pointless to fight an inevitability.
Perhaps, but just because it’s an 8-team variance fest doesn’t meet we need to encourage or invite a 14-team variance fest.
I think the only way I can get on board with 14-team playoffs is if the 3 division winners get a ‘bye’, and then 4 wild cards play a double-elimination tournament, NCAA regional-style. But really, I kind of hate what playoff baseball has become. Compelling elimination games should be the result of two teams showing there is little difference between them over a long slog. Not manufactured for television between teams that had a difference of 8 wins in the regular season.
It seems to me that the significance of the CBT level is not just that a few teams who push up against it would spend more if it were increased, but that their spending more would put a general upward pressure on salaries–both because those teams would be bidding against others for players and because other teams who wished to keep their playoff chances high, would be forced to spend more to keep up. In other words, it’s not just that the Dodgers would spend more, but the Cardinals would also spend more (although not up to the new level), in order to maintain their position in the league. If that is right, it would suggest that you may be considerably underestimating how much money is at stake there.
It is also not clear how to estimate the effect of the change to the minimum. If the minimum got big enough (not a possibility here), teams may use those players much less relative to comparable veterans. But, the price affects how many of those players will be fielded, so the simple calculation is … too simple. On the other hand, a team with a hard budget, may simply pay more in minimum salaries if forced to do so and then refuse to sign the extra free agent to make up the difference. One cannot assume that the shape of the roster is unaffected by these changes.
Some of that upward pressure on salaries in order to keep up with the higher-paying teams might be muted by the fact that more teams may make the playoffs anyway. The Cards (a good example you used) might spend more to make it into an 8-team field, but would they feel that same pressure in a 12-team field? 14?
(And no amount of pressure will force the A’s, Rays, Pirates, or Marlins to spend.)
or Guardians
There is one thing that could, and that would be if the Revenue Sharing Grievance that the owners tried to get the union to drop from 2018 got decided in the players favor. That would be a game changer.
I’m sure some teams would spend more to jumpstart a contention window, but even MLBPA’s proposal still keeps pre-arb players absurdly underpaid and keeps most players from free agency until their 30s, so plenty of teams will still go with stockpiling youth. Not sure this is as much of a “lift all boats” issue as you think.
Nothing substantive done on competitiveness, and the Union largely playing by MLB’s rules elsewhere. The yo-yoing of players optioned will continue to depress salaries.
The deal on the table isn’t as bad for the Union as the existing one, but it’s very little progress. And, the only tangible increase in compensation is on the minimum, and the handful of “bonus” pool players, some of whom might have been bought out through extensions. Rich teams will continue to see the CBT as a hard cap, and poorer/tanking teams will continue to look for the cheapest alternatives. Bleh.
They actually did agree to a 5 option maximum per year per player, so that is one small positive.
The bonus pool players thing will hopefully prevent owners from doing to other young guys what happened to Acuna and Albies.
I thought MLB pulled back the 5 option max after making it
they put it back in on Monday I think.
It seems everyone agrees the owners took the players to the cleaners under the old CBA in light of growth in revenue, inflation, the pocketing by some teams of revenue-sharing funds that could have gone to salaries/free agents, and changes in roster construction over the years. Now owners get another $85m in TV revenue for expanded playoffs, and I don’t see that what the owners propose under a new CBA benefits the players even that amount (esp. given so few teams are likely to test a higher CBT ceiling, whatever it is). Seems like the owners are asking the players to lose ground, once again, to growing revenues while still not making any appreciable dent in the imbalances that have built up over the last two CBAs (and that does not even account for add’l growth in revenues over the life of a new CBA).
I’ll say a date that will be really interesting to see if we’re playing by. April 15. Jackie Robinson Day, which in 2022 is the 75th anniversary of him breaking in. You figure where we are, we have about 2 weeks left.
If I were the players I would set up some sort of benefit game on that night. Broadcast nationally.
I would watch it. Heck, they could make a small tournament, play games the Fri-Sat-Sun…
Related issue on mid-April dates. Have the owners noticed that on April 16th there will be a professional gridiron football game on NBC and FOX? The NFL is already eating their lunch when the two are in direct competition, normally I’d figure that there’s no chance that I’d watch much spring football from an start-up league, not when they’re up against MLB after all.
This year… Birmingham is much closer than any MLB team and it’s not like I’ll be choosing between watching them or watching the Red Sox when the Red Sox aren’t playing.
If MLB doesn’t start before mid-May, they could largely lose me for the year. All it takes is me deciding that the MLB owners are greedy assholes who I don’t want to give my money too (looking good) and deciding that the USFL is worth watching.
I support the players totally, but I am disappointed in the extent to which it really feels like they have negotiated on ownership’s terms. The deals they were tossing back and forth really look like they were fooling around with the status quo and the players were begging just to get something that approximates a continuation of the previous CBA. Too much attention is put on the draft order as well, I really do not think teams see so much value in moving from the #5 pick to the #1 pick that they’re going to drop everything to get there. They are tanking not for a specific draft slot but to avoid throwing good money after bad.
If players want to deal with that they need to think about structural changes that make it less appealing for teams to abandon investment in their MLB clubs in favor of the far cheaper amateur and minor league players.
And of course I thought they would have pushed much harder for earlier free agency, which they gave up on quite early. Not only that, but as mentioned they gave up on most of the methods to get players paid more like their market value early in their careers. So many players make the minimum that I can see why you put a lot of focus there, but I would have liked to see the players spend more time trying to reduce the number of guys making the minimum in the first place.
Ben, one question I wondered if you had any comment on. You wrote: “The league paid roughly $289 million in minimum salaries in 2021. If they adopted their proposed minimum salary schedule over the next five years and the number of players receiving the minimum remained the same, the league would pay an average of $364.7 million per year over those five years.” The qualifier (same number of players) is important. Better teams are going to spend for the players they want. For the “frugals” let’s assume they have 12 players at or near MLB minimum, so the extra cost would be the delta between old and new, or about $1.5M per year. It seems to me that the frugals would just lop off another vet at, say, $2.5 M per year and replace him with a ML minimum player. The actual extra costs might be considerably less than the roughly $75M over 5 years you came up with.
For the life of me I can’t understand how anyone could be a fan of these teams.
Fans don’t get to choose their teams’ owners.
Absolutely nailed it. We are going to miss games over 5 mil per team that is covered by other revenue increases anyway. Insanty.
yep- and even for the teams if they don’t want to- wouldn’t have to have an impact. Could instead of paying a few vets pay a few more rookies.
Another log to throw on the fire is that Manfredo says the players won’t get full salaries if or when baseball returns in 2022, and Clark says they’ll fight for that so add another impediment to an agreement.
Yep and Clark said if they don’t pay 162 they won’t agree to extra playoffs.
The problem is that the gap can’t really be measured in money. The owners want nothing more than total surrender from the players’ side. The players gave them a really favorable offer and the owners were like, “nah, not good enough.” This will probably end up with the owners declaring an impasse, the union alleging an unfair labor practice, and no baseball anytime soon.
I mean, we’re already there.
Technically, no. My collective bargaining knowledge is very rusty (haven’t had to be involved in any collective bargaining in literally 15 years and I’m not a lawyer), but declaring an impasse in collective bargaining is a formal thing that happens when one side thinks no further movement will be made. It opens up certain legal avenues (which I think vary depending on the sector). Whether it stands depends on the negotiations being made in good faith, though, so it sometimes results in an unfair labor practice grievance by the other party.
I don’t have any idea why they haven’t already done it. I saw Eugene Freedman speculate they didn’t do it because they knew they would lose due to arcane duty-to-bargain legalese. But if this does go into the legal system, I lose any ability to predict any timelines because I have no idea how long it would take.
one thing he said that was interesting was some things that were in the owners proposal couldn’t be done via impasse. Getting rid of the 2018 Grievance and also the pitch clock. Thought it was pretty interesting.
This is the way it is going to go.
I think those who really want a deal reached should refer to the two parties as “Owners” and “Players” because without world class ballplayers, there ain’t nothing major about MLB.
I am flat out stunned at how little the players are asking for. $700k minimum salary, with $20k (less than 3%) raises? Sheesh, why bother.
My my these players have it rough. Work hard playing a game for 8 months per year and the poor ones only make about 500k. They must really be starving. Meanwhile, the union could do things more noble like fight for better Milb salaries, help protect the 14-16 year old prospects from the caribbean from being taken advantage of, or maybe have their richest pitch in to provide for these young players that they care so much about. But that is not any of their sticking points in negotiations. I wonder why? Any person in reality would find another job, or at least get another job as leverage and then go to the employer asking for a raise. We have people all over the country that were fired from their hard-working, extremely valuable positions in healthcare and other vital services through no fault of their own and these insane humans have a union asking for 40% raises for the most inexperienced men to play a game and the media eats it up. 2022 for you.
Dick Monfort, is that you?
i think you may need to re-check your math on that 40% figure you’re talking about
Are you drunk? If you want to commandeer a billion dollars of MLB’s money and redistribute it to all the underpaid nurses and schoolteachers, I am rooting for you but think you’re probably gonna fail. “Insane humans”, indeed.
This is before we even get into the fact that MLB players can’t exactly find another job as leverage since MLB is literally a monopoly. And that everyone knows exactly why people in critical services were fired and it’s because they were a public health risk in a public-facing role. It is so hard to be this wrong about so many things in just one paragraph.
Let’s not forget the years of being paid way less than minimum wage in the minors for the HOPE, of even getting well paid.
Good comment by Horatio. The MILB players are by far the most underpaid and underrepresented participants in professional baseball. The AAA/AA players not on 40 man rosters are making about $25,000 per year compared to the proposed MLB minimum salary of $700,000. The differential in skill level between these groups is very small, and would not be noticeable to 90% of mlb fans.
Fangraphs, The Athletic and ESPN writers have become an echo chamber for bashing the owners and providing nonstop praise for the players and their agents. So it is good to hear another viewpoint besides the evil billionaire owner mantra.
Ben does a good job trying to quantify the financial differences of current offers, but he neglected to quantify how much the owners have already moved in their current proposals compared to the current CBA.
The owners have proposed increasing the minimum salary 23% or $130,000 to $700,000 which is worth roughly $120 million per year.
The owners have proposed to fund a brand new pre-arb pool at $30 million.
The CBT offer by owners to increase the first threshold from $210 million to $220 million is worth about $100 million per year initially per Ben’s estimate. The threshold ultimately reaches $230 million and the benefit then grows to $200 million per year.
The owners have proposed to remove draft pick compensation on qualifying offers, and to implement a draft lottery. The financial impact is undefined, but these are clearly concessions by the owners to player requests.
The current proposal by owners increases player pay by roughly $250 million to $350 million per year. While Ben estimates the current gap between the MLB and MLBPA proposals at about $200 million per year. To me a reasonable solution would be for owners to raise CBT threshold to $225 million with $5 million increases each year thereafter. And for owners to raise Arb pool by $10 million or increase minimum salary to $710,000.
But even the existing owner proposal is a reasonable deal for players when you consider the league has just endured two pandemic years with the 2021 attendance the lowest in 37 years, and double digit decline in TV ratings this year.
Under the current CBA, Max Scherzer just signed a 3 yr guaranteed contract for $43.3 million per year. Last year Bauer received a 2 yr deal for $85 million total. Trout and Tatis recently signed guaranteed contracts for $426 million and $340 million before getting injured. And Seager, Betts, Harper, Machado, Cole, and Rendon all signed $300 million plus contracts recently. It is hard for MLBPA to claim victimhood with these deals consummated. And Scott Boras receives over $100 million per year in commissions, which may explain reports that he sabotaged the negotiations on Tuesday.
I understand the arguments about billionaire owners and increases in franchise values, and believe owners have responsibility to reach an agreement. But to say owners have not offered the MLBPA anything at all is misleading.
TV deals just increased by 33%.. just saying.
And with how far apart the sides were- no Scott Boras didn’t sabotage the negotiations. All that was IMO was a RUSE by the owners to make the players look bad. 238/244/250/256/263 CBT thresholds vs 220/220/220/224/230 isn’t remotely close and the owners knew it. 30 vs 85 million per year(with 85 going up to 105 by end of deal) isn’t remotely close. 700 vs 725 minimum salaries sounds close, but by 2 years in it’s 720 vs 765. That’s not all that close with the last 2 years going up even more of a difference. And they were further apart on Monday night. They’re counting on low information idiots to think that they were close. When it’s pretty obvious that they weren’t remotely close at all.
So now it’s the job of Max Scherzer, Mookie Betts, Mike Trout, etc. to pay $$ out of their own pocket to make sure their employers (who are all billionaires) pay young players, including minor leaguers, a fair salary! Brilliant!
My my these [owners] have it rough. Work [not at all, watching] a game for 8 months per year and the average ones only make about [$50M in operating profit and an additional $71M in value]. They must really be starving. Meanwhile, [MLB] could do things more noble like fight for better Milb salaries, help protect the 14-16 year old prospects from the Caribbean from being taken advantage of, or maybe have their richest pitch in to provide for these young players that they care so much about. But that is not any of their sticking points in negotiations. I wonder why?
Well the owners do provide a way for someone who is under 30 years old, to make enough money after one season of playing a ballgame, to invest comforably and easily retire before 50 years old. That is not a trivial thing. I believe most working class people who don’t have a goverrnment parachute would kill for that opportunity. That is more than the players union is doing. I would imagine their health benefits are fairly nice as well. That invested money compounding at 22-24 years old really does add up.
“Meanwhile, the union could do things more noble like fight for better Milb salaries, help protect the 14-16 year old prospects from the caribbean from being taken advantage of”
Lamont you big dummy…you can’t collectively bargain for folks not represented by your union.
These articles are always such a refreshing change of pace from the discussions on social media etc. Every time I see some doofus on Twitter characterize these negotiations as “millionaires vs. billionaires” and call the players greedy I actively lose years off of my life.
If you are on Twitter much at all and are losing plural yearS for every instance of that, your life expectancy must be like -734 at this point
What happens to the money paid into the CBT pool is that distributes as revenue sharing? Because while you could say that the CBT doesnt impact teams that dont want to spend, it does potentially benefit those teams that dont want to spend and can argue market share because thats money they wouldnt get with an increased CBT threshold…right?
I wonder how much of this impasse is due to the nature of having two highly competitive groups trying to win at another game. Undoubtable you don’t become a billionaire or a MLB player unless you have an overdeveloped competitive streak. For instance that minimum salary difference. A simple solution would seem to be start with the higher salary and use the lower annual increase or vice versa. It can’t be that much of a difference if not losing games was really important instead of claiming a victory over your opponent.
I’m not going to stop following baseball in print, but the chances of me spending any money on it, in any form, including putting my eyeballs on a game onscreen, have decreased to zero. I boycott all sorts of products/vendors because of bad behavior, and it won’t be hard to do the same with baseball. Whatever money the owners reap from here on out will not include any from me.
There’s now a rumor going around, which may even be true, that teams can miss up to 25 games before the TV partners start getting money back. This makes the whole “owners are willing to miss up to a month of games” rhetoric that we heard about a week ago make a lot more sense. If they miss the games but still get some money, it hits the players harder than the owners.
I should say, it makes sense that the owners would think that way. It doesn’t actually make sense. Now the union is pursuing back pay, making it harder to get to an agreement. And the owners will be in the exact same position in a month except they’ll have less leverage. And on top of that, a lot of teams own some or all of their cable partners. AND on top of that, a lot of possible baseball-goers may turn their attention somewhere else as it is off schedule.
So they’re passing a certain percentage of the losses around to another division in the same company (in some cases, a lot–50% for Dodgers, 80% for Red Sox, 71% for Mariners), the other side now has more demands than they did before, they’ll have less leverage, and there’s a chance they’ll have lower revenues throughout the remainder of the year. This is definitely a good example of how tactics are not the same thing as strategy.
The 25 games is from a Ken Rosenthal article at the athletic.
I really don’t see a path to a deal at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the entire year lost
The incentives for ending the labor stoppage are going to shift, but that doesn’t mean it will end. The owners probably think that they can still get to the playoffs this year if they miss the first couple months of the season. But we’re at the point where if the league unilaterally ended the lockout and everyone was back to playing games in June under the old CBA, the players would just strike three weeks before the end of the regular season and blow up the playoffs. So the owners probably aren’t going to do that, or if they are, it would still end up with roughly the same result.
Still seems like a one issue negotiation to me.
Minimum salaries and pre-arb bonus pool are straightforward – players want more money for service, owners want to give less. They’ll end up in the middle.
Expanded playoffs – owners obviously want the money, and in their heart of hearts players probably want it too(they all want a shot at a ring). But it’s their biggest chit, so they’ll hold it as long as they can. Eventually, they’ll trade it in some form for the things they want.
The CBT is where the mess is. Nothing seems acceptable, because it’s a poorly designed mechanism to begin with. It’s ostensibly to narrow the gap between the haves and have nots and if you believe that – raising the cap flies in the face of its stated purpose. They’re trying to band-aid a broken thing, because doing what’s really needed (an overhaul of revenue sharing between owners) is even more daunting.
“equivalent to a 1.3% annual growth rate”
LOL, they’re not even going to get raises that keep up with inflation. MLBPA is a joke.
Can’t one reporter push Stripling to learn what the “fine print” double-cross was? Everyone references it but drop the ball on actually breaking any news.
This is from a CBS Sports article:
Also, I learned today that the owner’s last proposal included language to count per diem player expenses toward the luxury tax threshold.
This analysis may be understating the financial gap as it pertains to the minimum CBT threshold and league minimum, as follows:
CBT threshold: Using $5mn below the CBT threshold as an indicator of which teams would be impacted seems too low. That’s less than 3% of the threshold. It stands to reasons that some teams give themselves more cushion than that. If you use a still modest 5% cushion, then an average of 7 teams came within that range or higher during the past CBA (which had the more onerous penalties). If you assumed those 7 seven teams spent amounts equal to the increase in threshold, the difference would be much higher than suggested here.
Minimums: To determine the full impact of increasing the minimums, you would have to not only factor in the mandatory raises for players making the minimum, but also account for how that would ripple through all players under team control, beginning with players whose contracts are renewed in year 2 and 3 and extending into arbitration and even the amounts of contract extensions signed by players under team control. One way to do that might be to take the total amount paid to players under team control (approx. $1.6bn in 2021) and multiply that by the difference in rates of increase from both proposals.
Not sure why owners don’t just pay the players then pass the costs on to the fans.
The players are free to go play in Japan, Korea, Mexico. The owners proposal is more than generous (and everyone knows it, including you). The players lost tens of millions of dollars last week. Tony Clark is the new Richie Phillips.
Troll account
“The owners proposal is more than generous (and everyone knows it, including you).”
Lick, lick, lick that boot. Found John J. Fisher’s account!!
I agree that most of the players’ demands are reasonable and dislike most of the owners’ proposals. I hate the idea of expanded playoffs; there are already too many playoff teams. Service time manipulation is terrible. If you want a de facto hard cap, then you should have a higher hard floor. But the comments on all of these things the players should do are not realistic. They do not have much power in this negotiation. They simply don’t. And it is rare for groups to make economic deals worth notably less than they are able to negotiate. If the players were capable of negotiating a deal that was unfair to the owners, then they would do it.
If the MLB owners agreed to all the MLBPA conditions, but traded that for non- guaranteed contracts going forward. In other words year to year team option, would the players agree to play?
not a chance.
Right you are. I asked the question to show just how greedy the union is. Yes greedy; Guaranteed contracts hurt the sport as much as tanking. The become lost money fir owners who miscalculated going forth, if owners could go year to year or so, they would have more $$ to allocate elsewhere. Hello Davis of Orioles as an example or the kid from BiSox that went to Arizona I think and never played mlb after signing that contract.m
Great story Dan, I wish someone at Fangraphs would write a story of hoq Bob Nutting has “killed” baseball in Pittsburgh.
Sorry Ben, Great story .
So, this boggles my mind: the owners wanted to count per diem food expenses against the luxury tax threshold. That is astonishingly stingy.
My math might be wrong: $30 per diem, times 81 road games, times 40 roster slots, is $97,200 per team, or $2,916,000 total for MLB.
I suppose, given the pittance of the amount relative to the overall numbers involved, it is easy to say, “the players can easily give on this”. And, sure, it would not cost them a ton. But within the context of these negotiations, with revenues skyrocketing and player salaries decreasing, that the owners would attempt to extract such scraps is a frightening insight into their mindset. This news, more than maybe anything else I have read, brings the greed of ownership into relief.
Is that true? If so it’s just downright insulting. Wonder which small-market owner cooked that one up? They are doubtlessly the one counting every nickel and dime, Ebenezer Scrooge style