The MLBPA Has a New Chief Negotiator
The biggest legal news to come out of Major League Baseball last week was the hiring of attorney Bruce Meyer as the union’s new “Senior Director of Collective Bargaining and Legal.” In other words, Meyer is the MLBPA’s new chief negotiator with Major League Baseball.
MLBPA hires veteran sports attorney Bruce Meyer https://t.co/zoZx8bn47u pic.twitter.com/aONd2M1W2H
— MLBPA Communications (@MLBPA_News) August 27, 2018
Tony Clark told @jareddiamond that new hire Bruce Meyer will run the Players Association’s bargaining efforts:https://t.co/y0cCJMlKhrhttps://t.co/htJUHh1KPF
— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) August 27, 2018
Mr. Meyer has extensive jury trial experience, having tried lengthy and complex cases to juries in locales across the country, including New York, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Western Massachusetts, Boston, and Texas.
[…]
Among other notable victories, Mr. Meyer: successfully defended Westinghouse in a major products liability action, resulting in a defendant’s jury verdict after a three-month trial; struck down the NFL’s free agency restrictions after a three-month antitrust jury trial; prevailed in a complex six week reinsurance arbitration for Life Re; achieved a complete defense verdict for Procter & Gamble after a three-week jury trial; and achieved a complete defense verdict in a $70 million preference action against Prudential. Recently, he obtained punitive damages after trial in a trade secret case, obtained a mandatory preliminary injunction for Vivendi in a high-profile case involving the launch of a major music television channel, obtained summary judgment for GlaxoSmithKline dismissing all claims in a suit alleging trademark, false advertising and trade secret violations, won bench trials for eBay and XM Satellite Radio, and prevailed in arbitrations for Rolls Royce and for PAI Partners, a leading French private equity firm.
In other words, Meyer is, by just about any metric, on the short list of the best trial lawyers in the United States and very likely the world — and he has experience turning around labor disputes for unions. In 2016, the National Hockey League’s union hired him to handle their legal matters in the midst of ongoing litigation and disputes with the League. Before that, Meyer was the first to win free-agency rights for players in the NBA, then beat the NFL’s free-agency restrictions in McNeil v. NFL. In other words, Meyer is the only trial lawyer on the planet to have won the right of free agency for two of the four major North American sports.
Bruce Meyer is a brilliant litigator involved in some of the landmark sports law cases of our time. https://t.co/MGREIqtzXw
— Allan Walsh? (@walsha) August 27, 2018
That’s not to say Meyer is bulletproof; nobody this side of Clarence Darrow is undefeated in the legal world. In this line of work, there’s a saying: “Show me a lawyer who’s never lost a case, and I’ll show you a lawyer who’s never tried a case.” Meyer is no exception. And he didn’t exactly improve labor relations during his stint with the NHL; in particular, the Olympics remained a hotly disputed issue there. (Besides, you don’t hire a litigator to make friends — you hire a litigator to win cases and improve your rights.)
Of course, Meyer arrived at the NHL after their CBA had already been finalized in 2013. But Meyer also had a trump card in his cases against the NBA and NFL that he doesn’t have with MLB: the Sherman Antitrust Act that he can’t use in MLB thanks to baseball’s much maligned but still extant antitrust exemption. (EDIT: Theoretically, Meyer could get around the antitrust problem by dissolving the union, as Nathaniel Grow discussed here, but I doubt very much based on his record that he’d consider that as anything other than a last resort.)
Nevertheless, Meyer is far more than a one-trick pony. Even 10 years ago, he was already shifting his practice towards frontiers in sports law beyond antitrust, as he relates in this interview with Corporate Counsel Business Journal which is well worth your time. An excerpt from that same interview:
[T]he nature of the practice has shifted away from antitrust. For many years the practice was concerned with establishing the rights of players to pick where they wanted to play. That trend culminated with the Freeman, McNeil trial, the first and only jury trial on the antitrust merits of sports league restrictions on players. Having established the basic principle of free agency, today we are focused more on the IP and licensing aspects of the business.
Players in all professional sports have IP rights worth an extraordinary amount of money. We do a great deal of work with the players on their rights of publicity. Our practice today has a particular focus on protecting these rights and, when necessary, litigating over them.
If there’s anyone who can maximize the players’ rights over their intellectual property, it’s Meyer. The amount of leverage that would give the MLBPA is massive, considering just what a right of publicity entails. MLB can’t market itself without its players; that’s because, absent a player contract (or a CBA) stating otherwise, legally each player owns his own likeness. So imagine what would happen during CBA negotiations if the players took a hard line on that intellectual property. And that’s just one example – Meyer is among the best intellectual-property litigators in the world, and has the ability to open revenue streams the union didn’t know it had.
This isn’t to say that there necessarily will be unrest during the next round of CBA negotiations, or before then. But after MLB and the MLBPA traded barbs over team spending and player uniforms this season, this is the first tangible step the union has taken to show its players it has no intention of repeating the mistakes of the past. But all of that said, Meyer’s hiring can’t be considered as anything other than a home run for the union here. Meyer is a self-described “player advocate” and the objective best in the business. Whatever the next CBA looks like, the MLBPA can say it won’t be for lack of trying.
Sheryl Ring is a litigation attorney and General Counsel at Open Communities, a non-profit legal aid agency in the Chicago suburbs. You can reach her on twitter at @Ring_Sheryl. The opinions expressed here are solely the author's. This post is intended for informational purposes only and is not intended as legal advice.
He’s just there to argue about players owning the rights to their own tattoos …
Yeah, and we should probably get ready for a work stoppage. The MLBPA didn’t hire him to get a better post-game buffet.
Nah, no work stoppage. Either side would be idiotic to stop the $9.5B (2017 revenues) gravy train. The owners and players seem to have settled on a 50/50 revenue share that has been interrupted by owners finally seeing the stupidity of give $10’s of millions to 30+ year-old players. So the next CBA negotiations will involve the owners making concessions (increase to $1M minimum salary, compromise to avoid gaming the service time of rookies, etc.) to keep the 50/50 revenue split. (Not sure how much money there is in Mike Trout ties, bed sheets, and dinnerware, but hey Bruce Meyer, go nuts!)
Not sure why Fangraphs’ writers keep cheerleading on the Players’ behalf. I view the negotiations between the two parties more like an interesting economic problem than some social justice issue. I also don’t understand the Fangraphs’ reader base’s 1995-era view that more revenue sharing amongst the teams would lead to more parity, since more teams could then buy more FA’s. With a few exceptions, FA’s are terrible! Even the Fangraphs writers (after a winter of yelling “Collusion!”) seem to have thrown in the towel on Free Agency as a viable team-building strategy.
You can use additional revenue for all sorts of things other than signing FAs: you can extend your young players, beef up your analytics or scouting staff, or spend more on Cuban or Japanese players.
The main reason that FA signings are terrible is because most players don’t reach free agency until age 30 or later. Perhaps Mssr. Meyer has been brought in to get that number lowered and/or eliminated in which case FA signings will be both quite lucrative and quite valuable.
The point of the next CBA is to get the players back to 50/50, not to make everyone a FA every year. This requires only minor tweaks not a major re-working of the agreement. That’s why posing Bruce Meyer’s hiring as some major event is silly.
Every team in baseball except the A’s and Rays can extend their younger players and the A’s/Rays can trade the ones they would have liked to extend for more prospects. The cost of scouting staff and signing foreign amateurs is a rounding error on the Hosmer/Cobb/Davis contracts. Just avoid those.
50/50 is a long way off isn’t it? IIRC, the last time I heard numbers, it had dropped to the mid-30% range due to the luxury cap and the boom on revenues.
Scroll down to the table in this Ringer article (https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/2/21/17035624/mlb-revenue-sharing-owners-players-free-agency-rob-manfred). The figures are provided by MLB and conclude that the Players (including player benefits) comprise about 56% of revenues (MLB players 50% and minors leaguers 6%. “An MLBPA spokesman?—?after running the numbers by the union’s economists?—?confirmed that they’re ‘basically accurate.'”
Meanwhile, average player salary has exploded from $3.69M in 2014 to $4.52M in 2018 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/236213/mean-salaray-of-players-in-majpr-league-baseball/). Thank you, Owners, for MLBAM and other marketing that have grown the revenue base!
MLB Players have a 50% revenue share, Minor Leaguers get an additional 6%. These are from Ben Lindbergh’s article in The Ringer from February 21, 2018 entitled “Baseball Economics Aren’t As Skewed As They Seem.” (I posted the link in another comment but Fangraphs’ moderator is reviewing my comment.)
MLB average salary has exploded from $3.69M to $4.52M since 2014. (I posted a link from Statista in my comment that’s being reviewed.) Owners deserve credit for exploding MLB revenues through MLBAM and other marketing so players could make more.
*When I say “get back to 50/50”, I’m assuming Players “lost” $250M (a round, generous number) in expected salary in the 2017-2018 FA which equals about 2.65% of total MLB revenue and it’s this 2.65% that the Players want to win back in the next CBA (and perhaps a bit more for the losses until then).
Don’t just complain that most FA’s are past their prime when the are eligible, offer a solution. I don’t have an answer and would like to hear some ideas but I am not optimistic. i cannot see teams willingly shortening their period of control without some major concessions from the MLBPA and I don’t see the union accepting a salary cap or even the status quo. The union is seething under the existing soft cap and what it perceives as service time manipulation. Much has been made of the weak off-season but how have those FA signings worked out. Let us start at awful and work down, Darvish, Hosmer, Cobb, Bruce, Holland, Lynn, Carlos Santana, Frazier, and the recent past isn’t any better. On the plus side it looks like it is J.D. Martinez, Lorenzo Cain, even though that has years to run and can still collapse and maybe Jake Arrieta. The next CBA is going to be very contentious but both sides must see that there has to be compromise, but from which side, or catastrophe. Is it realistic to expect a team to find and develop great young players, being forced to bring them up at 20 especially if the teams are not allowed to control service time, then lose them at age 24 or 25, before they even get close to their prime? I just can’t see that happening and if the MLBPA is adamant then a work stoppage seems all too possible.
Which Fangraphs writer(s) “shouted collusion”? My memory is that only a few irate commenters did so (on seemingly every article during the offseason) and they were swiftly shut down. The writers had no part in those conspiracy theories.
Craig, Travis, Meg, Sheryl and Nathaniel Grow were writing “collusion” on a twice weekly basis over the winter. The actual performance of said FA’s and updated and accurate numbers of players’ revenue share since seems to have stopped them.
Let’s hope minor leaguers get a seat at the table next round. Below min wage for these guys is pathetic.
Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it. Extending the MLBPA to the minor leagues has plenty of up-side but there could easily be some perilous unexpected consequences.
Heck, as long as wages go up they don’t have to change much of anything to make a huge improvement for minor league baseball.
And if minor league wages go up dramatically then you can expect 80% of current minor leaguers (the “suspects”) to be laid off, all MLB teams to drop down to only 1 or 2 minor league teams, and the great majority of American cities that have minor league teams will suddenly lose them. The only reason the minor leagues exist in the form they are today is because they are readily affordable. The instant they become non-readily-affordable, most of them are history.
With that will come reduced opportunities.
Be careful what stupid things you wish for.
If the minor leagues can’t stay solvent without paying better than minimum wage, they shouldn’t exist.
What the hell are you talking about?
Minor league affiliates don’t pay their players’ salaries. The MLB parent club pays all of that.
if you aren’t new, you should know by now to ignore the angry old man ramblings of johnston
I don’t care if he’s a good lawyer. You don’t win labor disputes with arguments or appeals to equity. You win them with power. The only thing that matters is the discipline of the union.
Yup, yup, a jillion times yup.
I couldn’t disagree more. It’s clear the previous negotiators didn’t understand what was important to fight for. If you don’t even know what will benefit or hurt the players and how, all the union discipline in the world won’t make one bit of difference
I think you’re both correct. 1) Union discipline is vital and 2) clear headedness is essential, too.
Can’t he still use the Sherman Act because the Curt Flood Act repealed the antitrust exemption with respect to employment at the MLB level (at least to the extent that the non-statutory antitrust exemption wouldn’t apply to the negotiations regardless)?
So he’s on the “Litigators’ Mount Rushmore”. What’s that got to do with negotiating acumen?? I don’t get it. Unless you’re saying he’s there to scare the owners into ponying up rather than face him in a court case. Is that it?
Without questioning Bruce Meyer’s credentials and ability, I would like to point out that hiring a litigator is not, in my view, the right move for the union. Litigators are adversarial by nature, whereas transactional attorneys are more synergistic. I am grossly oversimplifying of course, but whereas most litigators have a zero-sum-game mindset, transactional attorneys (at least good ones) are trained to evaluate deals in a win-win way (the classic orange fruit and orange peel example). I am not sure that a win-lose mindset is the right way to approach renegotiations, let alone successful negotiation overhauls. Personally, I would have been more enthusiastic for the union to hire someone with more of a transactional history for the sake of both preserving labor peace while also being equipped to renegotiate the existing deal (and future deals). I am not sure someone “Adversarial” in nature is the right way to go, unless posturing is the union’s biggest priority right now.
Yeah, from purely a negotiating perspective, this is a senseless hire. Like hiring one of the world’s preeminent constitutional lawyers to defend you in a murder case. This is a posturing hire, which actually can serve a negotiating purpose, particularly early on.
Meyer’s basically on a retainer, just getting the fancy title as part of the deal. But some transactional attorney working allegedly under him will lead the real work of ironing out the actual eventual deal, which side gets how much of ‘this’ in exchange for exactly ‘that’.
Bear in mind the ‘NEW! Fangraphs!’ along with the fervent part of its clientele actually wants a baseball labor war, culminating in a glorious labor victory. So the Meyer hire has their hopes up, kinda like ‘Patriot Hawks’ raucously cheering when a military general gets appointed Prime Minister at a time of high tension with some hated neighboring country.
Nobody here wants a labor war. That’s just less baseball to enjoy.
IMHO the MLBPA adopting a “get tough” stance is prelude to one, however. It signals that they want something significant. 100 years of baseball history tells us that ownership will never give up anything significant without a work stoppage and/or court order.
Without even knowing the details of what the MLBPA hopes to bargain for it suggests to me that trouble is coming. One’s personal politics isn’t even in the picture yet.
“Bear in mind the ‘NEW! Fangraphs!’ along with the fervent part of its clientele actually wants a baseball labor war, culminating in a glorious labor victory. ”
Absolutely correct. The mindless hatred of that group for MLB and baseball team owners is stunning and fully worthy of Karl Marx.
I’ll assume this comes from a place of mere ignorance, because many unions use labor attorneys who are primarily litigators as their negotiators. Not only is it not uncommon, it is not even remotely comparable to hiring a person who works on entirely different subjects.
No, it doesn’t come from a place of ignorance – I’m an attorney enemy and do this for a living. It’s a very pragmatic view.
I was responding to Richie’s comment, not yours.
Lost me at “synergistic.” We get it, you have an MBA.
Wrong – I have a JD
The executive directors of the NFLPA, the NBAPA and the NHLPA are all trial attorneys.
Collective bargaining is inherently adversarial. Yes everyone wants to work out a deal, but it’s certainly not about synergy and it’s not like working out a business transaction.
Maggie25: attitudes like that are not productive for negotiating contracts
I don’t know what to say. It’s just not the same thing as doing transactional work, which is why unions and management don’t hire transactional workers to do their collective bargaining.
Taking the attitude of “I win you lose” to negotiate anything isa really poor way to get things done in a way that preserve relationships
I don’t see Meyer listed on the Weil website. The info I have reflects that he left the firm to work directly for NHLPA a few years ago. MLBPA may have hired him away from that position.
Darrow lost both the Leopold and Loeb trial and the Scopes trial (though only nominally so), his most high-profile cases.
I’d’ve gone with Cheryl from Seinfeld. You think she[‘s a] nice girl? Wait till you see her in court. She’s a shark! They call her the Terminator. She [has] never los[t] a case.
Leopold and Loeb was never about guilt versus innocence, it was about saving them from the death penalty, which he did.
Yep, they plead guilty.
Sheryl,
What you missed is that Bruce Meyer will be paid by FIFA, as it is part of soccer’s long term plan to destroy baseball by causing yet another MLB work stoppage (apparently ’72, ’81, ’85, ’94 and ’95 weren’t enough) and there are too many baseball fans left (this year’s attendance figures not withstanding). Guess they figure one more work stoppage combined with some World Cup will be enough to push soccer ahead of baseball in America.
They may be right. And if not, they’re getting close.
I think the comments upthread about how this is article is part of some “Pro-Union/Agent FG conspiracy” are less insane than FIFA planning MLB work stoppages to benefit soccer.
Apparently some people don’t get satire.
great news, time to put a stop to this commisioner manfred and his puppet torre ruining the game.
time to strike and take the game back.
The last work stoppage proved extremely lucrative for the MLBPA (after they won their case against the league following MLB’s attempt to use replacement players.
And the judge who presided over that case just happens now to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States — Justice Sonya Sotomayor.
The players need better representation–or at least one with a grasp of all the issue. The Union spent far too much time on serving the needs of the top-tier agents (getting small concessions on the QO) and far too little improving things for every other class of player.
The American Way.
Time to start working out! I’m going to make the team when the strike hits!
I do wonder if he will make service time manipulation a point of contention in the upcoming CBA.
I’m very curious to see what fan reaction would be in small markets if their best players get signed out from underneath them by big market juggernauts like the Yankees and Dodgers during what are now arbitration years.
Makes sense for the players to fight against this, although it can’t be overlooked how they have boxed out their own by not including the interests of minor league players in prior negotiations. But, for the fans who grandstand over this horrific injustice, I just hope you’re rooting for the teams who can foot the bill, because I won’t want to hear about how the new system prevents small market teams from competing after hearing all the complaining that precedes it (hypothetically).
One could, of course, hope to have it both ways. When not only are early career players compensated in a manner more commensurate with their production, but in addition some sort of market size control is in place such that LAD and NYY doesn’t buy all the talent.
Yes, absolutely, that is ideal, and what we should all be rooting for.
But the impact to small market teams is too often overlooked (or rather, always overlooked) in discussions surrounding the practice of “service time manipulation”.
Finding that happy medium is not so simple. They can pay minor leaguers more, and they really should, but you’ll be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Certain teams only have so much budget or so much wiggle room.
When the small market teams stop bilking their cities for hundreds of millions of dollars for stadium deals, I might feel more sympathy to them when they cry poor regarding competing with large market teams. Maybe.
This is an easy potshot to take, but not exactly applicable across the board.
The Royals have played in the same stadium for 40 or so years. Can they cry poor?
The Marlins’ previous ownership group had their stadium publicly financed. Can the new ownership cry poor?
The Rays desperately need a new stadium (seriously, it’s pathetic), and cannot get one financed or finance one themselves. Can they cry poor?
So take these teams, plus any others that you want to categorize as “small market” that aren’t angling for new, publicly financed stadiums, make them give their players raises across the board and reduce the amount of controllable years they have over their players, and watch what happens. There will be a new victim in town, the small market teams, and a new CBA to look forward to negotiating in order to fix it!
Hopefully the MLB and the MLBPA has more foresight than the vocal majority of the baseball community in finding middle ground here that protects the small market teams while giving the players their due.
I don’t have the answer. It may be a salary cap / floor. But the viewpoint taken by the community at large is narrow and requires broadening.
Screw small market teams. I’ll advocate for more player-friendly stuff AND I will also be intellectually honest in admitting it could hurt small market teams and I don’t care.
Let big market teams (or rich owners of small market teams) pay players whatever they want. It happens, more or less, in European football and everything’s fine. Manchester City is cool as hell and Newcastle is butt. It’s still fun.
It’s super weird how we just accept that it is good to artificially prop up non-competitive sports teams at the expense of players because “small markets.”
Interesting. Some people think it’s super-weird how we accept a sports league without a fair, level playing field for all competitors.
And certain teams have far less budget than income.
I cheer for a mid-market team. (Decent sized metropolitan area, but unfortunate television deal, and really bad stadium planning) So, I can only speak for myself. If fixing service time rules makes it more likely that the Yankees will sign Acuña away from us after 5 years instead of 7, I would consider it a worthy trade off. As much as I love Acuña and love him playing for my Braves, the service time manipulation to claim an extra year of control did not sit right with me.
I admire the position, but unfortunately I believe that you’re in the minority in this regard. The majority would be crying, “Damn Yankees!”
What an exceptional article. Fully researched and cogently presented. Outstanding. Thanks, Sheryl.
I do enjoy the meta-game and I’m looking forward to a marathon with popcorn. And with luck no stoppage of baseball.
The people who think fangraphs is pro work stoppage have obviously never read chats in the winter when writers talk about how hard it is to think of things to write when nobody is playing.
Also, I should add, maybe these people are also just trolling big time and/or not sane.
Very, very bad news for baseball. Extortionate demands and a strike are coming.
What, exactly, would be the extortionate threat? Pay us more or we would rather do something else until you do? If so, this would seem to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of extortion
So, I’ll ask the obvious question.
Why hadn’t they hired him before?
Seems like a great hire, but how much does a negotiator help if the PA doesn’t really even know what it wants?
No CBA or grievance can change the fact that clubs do not value players in their mid-30s, or even early 30s, and that that valuation is rational. Can this guy negotiate job guarantees? For whom? It seems ridiculous. Those deals were always stupid. They’re not coming back.
Now, can the MLBPA negotiate to redirect some of those savings from owners to players in some form? Sure, that’s possible. But in what form? Higher minimum salaries?
They could shorten the 6+ years of reserve service time, but that mostly would just damage small-market teams. It wouldn’t expand the market for veterans, it would just flood the market with a supply of 30-year-olds.
What, realistically, do they want?
From the player’s perspective, unless you break in to the majors at 21, or you’re a late developing superstar, it’s getting harder to get a big contract. We can argue the merits of of that point, and all the complicating factors, but it’s understandable why the union want’s to change that.
Yes, it’s quite understandable, but as the saying goes, it’s only a problem if you have a solution.
There isn’t anything necessarily wrong, either, with greater incentives for extending with your current club. One could even argue it’s good for the game.
Players will definitely get everything they want. This is the only game on the earth where the service they provide can’t be done by anybody else. MLB players are irreplaceable, owners know it, and the MLBPA finally hired someone who will get them their fair share.
So who was the old one? Who did he replace?