The Owners’ Latest Offer Gets Us No Closer to Baseball Season
You didn’t have to be a cynical curmudgeon to know that Saturday’s meeting between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association would not magically produce a deal for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, thus allowing spring training to begin on time. With its “defensive” lockout and subsequent failure to officially offer more than one proposal to the players on core economic issues over the previous 71 days — a counterintuitive definition of “jumpstart,” never before observed in the wild — the league had already made abundantly clear the fantastical nature of any dates attached to pitchers and catchers reporting. By prematurely calling for the entry of a federal mediator into the proceedings after the barest attempt to negotiate, by telling the media that “phones work two ways” when it comes to bargaining, by downplaying the financial benefits of owning a team relative to investing in the stock market, and by mischaracterizing the owners’ latest proposal for the Competitive Balance Tax rates, commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners have made it clear in recent weeks that they aren’t ready to play ball. And so, for the foreseeable future, there will be no major league baseball played.
Manfred has yet to make a formal announcement to that effect because no spring training games have been scrubbed thus far, but via USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, that could happen by the end of this week, as the exhibition season is scheduled to begin on February 26. During his press conference last week, Manfred didn’t offer a deadline for an agreement that would keep the March 31 date for Opening Day intact, though he did express a desire for a minimum of four weeks of spring training, suggesting that the league has absorbed at least one lesson from the frenzied and contentious run-up to the 2020 season and the soaring injury rates that followed. Nightengale reported February 28 as the deadline for an agreement that would preserve Opening Day, though with 197 unsigned arbitration-eligible players and nearly 300 free agents (his figures), such a compressed timeframe would create a level of chaos and logistical difficulty that would make Team Entropy cringe.
If you’re expecting this column to both-sides the failure to hash out a new CBA, to assign equal blame to the MLBPA as to the owners, you’ll have to look elsewhere. This is a lockout, not a strike. It is entirely of the owners’ doing — you could say they own it — and entirely unnecessary, because the 2022 season could be played under the terms of the previous CBA until a new one is in place. The two sides would need to agree to restore the old agreement’s Competitive Balance Tax, Joint Drug Agreement, and domestic violence policy — all of which have technically expired as of December 1, 2021 — until such a point, and that may not be trivial, but it would be a rare glimpse of good faith. Based on the minimal concessions the owners have been offering, not to mention the widening gap between revenues and salaries over the past decade, they must like that old CBA pretty well, because they seem reluctant to change things too radically.
Yes, the two sides have agreed that the new CBA will include a draft lottery of some kind as well as a universal designated hitter and the elimination of draft pick compensation, as Manfred announced on Thursday. But the owners have refused to budge from the status quo on the years to free agency and arbitration, as well as revenue sharing, and the two sides remain miles apart on the core economic issues addressed in Saturday’s proposal. The players are not amused. Via The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal:
There are some [players] who would have preferred that the union had not made its last counter offer at all. Some of the same sentiment cropped up Saturday, based on a feeling that MLB is moving too little to consistently warrant counter-offers.
Because Saturday, when MLB made its first economics proposal of February, was predictably just like everything else that preceded it. MLB made moves it thought the players should consider significant, and the players felt, again, lowballed and frustrated. Some players fear that with their counter-offers they essentially are bidding against themselves. The league says it has the same fear with its own offers to players.
While there’s certainly interplay between the various economic facets under discussion, no single issue illustrates the distance between the two sides, and MLB’s unwillingness to yield, more than the Competitive Balance Tax structure. Over the past decade, the tax threshold has not kept pace with revenue (or, for that matter, inflation), and it has functioned as a soft salary cap that even the wealthiest teams have been willing to approach but very rarely go over; per The Athletic, the Phillies, Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Astros all finished with payrolls less than $4 million below the first CBT threshold in 2021. From that roundtable, using figures from Forbes and the Associated Press, here’s The Athletic’s oft-circulated graph showing the separation between the revenue and the lowest threshold:
In Thursday’s press conference, Manfred mischaracterized the owners’ previous proposal as being similar to last year’s structure with regards to the tax. Via ESPN’s Jeff Passan:
Manfred said the league had proposed taxation rates that were “status quo.” This was incorrect. In recent years, the tax rate was 20% for teams over the $210 million threshold, 32% at $230 million and 62.5% at $250 million. MLB’s proposal calls for a 50% rate at a $214 million threshold, 75% at $234 million and 100% at $254 million. Additionally, teams would lose a third-round draft pick at the first threshold, a second-round pick at the second and a first-round pick at the largest.
Admittedly, things get a bit confusing when trying to distinguish between the penalties for moving up a tier ($20 million or $40 million above the first tax threshold) and those for repeated annual violations. Using MLB Trade Rumors, The Athletic and the expired CBA, I’ve attempted to summarize the CBT’s recent history and the basics of the three economic proposals that have been officially exchanged since the beginning of the lockout (two offered by the league, one by the players). First, here’s a look at the thresholds:
| Year | Threshold ($Mil) | Annual Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | $178 | 0.0% |
| 2013 | $178 | 0.0% |
| 2014 | $189 | 6.2% |
| 2015 | $189 | 0.0% |
| 2016 | $189 | 0.0% |
| 2017 | $195 | 3.2% |
| 2018 | $197 | 1.0% |
| 2019 | $206 | 4.6% |
| 2020 | $208 | 1.0% |
| 2021 | $210 | 1.0% |
| MLB 1/13 Proposal | ||
| 2022 | $214 | 1.9% |
| 2023 | $214 | 0.0% |
| 2024 | $214 | 0.0% |
| 2025 | $216 | 0.9% |
| 2026 | $220 | 1.9% |
| MLB 2/12 Proposal | ||
| 2022 | $214 | 1.9% |
| 2023 | $214 | 0.0% |
| 2024 | $216 | 0.9% |
| 2025 | $218 | 0.9% |
| 2026 | $222 | 1.8% |
| MLBPA 1/24 Proposal | ||
| 2022 | $245 | 16.7% |
| 2023 | $252 | 2.9% |
| 2024 | $259 | 2.8% |
| 2025 | $266 | 2.7% |
| 2026 | $273 | 2.6% |
As you can see, the first threshold has barely budged in recent years, falling short of even a typical 2% or 3% cost-of-living adjustment, let alone the rate of inflation. As MLB Trade Rumors’ Tim Dierkes explained, “A simple 5% increase per year beginning in 2012 would have put the 2021 base tax threshold around $290MM, yet it sat only at $210MM.”
Note that rather than ordering the official proposals chronologically in the table above, I’ve kept the owners’ two proposals adjacent to illustrate how little they differ. The second one increased the thresholds for each of the last three years of the upcoming CBA by a whole $2 million a year. It took the owners a month to come up with that, though to be fair, they did also do away with teams exceeding the first tier losing a third-round draft pick (worth $3.8 million by Craig Edwards’ 2019 estimates, and probably not much more now).
Here’s what those penalties look like:
| Amount Payroll Exceeds Base Tax Threshold ($M) | 1st-Time | 2nd-Time | 3rd-Time+ | Draft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-21 | ||||
| <$20 (Base Tax Rate) | 20% | 30% | 50% | — |
| $20-$40 (Base Tax + 1st Surcharge Rate) | 32% | 42% | 62% | — |
| >$40 (Base Tax + 2nd Surcharge Rate) | 62.5% | 75% | 95% | (1) |
| MLB 1/13 Proposal | ||||
| <$20 (Base Tax Rate) | 50% | 50% | 50% | (2) |
| $20-$40 (Base Tax + 1st Surcharge Rate) | 75% | 75% | 75% | (2) |
| >$40 (Base Tax + 2nd Surcharge Rate) | 100% | 100% | 100% | (2) |
| MLB 2/12 Proposal | ||||
| <$20 (Base Tax Rate) | 50% | 50% | 50% | (3) |
| $20-$40 (Base Tax + 1st Surcharge Rate) | 75% | 75% | 75% | (3) |
| >$40 (Base Tax + 2nd Surcharge Rate) | 100% | 100% | 100% | (3) |
| MLBPA 1/24 Proposal | ||||
| <$20 (Base Tax Rate) | 20% | 30% | 50% | — |
| $20-$40 (Base Tax + 1st Surcharge Rate) | 32% | 42% | 62% | — |
| >$40 (Base Tax + 2nd Surcharge Rate) | 62.5% | 75% | 95% | — |
(2) = third round pick surrendered for teams in Tier 1, second-round pick surrendered for teams in Tier 2, first-round pick surrendered for teams in Tier 3
(3) = second-round pick surrendered for teams in Tier 2, first-round pick surrendered for teams in Tier 3
While the players’ first post-lockout proposal attempts to make up a bit of the lost ground with a substantial jump in the CBT threshold, it maintains the same tiered and annual penalties that were in the last CBA. Meanwhile, the tiered penalties in the league’s two offers have become more severe even while the thresholds have barely moved. Even with the removal of escalating repeater penalties and the draft pick penalties for teams exceeding the first threshold, the owners’ proposal appears designed to continue the effects of the last CBA, during which the average salary fell by 6.4% relative to 2017, with the brunt borne by baseball’s middle class; via the Associated Press’ Ronald Blum, the median salary dropped 30%, from $1.65 million in 2015 to $1.15 million in ’21.
Regardless of the other bells and whistles in the deal, the players simply don’t believe that the structure of the owners’ proposals will allow them to grow their salaries. As pitcher Alex Wood put it via Twitter on Saturday:
If penalties increase under the CBT/Luxury tax IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE THRESHOLD IS MY GOD. Make the threshold a billion dollars it doesn’t matter. Teams already don’t spend bc they use the current penalties as an excuse not to. Imagine if the penalties got worse. SMH.
— Alex Wood (@Awood45) February 12, 2022
Beyond the tax structure, the two sides are far apart on the minimum salary, which in 2021 stood at $570,500, the lowest of the “big four” North American team sports according to The Score’s Travis Sawchick (the NBA’s $925,258 is the highest, and even the NHL comes in at $750,000), and only about 12% higher than in 2016, with annual growth of less than 2% in each of the past four years. What’s more, none of those other sports rely on that minimum-salary labor more than baseball. Via Sawchik, 63.2% of all players in 2019 had less than three years of service time, meaning that they were generally making some function of the league minimum. Those players accounted for 53.6% of all service time accumulated, but only 9.8% of player pay. Via Ben Clemens, in 2021, players making the minimum accounted for 47% of service time accrued, but only 7.5% of player pay. Via Nightengale, 1,145 of the 1,670 players on rosters last year (68.6%) made less than $1 million — a reminder that calling this a fight between millionaires and billionaires is off base.
The union has proposed increasing the minimum salary to $775,000. After making a preliminary offer of $600,000 during negotiations in mid-December, the league offered straight salaries of $615,000, $650,000 and $700,000 for players with 0-1, 1-2, and 2-3 years of service time in their mid-January proposal. On Saturday, they proposed raising the salary for the third year to $725,000, and offered an alternative as well, a flat minimum of $630,000 in the first year of the deal; that’s 10.4% above the current minimum, a jump that would be the largest since the 2012 CBA increased the minimum from $414,00 to $480,000 (15.9%), but it’s less than $6,400 ahead of what the minimum would be if the last CBA’s 2017 minimum ($535,000) had grown with inflation. Under that structure, teams would be able to give raises for subsequent years, but would also be able to unilaterally renew contracts with smaller or no raises as well, just as they have for ages.
Along with the proposals for the minimum salary come proposals for a pre-arbitration bonus pool, where the gap between the two sides might best be described as a chasm. Via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers:
The league increased its offer from $10 million to $15 million while offering a six-person panel — three from each side — to develop a mutually agreeable WAR statistic to allocate the funds. The top 30 players in WAR and award winners would be eligible for the bonus pool.
The union has asked for a $100 million bonus pool, down from a previous offer of $105 million.
The latter reduction came as part of negotiations since the MLBPA’s first formal post-lockout offer. That the two sides have reduced the gap from $95 to $85 million doesn’t exactly count as progress, though to call back to the aforementioned Clemens analysis of the players’ first proposal, the amount in question is now less than 1% of the league’s annual revenues. The structure of how the money would be divided up isn’t clear, but the league’s figure would mean an average of an additional $500,000 for those top 30 players, while the union’s figure would mean an average of $3.33 million — a substantial difference.
Here it’s worth mentioning that nobody who’s in the business of presenting WAR values, not FanGraphs or Baseball Reference or Baseball Prospectus, is comfortable with the idea of its estimates of performance values being deployed in the direct service of determining player salaries. As our own managing editor Meg Rowley said on a recent Effectively Wild podcast:
“This assumes a precision to WAR that, I think people who think WAR is a really useful framework through which to understand baseball would be very quick to tell you, is not present. So what happens if you are the 31st-most valuable pre-arb player and the difference in value between you and the 30th-most valuable is less than half a win? You’re probably not the same, but you’re within our margin for error on this.”
Other elements of MLB’s proposal that ESPN highlighted pertained to service time manipulation, roster continuity, pre-draft physicals and a restoration of the draft-and-follow system. Via Rogers, “The league increased the incentive for teams to keep their best prospects in the majors, offering them two draft picks within the player’s first three years if he finishes in the top three in Cy Young, Rookie of the Year or MVP voting. Previously, the league had offered one extra draft pick per player within his first three years.”
The example Rogers offered was Kris Bryant; had the Cubs kept him up for all of 2015 instead of farming him out for the first 12 days of the season to [check notes] work on his defense — thus leaving him one day short of collecting a full year of service time — they’d have netted one pick for him winning that year’s Rookie of the Year award, and a second one for his MVP award in 2016.
On the subject of roster continuity, the CBA would limit the total number of times a player could be optioned to the minors in a season to five, which could make a significant difference in the quality of life for pitchers at the bottom of the bullpen food chain, the ones vulnerable to getting sent down if they’ve thrown so many pitches that they won’t be available for a day or two. To cite just a few extreme examples, the past year alone saw the Rays option Louis Head 12 times, with the Dodgers optioning Mitch White 11 times, and likewise for the Yankees with regards to Albert Abreu.
On the subject of pre-draft physicals, in what could be called the Kumar Rocker rule (though, as is often the case for players expected to be drafted highly, the Vanderbilt pitcher did not submit to one), the league has proposed that a player who submits to one and is subsequently drafted will be guaranteed at least 75% of slot value and can’t be failed by the team in a post-draft physical. As for the draft-and-follow, the league has proposed reinstating the ability of team to draft a player who’s not yet ready for professional baseball and then sign him the next year. In this case, the team can draft such a player, send him to junior college for one year, and sign him for as much as $225,000 the next year.
For as helpful as those elements may or may not be, they’re of much smaller scale compared to the CBT, the minimum salary, and the structure of arbitration, regarding which “the league has said it won’t move off the status quo,” according to Rogers.
Even with the lack of progress and the players voicing their frustrations, it’s worth noting that the immediate asymmetry of the situation favors the union. Players don’t get paid for spring training, so they won’t feel the bite of missed games as suddenly as the owners will when their exhibition dates begin to dwindle. The owners obviously have much more ability to absorb the loss of games long-term than the players do, but given the empty ballparks of 2020 and the reduced attendance last year, their resolve may be tested more quickly than that of the union. The players appear galvanized and geared up for a stand via which they can regain some of the ground they’ve lost, and guarantee their rank and file significantly more security, financial and otherwise, than they currently enjoy.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
For anyone who was “expecting this (Fangraphs!!) column to both-sides the failure to hash out a new CBA, to assign equal blame to the MLBPA as to the owners”, man oh golly gee whilickers do I have an-sale bridge just for you!
“an on-sale”
Well, that is because there isn’t equal blame.
Doesn’t take genius level observation skills to predict where Fangraphs is going to come down on this issue. The part I don’t like here is that the assumption is that it is basically pure greed that is driving owners’ actions, it’s basically accepted as a prior. I would like a little more inspection/discussion of how owners may be rational actors while not portraying them as Monopoly Man charicatures. I know I will get dinged by many who, again, feel that such a position doesn’t even need to be supported, but still, ex:
Surge in revenue is tied to TV contracts, which I think is hugely in line for a correction. Lower viewership numbers and the rise of streaming are going to kill these contracts whenever they are up for renewal, just look at the albatross that is the Olympics rights. So this is a short term windfall, not a stable economic foundation. If you are an owner and see that coming, are you excited about getting locked into a CBA that bakes in current revenue as stable? Particularly if people Also aren’t coming to games anymore? Honestly, I worry about the fundamental economics of baseball given it’s waning popularity and think we may very soon see significant changes to the game’s structure (ex: does having 162 games that few watch even make sense anymore? Does maintaining these huge fields that are mostly empty most of the time?) that are out of the hands of both players and owners. If owners see this coming down the road, who is irrational, owners or an MLBPA that demands a bigger piece of a pie that very soon may be much smaller?
These are just questions! The answers are very likely a mix between “owners are rational” and “owners are greedy”, maybe I am overly pessimistic about MLB’s prospects, but these are the types of questions that don’t get asked if you just reflexively settle in to the popular narrative.
OK, but if there are real economic concerns on the part of the owners, they need to open the books (at least to MLBPA) to be credible. If they won’t do that, MLBPA is entirely correct to call bullshit.
The owners are determined to treat the players as employees rather than as business partners. Unless that changes, why should the players care?
Agree I don’t think you can in good faith make a case about the economics of the game and demand the books be closed. I can see some reason there too – they probably don’t want to have to litigate with fans every year why they are spending X % of revenue and not some arbitrary X + Y % Cubs Twitter has settled on, and they also probably really don’t want it spelled out to the public how much they have enriched themselves on the public dime, the latter of which I find far more objectionable . I am not saying these people are saints, just that you usually get closer to the truth presuming people are rational than if you presume they are ogres.
Opening the books to the players doesn’t mean opening the books to the public. You can have any individual players (presumably the union’s senior leadership) who will review the financial documents sign NDAs.
I don’t assume they’re ogres. I assume their number one priority is their economic self interest, which they see as extracting every possible cent from the players, the municipalities, the cable networks, and anyone else involved. I also think they’re VERY interested in demonstrating (again) that MLBPA is not capable of forcing them to amend their proposals in a meaningful way.
I definitely think the owners are being short-sighted and risking the long term value of their franchises with this brinkmanship.
People are rational? I think even economics doesn’t posit that anymore. People are motivated by greed, love, power, hope, fear, connection, anger etc and then use motivated reasoning to justify their wants, desires, hopes, fears etc. So do we have any clues about the motivations of the owners? We can look at their public statements and their public actions. We can look at what we know about how small clubs of extremely wealthy white men generally think about themselves and act towards others. Where does that take us? “Ogres?” No. “Entitled?” “Ruthless?” “Confident in their own superiority?” “More interested in their own perceived well-being, sense of power, and wealth than basically anything else?”
Generally, yeah…. Those might be some starters.
True that people aren’t always rational, but we should start a discussion with how rational actors in the owners’ shoes would behave and work from there.
Mostly I am just making the argument that what might seem like “both sides ism” is merely an attempt to delve into the motivations and behaviors of parties for a more informed discussion, NOT an attempt to enforce artificial moral equivalence in everything
I’d be more willing to think the owners are motivated by some concern other pure profit maximization if their CBT proposal were a less punitive and they were willing to remove some of the strings associated with their salary floor proposals. If the owners cared about PR wins, they should be willing to spend a little more money to make things better for minor league players and encourage lower spending teams to increase payroll, to at least look like they are being competitive. If the owners really feared about losing long term cable money, they would try harder to get fans in their ballparks and loosen the blackout rules. Fans will pay, to watch their favorite team, but you have to give them reasons to want to watch. It’s hard to talk about risky financial propositions when the sport reported record revenues for years.
@bigj Appalling, really, that you thought to distinguish team owners by race and gender as if wealthy women and non-whites are, by nature, somehow less ‘entitled,’ ‘ruthless,’ etc. than white men. Or that those members of ownership groups or shareholders who are women or non-white have been agitating for something more altruistic. Disgusting, really, in addition to the utter, abject mindlessness of it.
I’m astonished a site that prides itself on rationality allows your revolting remark to stand. Would it do the same with a post targeting women in this way, or non-whites? Has it ever?
Why can’t they be both?
Wouldn’t you see more teams up for sale if the future outlook seemed this bleak to some owners?
Per the CBA owners do provide audited financials to the MLBPA. They are not publicly available to fans or the press but they are mandated to be provided to the MLBPA. This is why I imagine that the perception of owners making outrageous annual cash-flow profits might be a little off-the-mark. If that’s the case the MLBPA ought to be aggressively messaging “profits are up x% while player comp was down last season.”
What is not included in the financials is things like real estate development revenues associated with some of the new parks i.e. ATL. I think the union is missing the boat on not fighting to re-define what counts as revenue like those real estate deals, gambling revenue.
“What is not included in the financials is things like real estate development revenues associated with some of the new parks”
As well as revenue earned by associated businesses. MLB owners are famous for taking part in the time-honored corporate tradition of hiding income in other businesses or jurisdictions that their governing body (in this case MLB and their agreement with the MLBPA) has no oversight over. During the RSN boom the big-market teams began keeping massive profits within their television networks, which of course the team’s owners had a huge stake in. Or Frank McCourt owning all the parking lots around Dodgers Stadium. None of this is “team” revenue so the players get no cut of it, even though that revenue is entirely extant on the existence of the team.
“Locked in” for three years? That’s how long a CBA has usually lasted in the past.
Examine your own assumptions here. Your assessment of the future of the sport, its popularity, etc. is extremely biased.
You also overlook the possibility that they start out from a rational position but — and just look at how these people made their money in the first place — that position is determined by the fact that they’re greedy jerks.
Maybe fewer fields would be empty if all the teams were consistently trying to win? Just a wild and crazy thought.
The fact that the owners would continue with the old CBA and be perfectly happy tells you everything you need to know about how fair that deal was. The only reason the owners locked out the players was to control the process. Otherwise they risk losing playoff games, which is when they make money that they don’t really share with the players. They didn’t want the players to have that leverage.
Even now, I bet the owners don’t care if they lose some regular season games, especially if they get to pay pro-rated salaries, as long as they get their playoff money. Just like 2020.
Yea saying the owners could just offer to continue under the old CBA is just a bad business decision for them. They’d end up paying the players most of their salary only for the players to strike before the playoffs.
That situation would also be significantly worse for the MLB as a product than the delay we are set to experience.
Don’t be absurd. Most teams don’t make the playoffs. Their fans would be unaffected.
There is no evidence that the players would play under the old CBA, nor that they would commit not to strike under a one-year extension of the CBA to avoid what happened in 1994-95 (which the lockout protects the owners against). A strike that cancels the playoffs after the majority of salaries have been paid is the worst possible scenario for the owners, and the players have made it very clear for years now that a) they find the old CBA unacceptable; b) they are willing to engage in more extreme negotiating tactics now than at any point since 1995. So the owners probably think they’d strike again. So do I.
Neither side has stated that they would be willing to proceed under that scenario. Neither side has made an offer along those lines, and the owners’ proposals that are closest to the old CBA have been rejected by the players as “underwhelming” or worse. When Adam Wainwright casually suggested the players *might* play under that scenario he got shushed by his own side very quickly.
When I say there is “no evidence” for these things I mean that literally. You’ll note that the paragraph that describes this scenario contains no links or quotes, in an otherwise heavily-sourced article. Every other paragraph in the piece (outside of the conclusion) has at least one link or sourced quote except for that paragraph. I.e., it’s speculation. It could be correct, maybe Jaffe has ITK sources or something, but I don’t think so because he admits that this would not be a trivial negotiation (almost immediately after suggesting it could be). Quite frankly I think it is incorrect that both sides would play under a one-year extension of the CBA. If I was a player *or* owner I would refuse to do that. Everyone’s already in the crap now, may as well get this resolved permanently, one way or the other; band-aids aren’t going to help at this point.
This was pointed out to Jaffe on Twitter — not by me, I hadn’t encountered the argument until just now — several days before he published this article. So he should be aware of this counterargument already. The fact that he either isn’t, or chose to act as if it doesn’t exist, makes me raise an eyebrow.
The players have said for years that they’ve wanted a fight, setting the stage for all of this, so it’s strange to act as if the owners just woke up on Dec 1 and decided to lock the players out for no discernable reason. Jaffe himself referred to the CBA battle as a “war” in a chat back in July, 2020. The players wanted a fight so the owners are giving them one.
It’s no contradiction to support the players and still acknowledge that.
This is why I am no longer a member of this site. Jay and Meg could easily write an article blasting the owners, which many would agree with, without deliberately lying to the readers. They say, no, we really need to go the extra 5% to show how terrible the owners are, and so they just lie and lie repeatedly. It would be so antithetical to their points of view to write an article that is 95% in favor of players but maybe just maybe include 5% of counter-evidence.
Meanwhile, the pro-labor anti-semitic Twitter trolls take it and have a field day with it.
Adjust your 5G hat, you’re not getting enough lasers.
I remember the good old days when accusing someone of “deliberately lying” would be followed by evidence or at the very least an example.
Too hard, maybe. Here’s your participation trophy.
Bootlicker.
Seems to me that that the players have made no concession to the bargaining process. A person that thinks the players wouldn’t have voted to strike as the season was starting is just not very intelligent about union negotiations. MLB by having the lockout took away the union ability to call a strike when it would benefit them. The players have said for two years that they were going to strike. That in itself is counter to negotiating in good faith. As a fan it is very disheartening to listen to billionaires and millionaires talk that shows no compassion for our struggles through these hard times.
The players essentially conceded on their ask for changes to service time rules. That’s a major concession. The league did not make a correspondingly large concession in response.
Concession? They knew the Owners would lockout the players for the entire year if they wanted to move FA from 6 to 5 years – it was the biggest non-starter ever. Outside of that give – the players have only given $5M off their newly negotiated bonus pool that the owners have agreed to already. Players got their ass kicked in last two (maybe three) CBA negotations – can’t win it all back in one….
Hard disagree, there are other structures besides years such as aged based that could make sense.
Dropping a non-starter demand isn’t exactly a concession. Suppose the owners had proposed non-guaranteed contracts for free agents, then later dropped the proposal. Would that be considered a major concession?
OK, so then the owners can just label any changes as “non-starter” and reimpose the previous CBA?
That does seem to be their negotiating position.
The status quo is pretty much what the owners want, so inertia is on their side. If the previous CBA is imposed, the players have to decide whether to strike or not before the playoffs. It’s hard to sell a strike when ownership isn’t trying to impose anything new. In the past, players only initiated a strike when the owners proposed a major overhaul that would help ownership at the expense of players bargaining power (draft pick compensation in the 80s, salary cap in 94). It’s easy to sympathize with their positions in these cases. This time it’s the players who want massive restructuring all at once. So the question is whether the players are really all that cohesive about the status quo being unacceptable rather than just the most active twitter users.
The players want to start over from scratch, but that’s not how it’s going to work. They should push hard for what they can get, but I don’t agree that making major new demands then pulling them back is a concession.
Some (knowledgeable people) would consider not restructuring revenue sharing and arbitration/FA terms a BIG concession.
I don’t think the MLBPA has dropped moving arbitration a year earlier. They did drop their demands for moving FA a year earlier, and came down something like 50% on the revenue sharing piece.
I have 0 bananas. If I ask someone for 10 bananas and they say “no, I will only give you 1 banana”, then in response I change my ask to 9 bananas, have I made a significant concession? No. The person offering me 1 banana has made a much larger concession than I have made. If the negotiation ended right there then I would have 1 more banana than I used to have, and my negotiating partner would have one fewer. They would still have more bananas than me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve made any concessions.
The old CBA is expired. The idea that the players (or owners) can’t concede anything they didn’t have a right to under the expired CBA is false.
Sure, but every expired CBA is the basis for the negotiations over the next one. That is why the players have refused to consider the owners’ proposed changes to replacing arbitration with a performance-based pay standard (based on WAR): arbitration has worked in basically the same way for decades, so they don’t want to change it. Then the league says the same thing about rules regarding the length of player control. So both sides immediately dropped those proposals, and the negotiations have held very tightly to the parameters of the old CBA. The PA refused to negotiate over a cap/floor model using the same rationale.
But if the players want to fully tear up the CBA and start from scratch then I’m sure the owners would be more than happy to negotiate on that basis.
The players’ concession on the pre-arb pool is literally half the owners’ entire offer.
Think about that and tell me again which side isn’t negotiating in good faith.
The players aren’t moving that much because their initial offer was reasonable (I was really surprised how low their asks were) and the owners have yet to offer anything that suggests they’re interested in a deal.
Millionaires vs. billionaires is not an appropriate way to view this labor battle. It explains why in this very article and links to further information. Setting aside the fact that a billion dollars is one thousand times more money than a million dollars, most professional players are not millionaires. The number of players who spend three years in the major leagues, which is about what would be needed to get to $1 million post-tax, is less than 1% of players drafted. If you take one thing away from this article, it should be this.
“Via Sawchik, 63.2% of all players in 2019 had less than three years of service time…Those players accounted for 53.6% of all service time accumulated, but only 9.8% of player pay. Via Ben Clemens, in 2021, players making the minimum accounted for 47% of service time accrued, but only 7.5% of player pay. Via Nightengale, 1,145 of the 1,670 players on rosters last year (68.6%) made less than $1 million — a reminder that calling this a fight between millionaires and billionaires is off base.”
I regret that I have but one downvote to give this comment.
On the other hand, I appreciate the people who post “millionaire vs. billionaires”. It’s like seeing a red hat now. I know what level of discourse there will be, going in.
A Cincinnati Red hat?
If by “concessions” you mean “back off their initial proposals” then no, they have done plenty of that.
If by “concessions” you mean “give the owners something new” then you are correct. The players do not want to give anything more to the owners unless they get something very nice back in return. They got screwed in the last CBA (probably partly their own doing, but you can’t change the past) and they’re pissed.
“A person that thinks the players wouldn’t have voted to strike as the season was starting is just not very intelligent about union negotiations.”
Ah yes, the hallmark language of someone who is very intelligent about union negotiations.
We should all learn at the school of Swamprat.
I didn’t know that the lockout was preventing the players from striking, nor did I know that they would have preferred to strike rather than be locked out… you learn something new every day when you listen to an expert!
As far as I can tell, both of you are wrong. The lockout occurred to prevent a strike happening right before the playoffs, since that would minimize the damage to the players’ earnings while causing absolute misery for the owners. After 1994, every sports league locks out the players when CBAs expire for this reason.
A lockout and a strike are two different things. A Lockout is the owner saying you can’t come to work, and a strike is labor saying they aren’t coming to work. Both can happen simultaneously.
Sure, the owners might lock out the players now so that they don’t strike halfway through the season to disrupt the playoffs… BUT THEY’D HAVE TO START THE SEASON FOR THAT TO HAPPEN. In order to start the season, there would have to be some kind of agreement for the rules framework the season were to be played under. Yes, in order to not start the season, eventually either the owners, players, or both would have to lockout/strike against the other side, but it’s actually beneficial for the owners to let the players strike from a labor negotiations perspective (they wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment, it looks worse from a PR perspective, they could require federal mediation instead of request it, etc.)
We’re not “both wrong”. I was making fun of Swamprat for a terrible take and didn’t bother to give a generous assessment for what he might have been trying to talk about. I would agree with the premise that I shouldn’t have taken the time to simply mock another commenter, shame on me there, but “both of you are wrong” is not an accurate assessment of what happened here.
I know “some” about labor negotiations… enough to know that I am far from an expert. Also enough to know that I know far more than swamprat. If I’m hesitant to give full explanations about how things work, take that as evidence of knowing my place on the dunning kruger curve here.
Really? You want people in a labor dispute to think not of their own futures but about you? Jesus, some people.
This is a great summary, and I agree with the conclusion. If the league won’t move more than a token amount on CBT thresholds, service times, or league minimums, it’s hard to see an end.
It seems like the most realistic and expedient compromise is expanded playoffs in return for substantially increased CBT thresholds and league minimums. If the league won’t even talk about that, this could be a long wait.
Given the ask from the players, it’s pretty easy to see an end… the union rolling over on itself.
If that’s all the players were asking for then I think this deal would’ve been done a long time ago. The owners have already made offers on all those things, and those are the issues on which the two sides are *closest*.
But it’s not all the players have been asking for.
The owners have made *terrible* offers on those things, yes.
The owners would be more likely to make better ones if they weren’t also being asked to give up hundreds of millions of dollars per year in other issue areas (which is the premise of this subthread). As both sides keep saying, it’s the whole package that matters not just any one particular area. The players have set the agenda, and so the negotiations are happening on their terms (i.e., regarding the issues they care most about). Relative to the previous CBA, the owners are not currently asking for anything that wouldn’t also benefit the players (universal DH, expanded playoffs with revenue shares for the players). The players want the owners to make substantial concessions across a wide range of issue areas, without making any concessions — again, relative to the last CBA — of their own. The owners seem willing to make several small/medium concessions, or more significant concessions across a smaller rage of issue areas, but not both. The players cannot compel them to make both types of concessions, yet will not accept anything less, and so far haven’t offered anything of enough value to make it worthwhile for the owners to accept. Hence the work stoppage.
Yes, I know, the owners are evil, yadda yadda. Let it all out. It’s not going to change the basic dynamic of the bargaining situation: the players do not have the power to get everything they are demanding, and seemingly either haven’t recognized that and/or cannot build group consensus on what demand to sacrifice next. Same with the owners: it’s pretty clear that they don’t have consensus on where the “red lines” should be, but they are not going to allow the players to determine how they spend their money, or even how much they spend, without a cap/floor model. Both sides are waiting for the other to make the “sweet spot” offer, but both sides are simultaneously incentivized not to do it.
Playing chicken is risky. Sometimes you win. But most of the time everyone loses.
It’s the owners who have locked out the players, not the other way around. The owners have not offered any significant concessions over any areas or any issue. I challenge you to present one that is significant.
Only one more point then I’ll go away and not check back in. Promise. If a player’s not really a millionaire because he doesn’t make that million in one single season, doesn’t that make an owner not a billionaire unless he earns that billion in one single season?
25% of players only play in one season. 40% never get above the minimum.
The average service time is 3.71 years. Say a journeyman gets to that service time. That’s $2.3 million. That doesn’t include the years it took to get to the majors. It doesn’t include time riding the AAA-to-majors shuttle. Average that out, that’s about a quarter a million per year. That 250k doesn’t stay with the player. They have expenses like any other worker –taxes, legal representation, family, debts incurred while in the minors since the owners don’t pay a living wage to minor leaguers, everyday life expenses….
Contrast that with the team’s owner. Forbes averaged the value of an MLB franchise at 1.9 Billion. The owner might not make a billion a year. But, he has an asset worth more than a billion. An asset that keeps gaining value.
Just for one example, a players union dues are $80 a day
EVERY owner will make billions (plural) upon the sale of their team. By most calculations, MOST players will NEVER make a million in their careers, total.
I think of a millionaire as someone who has a million dollars (or more), not someone who makes a million dollars or more annually.
A lot of MLBPA members don’t qualify under either definition. The league minimum is high, but very few players making the league minimum actually spend the full year in the league. Even a player who’s spent 2 full seasons at the league minimum isn’t a millionaire unless he’s still sitting on a nice draft bonus. The tax code doesn’t care that they spent years earning poverty wages in the minors, so they’re taxed just as heavily as an i-banker making the same salary (the difference being the hedge fund person can earn that salary for 30+ years while athletes’ earnings are compressed). Plus they pay agent commissions, and many of them accumulate substantial debt to make it through the lean years in the minors they need to pay back. There’s a developing industry that “invests” in pro athletes by loaning them money when they’re young in return for a share of earnings when they make it.
On the flip side, every team is worth more than $1billion. Not every team is owned by a single owner, but every ownership group owns a $1billion+ asset (before considering the wealth these people had to have to become owners in the first place).
About 8% of the total population are millionaires. About 4% of baseball players (including MiLB obv) are. So does playing baseball decrease your odds of being a “millionaire”? Probably not, no. But to think that baseball players are all millionaires is also pretty damn false.
That’s a straw man argument. Most players are 22-26 years old. I’d imagine most millionaires are 45-50 years old at minimum. What percentage of the population is a millionaire at a normal baseball player’s age? Probably less than 1%.
A lot of people are millionaires who you wouldn’t consider “rich”. People that socked 6-10% into a 401K for 25-30 years & now have $1-2 million for their efforts.
BTW, this is NOT to say I support the owners. They pretty much suck & are ruining the game with their greed,
Right, wealth peaks at about age 65 for these reasons.
Of course. Why I said probably not, no. Some of those minors players will end up making millions in business, or real estate, or as an employee etc. I just wanted to point out that most professional baseball players are not currently “rich.”
Regardless of the merits of each proposal the big picture is that owners are killing the goose that laid the golden egg over small potatoes. (Insert bacon reference here). The last time they did this — 1994 — they crushed interest in MLB that was only retrieved by steroid fueled long balls. Fools
well said
This is basically it. They are doing this because they think they can get away with it, and that the union will fold and just re-up the same CBA for another 3 years. And maybe even get more playoffs out of it.
If they’re wrong, it’s going to be a disaster for everyone in baseball, including themselves. But there are a lot of people who would rather lose money than lose at the negotiating table, and I suspect the owners are very much that type.
Well, the real money lost probably doesn’t matter as much as their sense of prestige gained at negotiating “good” deals, so yeah, the owners are very much that type.
The difference is fans are more likely to forget about missing a month of games to start a season than they are missing a year of playoffs and having no champion. Unless we lose most or all of the season this isn’t going to have nearly the impact 1994 did.
The owners’ short-term thinking is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. You only have to look at the elimination of 42 minor league teams last year, the shortening of the amateur draft to ten rounds (after a year of 5 rounds), the $20,000 bonus limit for non-drafted players, and the owners’ recent proposal to cut the Domestic Reserve List (the number of minor leaguers under contract) from 180 to 150 with the right to make it lower. Add in that a D1 college programs can give out the equivalent of 11.7 scholarships for a 25 man roster, as opposed to 85 for football and 13 for basketball, and its no wonder that most of the best athletes don’t chose baseball.
The owners are not short-term thinkers. The reason why the players are mad is because the modern generation of owners have proven to be long-term thinkers. They invested long-term (in tech, in media, in new stadia, etc) in order to generate new revenues in the sport (and to enhance the value of non-baseball investments). The players “lost” previous CBAs because they failed to anticipate how transformative those things would be for the economics of the sport. The owners increasingly come from private equity, from hedge funds, from frontier tech: thinking about the long-run is how these guys all made their money. (Short-termist thinking on the league’s side is more likely to come from the owners who inherited their franchises from their families, and/or bought in a long time ago when the industry was completely different, and so probably have much less cash sitting on hand than most fans would believe.)
Unfortunately the players are still failing to anticipate how the economy has changed, so they are going to lose this CBA round too. In fact, they already have lost it. Haggling over minimum salaries is exactly the negotiation the owners want to have. Arguing over giving 50% of streaming revenues to the players in perpetuity is the conversation the owners don’t want to have. The best thing for the owners is for the players to continue to refuse to consider revenue sharing in a cap/floor model.
The union is bargaining like it’s the 1970s. It’s a different economy now. The value is in equity, in control. The players aren’t even asking for it. So they’ve already lost.
The players lost previous CBAs because they failed to anticipate how successfully the owners would use the first tax threshold as a hard salary cap.
Precisely what I said: the players have a shorter-term mentality and the PA’s leadership has (disastrously) failed to anticipate how changes in the economics of the sport relate to broader economic changes elsewhere in the world. The whole point of a “CBT” is to reduce spending at the top end. There is no other reason for it to exist. If the PA leadership did not communicate that to the players then that is their fault. (Can anyone remind me what Tony Clark still has a job?)
Similarly, complaining about Moneyball strategies in 2022 — as Andrew Miller did to ESPN a week or so ago — is just a liiiiiiiiiiiitle behind the curve. The PA also failed to anticipate how the elimination of steroids would impact teams’ valuations of players in their mid- to upper-30s.
None of these things were great secrets of the cosmos. Any halfway-sophisticated fan understood what was happening to the sport by 2016 (when the last CBA was agreed), but the MLBPA leadership seemingly didn’t. They didn’t ask for a slice of BAMTech or MLBAM at the same time that the rest of the culture was already engaged in the streaming wars. So they didn’t get a slice, and then they got mad almost immediately. But they didn’t learn. That’s the problem. They’re still not asking for a share of the upside, so they won’t get it. Owners aren’t going to give it to them without even being asked to do it, especially not after the entire membership of the MLBPA has been calling them names on Twitter for the past two years.
Owners will restrain their spending without a CBT, just as they did before the CBT existed. The MLBPA is currently trying to remove the closest thing there is to a salary floor in MLB: revenue sharing. Under the system the PA is currently proposing, there is absolutely nothing preventing a team from fielding a team made entirely of minimum-salary players. If the MLBPA successfully ends revenue sharing among clubs, then that will provide a strong incentive for clubs at the bottom end to reduce spending even more. And if they do, then the teams at the top won’t have to spend any more, because of reduced competition for talent, even if there is no CBT. A handful are going to spend a lot either way, but it’s not like the Red Sox are going to double payroll if the CBT goes away. They’ve never operated like that under this ownership group. But will the Pirates cut spending even more if revenue sharing goes away? 100%.
This is why I say the MLBPA has already lost. They never even positioned themselves to have a chance of winning. They got so puffed-up about fighting that they lost track of why they wanted to fight in the first place. All of this for ~$100k increase in minimum salaries instead of the ~$50k increase that the owners were more than happy to offer, and a small bonus for a very small number of pre-arb players who are already ticketed for vast wealth? Because right now that’s all they’re going to get. If that.
There’s no doubt the players have negotiated badly in the last few CBAs.
I can agree that the players’ anti revenue sharing position doesn’t make any sense to me – seems like they should want more revenue sharing, and some kind of guarantee it will go towards player payroll. If it were me I’d be looking for the a mirror to the structure in place for the luxury tax – a “cheapness” tax where if the owners run payroll under X dollar amount they have to pay a surcharge.
I can agree that they should want a stake in the baseball-related revenues, but I don’t see how they have a chance in hell of getting that if they can’t even get enough increases to the minimum and the salary cap to keep pace with inflation.
You are right that owners increasingly come from private equity, hedge funds and the tech world. Having worked for two companies acquired by private equity, I can tell you that they are not long-term visionaries. Thinking about maximum short-term profit is how most of these guys all made their money: buy a company, pump up short-term profit by cutting expenses including payroll (e.g. smaller minor league systems and scouting staffs) and R&D, then sell at a profit to someone else or to the public via an IPO. Five years is long term for these guys.
If they can get the taxpayers to build them a new ballpark, so much the better. For example, I had to pay sales tax for years to build a ballpark for the Brewers, and was rewarded with expensive ticket prices, $15-20 parking, $10 for a glass of beer, about $5 for a soggy hot dog, and held captive to high Cable TV rates for the minimum package that broadcasts the Brewers Games.
Fantastic stuff Jay. Aside from cowdisciple, less than intelligent comments so far (maybe they didn’t actually read the article?), but this lays everything out coherently.
You can always count on the pro-owner/Fangraphs is too ‘woke’ whine brigade to be first on any article, they truly have infinite free time.
Sometimes I wonder if there is some algorithm, or like it is someone’s dummy account. Truly seems hard to believe people actually think that.
It’s a big world and a lot of it is on the internet.
If you want an honest answer what I suspect is that there is a group somewhere: on reddit, or facebook, or so on, and they hate analytics/”wokeism”/whatever else youw ant to call it in sports, and people post articles and bitch about them and then everyone clicks through and hate comments to troll and start fights because some people really like trolling people they hate.
They don’t stumble in individually, they know each other. That’s also why the downvote brigade is particularly intense, because some of them just vote, because they want to make their presence look bigger than it really is.
Yep. Classic astroturfing.
If I had to criticize, while the owners could have offered to play 2022 under the terms of the old CBA, there’s no way MLBPA would’ve agreed.
Sort of. The players would be thrilled to play under the old CBA without a formal agreement because it would give them huge leverage around the all-star break. You strike before the playoffs your guys get to walk away with almost all their money and you hit the owners where it hurts. That’s the mistake the owners made the last time and it’s why it’s been 100% lockouts in every major sport since then.
I don’t really blame the owners for instituting a lockout, exactly, but I do blame them for not having any other plan except “get more playoffs without giving anything major of value up.”
Right. The players would have been happy to continue the season using the old terms but without any commitment to abide by them in the future. The lockout was a tactically sound move by the owners. They’re just running some huge strategic risks with the long term value of their franchises in order to dominate the union at every turn rather than accept an agreement that would be incrementally less favorable to them.
They’ve also done an amazing (I don’t use this positively) job of playing hardball to such a level that issues like non-baseball, baseball related revenue aren’t really even being talked about right now.
The players really are being reasonable to the extent the owners tactics are allowing.
This is about the only reason to see it from the owner’s perspective (today, anyway).
Literally, the only reason, in my opinion.
Obviously we don’t know what will happen if (let’s be real, when) regular-season games are affected, but I do wonder if MLB/the owners have badly underestimated the extent to which the PA is just sick of their crap?
If I had to guess, I would say that they don’t get how much the bizarre negotiations around the COVID season unified the players. Usually you don’t get unity unless there’s an external threat, and the external threat came a bit early and gave them a bit of a dry run.
Their gameplan seems to be “wait until the players start losing checks” but if the players saw this coming it might not have the same effect.
As a life long fan of baseball who understands what the product is (players playing), I am decidedly on team player. The owners are taking in a greater and greater profits, obfuscating true revenue, and actually going backwards on some proposals. The CBT negotiation is just such bad faith, raising the penalties will make this a de facto salary cap, which is what they’ve wanted all along, and this is unacceptable unless they have an agreement to share ALL their revenue, even the hidden stuff, at the same percentage as other leagues. Also the rampant tanking, which isnt being disincentivized by the proposals, is wrecking the game. At this point, I would rather the players hold out to get a fair deal even if it means many missed games, for the long term health of the sport. MLB has a monopoly on this sport and is using it to depress wages for the worlds best trained workers, a condition that would be illegal in any other industry where workers can move freely. It’s not millionaires versus billionaires, it’s literally our favorite players that root for. I have not once cheered when an owner increased his ROI, yet I go crazy when my favorite outfielder pulls a home run back. Let’s remember why we watch in the first place.
Every offer I see publicly from the league is so pathetic that I simply cannot fathom a situation where there aren’t games missed this year. It seems like they are squabbling over 1% so far of the actual things needed to be worked on between both sides. Has got to be easily the most toxic relationship between league and union in professional sports.
Somehow, the owners’ offers have fallen short of everyone’s extremely low expectations. It’s downright shocking. Increasing the minimum to $600K and the luxury tax line by $4M is amazingly weak.
I don’t think there will be games until June. At least.
This, I think I’m more pro-owner most of the time than most of the people on this site, but these owner proposals simply are not serious offers. They are a demand for nearly unconditional surrender by the players, and I’m unclear on what the owners think gives them all that much leverage.
Thanks to gross underpayment of minor-leaguers, a lot of the players have a recently demonstrated ability to live on circa $20,000 a year, most of the major leaguers should have a decent nest egg, and if those high union dues are good for anything, the union should have some strike funds for the poorer MLB players. I would tell the owners, “You locked us out, we’re waiting for a serious proposal, and if that means we all play for a reborn federal league starting in 2023, so be it.”
They think their leverage is that the players won’t want to miss their paychecks. They may even be right, but the offers are outrageous to even look at.
I guess I just don’t see the purpose of adding prejudice into who is morally justified when they are both being greedy smucks? Personally, I think the real smucks are those that pick any side based on who they are less envious of. I may be frustrated at another for making me wait to use the bathroom after them, but I don’t get mad at them. Even if I crap myself, it wasn’t their fault, they didn’t crap in my pants.
It smells like you crapped your pants. Did you even read this? Median salaries for players have been dropping while owners continue to see soaring values. Just because players want to be paid what they are worth and see that increase over time, just like in many other professions, doesn’t make them greedy smucks (sp).
If your salary today was less than what it was in 2018, for the same job, I suspect you wouldn’t consider yourself a greedy *Schmuck* for wanting a raise.
I’ve got a friend who a few years ago was told she was getting a very small pay cut.
She immediately gave her two weeks notice and retired.
This surprised her supervisor, it was a small cut after all, and she agreed that it was tiny.
But she considered the cut to be an indication that they didn’t think she was worth what they were paying her, and so she didn’t see any reason to continue to burden the company with her presence.
A pay cut in a thriving industry is a flat out insult to the workers, in this case it’s complicated by the fact that we’re looking at a median pay in a group with lots of turrnover, so individual players who are still in the industry may or may not have taken a cut, but the idea still holds, profits are up, they’re up because of the player’s labor, the players can reasonably expect to get paid.
You should probably take a look at the owners’ offers.
Your inability to see it is your problem, nobody else’s.
Crapped right in your red hat.
Omg, the opening paragraph to this article is fire and I love it. Go get’em Jay.
This really summarizes why, last week, the thing I found myself thinking is that it is truly insulting that MLB thinks that we, as observers, are so stupid and credulous as to accept these flimsy, easily-debunked offers that are clearly not made in good faith. Most of ownership’s behavior seems to be aimed primarily at the PR battle, and that tracks with 1994, where they really did not behave in good faith as long as sports media parrotted their position and let fans blame the players for the situation, ending only when the court ruling against them made it clear that the tone of coverage would change. I imagine this will be similar: until they become convinced that they’re taking the blame for this situation, they’ll continue to operate in boundless, endless bad faith the way they always have with MLBPA, because the legacy owners remain mortally offended that it exists at all and dream of breaking it once and for all.
Honestly the players would be far better off with no MLBPA and no monopoly exception for MLB
Think about sports like European soccer. Do you think that is worse for the players than the system we have now where every US player (and soon every player in the world) is forced to play for peanuts for one random team for the first 6-12 years of their career?
I agree, it is insulting.
Then I read the comments on pieces like this, and I see why they think they can win the PR battle while simultaneously engaging in bad faith negotiation…
And remember this is represents like the 80th or 90th percentile of left-leaning baseball commentary!
The owners aren’t necessarily losing the overall PR battle, but at least it is a battle when it never was in the past, and it was just uniformly everyone out there going Jim Bowden constantly.
The big economic issues for the players have essentially gone unaddressed by the owners, and the CBT problem will intensify if the owners are able to get anywhere near what they are demanding. Let’s face it….the high-end downward pressure of the CBT doesn’t just keep a Freddie Freeman from earning $3M more per year, it squeezes the entire stack of player salaries, either lowering them, or offloading useful, productive players for nothing more than salary relief–for a team that can afford the salary. At the same time, Owners zealously protect teams who prefer to tank, even those with healthy balance sheets, because MLB prefers one fewer payer (and possible driver-up-of-salary) to sending out a competitive team. All this while rummaging around in the taxpayers pockets for freebies (Hello people of Oakland and Tampa). Then, run out a garbage proposal of free agency at 29 1/2. which punishes the best and brightest stars, making them even more vulnerable to below-market early extensions. The Owners think they can wrest more control by being hard-nosed here, and maybe they can, but let’s not trot them out for sainthood because we fool ourselves with the nonsense that “we’d play the game for nothing.” No, we wouldn’t, and as in every other field, we’d want to get paid for what are unique skills. Does anyone think the top orthopedic surgeons who put these guys back together should be raffling off TJ’s?
In my opinion the players are not as good anymore, so they should not be paid more. Look at the high strikeout rate going up every year, year after year. MLB is becoming the the NBA who’s game is terrible to watch now days with players firing up constant three’s with little defense or strategy. If not corrected soon we will see the MLB turn into a HR or out game which will turn many away from the game. The top prospects on most teams have poor hitters who strikeout over 4 to 5 to 6 to 7 to 8 to sometimes even 9 times the amount of walks in IN THE MINORS swinging at all sorts of balls out of the zone. This, in turn with people not being attracted to sports as much because of computers, cell phones, and of the many other things to do including other sports. The soccer fields are filled while baseball fields are empty. Sign the agreement players, us fans need the enthusiasm, and you all need the practice!
Counterpoint: no.
I highly recommend you check out Pitching Ninja on Twitter if you think that baseball players are getting worse. They’re getting better. Stuff is moving more and is harder out of the hand, plus it all looks the same until the last 20 feet. That’s why the strikeout rate is increasing, not because players are getting worse.
The pitchers doing the striking out are also players?
Check out the big brain on Matt. With this absolutely beautiful parlay of terrible takes that cross sports boundaries and nuked 10% of my brain cells. Respect Matt.
You’re right. And obviously, football players are getting worse too, because NFL teams are giving up way more passing yards than they used to, and running for less yardage than they used to.
Ipso facto, case proved.
I choose to believe that these are troll accounts because no way someone who finds his way to fangraphs would actually believe this. Right? Please be right.
As far as I’m concerned, if you pay for a membership you get a lot of slack on making dumb comments.
Astroturfing is cowardice.
There’s really no encapsulating how much and in how many ways this is wrong.
Good faith is basically non existent on the part of owners. Players contracts (at least salary structure) are basically public knowledge. Owners books are not. Any numbers about revenue from owners are as likely to be picked from a hat as they are genuinely accurate. MLB is a basically a state sanctioned monopoly, capable of controlling entry into their workforce via the draft and international spending limits, where revenues get shared between owners, and minor leaguers don’t even earn minimum wage it’s just an exercise in racketeering and collusion.
Players are not responsible for owners leveraging their equity and piling up debt developing real estate. If I were in the MLBPA, I wouldn’t budge until an owner or two is forced to sell because their external debt can’t be serviced without butts in seats at games and tv broadcasts.
OR, they could settle it on the field. 40 MLB All-stars vs. 40 members of ownership groups. Best of 7 series. For every 10 runs margin either minimum salary goes up $100K or luxury tax threshold goes up by a $1,000,000. I’d guess owners would only score if there were 4 HBP in a row.
Well let’s hope the owners score a couple times then 🙂
Here’s something I don’t know the answer to. How liquid are the owners? What does the debt service look like for these teams? How much have they leveraged their stake in ownership to invest in other areas? I’d guess some teams are much more vulnerable to a prolonged labor battle than others.
The only good thing that might come out of this is that maybe–maybe–enough owners will lose enough money that in order to cover their debts, they’ll decide to sell the rights to a couple new franchises and get a cash infusion to cover their losses. But even that might not happen if financially MLB teams are in good shape.
i think its a fair question. I can’t imagine the owners can absorb a 50% drop in franchise value if they skin the sheep
I don’t think franchise value is going to decline. Too many super rich guys want one for that to happen, and even if the revenue stream decreases because of waning fan interest they’re still practically guaranteed to make a profit over the long-term.
But I think we did recently calculate out how much baseball teams would lose if no games were played and they didn’t pay out any player salaries. If I can find any of the math done back then, I’ll pull it up. If a team’s non-player-salary costs are pretty high, then they’d have to take on more debt / sell more of a share in the team.
50%?
I’d venture to guess that the runup in equity valuations over the last two years has left many of them pretty flush, at least to the extent they can sell publicly traded holdings or borrow against private holdings to raise capital.
I would also guess that many are not willing to liquidate assets outside their MLB holdings to fund this labor conflict. Impossible to say, really.
I would agree that most teams would take out more debt over the other options if they can. I think the question is how many can, since they took on a lot of debt from the COVID year.
The Marlins are loaded with debt because of the purchase of the team (the structure of these deals is maddening), and the same is true to a lesser extent for the Royals (heck, the Astros are still paying down the debt from the Crane deal and that was something like over a decade ago). And the Rangers have a ton of debt from a bunch of different sources. How much is too much?
I’m sure they could weather even more by selling stuff, either non-baseball holdings or ownership stakes in the team. But that would probably be a last resort.
It’s a good question. We would all love to see the answer, but we won’t.
You can look at the Braves financials.
You can look at the recent history of Dodgers valuations.
2006: ~450 Million
2012: ~2100 Million (2.1 Billion) and McCourt kept half the real estate
2019: ~3500 Million – Not including any real estate (MLBAM, Disney+ unknown)
You can look at the Marlins sale
You can look at comments from Rogers Media people
[…The Blue Jays Are] “very valuable asset for us that we don’t get full credit for”
You can look at comments from Yankees minority owners
You can remember that MLB still owns 15% of Disney + after already selling the other 85% (technically 75%) for ~2.6? Billion dollars over the last 5 years
(The NHL got 10% as part of a rights deal, which Disney bought out for $350 Million on an option, valuing the company at ~3.5 billion, but the remaining 15% is freely held, so it will likely go for a significantly higher valuation).
You can look at MLBAM, which, it appears, the owners don’t tend to include when they talk about league revenues/value? (We don’t know!)
So we know that, on aggregate, the league is doing very well. It’s fair to assume that potential sources of capital (loan or equity) will agree on seeing the actual numbers portrayed in the best possible light by ownership (when you’re seeking capital, you actually want to make your company look like it’s making money, as opposed to when you report to tax authorities or the public).
Then the question is, to the extent that there are a few teams that legitimately have trouble fielding competitive teams within the constraints of their cash flows, how much should we fans care? It is a cartel, so the owners don’t just own their teams they also own an interest in all the others… Revenue share, provide 0% loans to cover payrolls, McCourt anyone who gets public attention for needing loans to cover payrolls despite taking dividends from the club the previous year… do whatever you have to do to preserve the value of the cartel. If the whole point of the cartel is to provide baseball, then it’s definitely on them when no baseball is provided. It’s their job to figure it out.
If the thing that is preventing me from watching baseball is that the owners are afraid that wage inflation will lead to distressed sales of cash-strapped teams because they’re unwilling to share revenues to prevent it, (this is really the most generous assessment of the owners position). I’m not sympathetic.
If the thing preventing me from watching baseball is that the players want to make more money than they made 5 years ago, and ensure that they won’t run into wage deflation again in the future (as long as league revenues continue to grow), I do have sympathy.
Everything we have publicly available screams “MLB makes lots of money”, the owners say “no we don’t” but never offer any proof, any fault in the public analysis (e.g. you guys forgot about how much X costs!), nothing… because it’s a lie.
Very well said. More than a thumbs up here.
You act like MLB revenues are evenly split among all the teams and ownership groups. That’s clearly not the case. I suspect Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs, and a couple others skew the #’s significantly. I would be surprised if even half the league makes anything decent, then you add on that the players want to increase this disparity even more, slash revenue sharing to nothing, and take away the one advantage these low-revenue teams have in cost-controlled talent, you wind up with a defunct league where the same few teams are only viable while the rest get beat up on. If the players got what they want they’d kill the game for me. There’d be no point in re-watching 2002 Devil Rays pathetic teams as they can only afford 0-2+ arb year players since they have no revenue sharing and arb/pre-arb players cost more and they have less control (either age or <5 year to FA).
It's not only about owners or players getting what they want, it's about the health of the league and fan participation. I'm a baseball die hard, but the players would kill the game for me if they got their desired CBA.
Please read the book before raising your hand.
This is a good question. A very good question.
Teams that aren’t recently purchased have pretty tight limitations on debt service to avoid them being in the position the Dodgers were during the McCourt bankruptcy/divorce.
i think that this does imply that teams are fairly illiquid, but that mostly doesn’t matter because people who own teams also own many other assets. There are a few families or figures in professional sports whose primary wealth asset is their sports franchise, but they’re fairly limited.
It is definitely true that you can’t leverage a baseball team the way you would a lot of other multi-billion dollar assets, because of the debt service rules intended to ..maximize franchise values by not allowing them to be encumbered at time of purchase.
I don’t think there’s any real possibility of teams actually losing meaningful money or any owner being forced to sell. I think what you would see at most is some sale of minority ownership. In the past few years, the Dodgers’ exception to the debt service rules for the financing of their purchase expired, and they had to get in compliance with the debt service rules. Most of what they did was add a couple more minority shareholders to the ownership group, presumably using that money to retire enough of the debt to get compliant.
They normally do have pretty tight limitations on debt service, but I think the relaxed it due to the pandemic.
According to Forbes the Rangers are at 43% of debt/value. The Marlins are at 40%; the Braves, Nationals, and Royals around 25%. Then there are another 13 teams in between 10% and 20%. I don’t know what the threshold is where a team has too much but I would guess a couple these teams will start hurting sooner rather than later. At what point do these teams start feeling it?
Alright, I found it–according to the MLB’s numbers during the last dust up, MLB claimed that the owners / MLB collectively paid out about $5B in “local expenses” and funding the league office. I think there’s a ton of reason to be skeptical of that number because somehow this presentation also showed that MLB teams paid out as much in expenses as they got in revenue. But if it’s even half that number then the owners will collectively not break even after something like 1/3rd of the season is cancelled.
Neither side is necessarily looking for a FAIR agreement. They are both looking to win, or at least make major gains, so in some ways, your looking at what is fair is irrelevant.
The PR bleatings by MLB/Manfred are just PR and should not be taken very seriously. Although since some people do, the players would be best served by a more robust propaganda effort I think! Especially since they have a number of popular baseball player stars who people like a lot more than Manfred out there to sell the message…
Well, sure, but the owners have, and have always had, disproportionate power over negotiations.
A lot of “it takes two to tango” takes down here in pleb section. How intellectually lazy.
The salary cap negotiations are such a joke. The owners are arguing for themselves to be penalized at steeper rates and for the penalties to get more extreme every year they go over. They can try to spin it and claim it’s to promote revenue sharing but we all know it’s just an excuse to artificially suppress salaries. I can’t imagine being able to look my employees in the eye while also knowing that I lobbied to penalize myself if I paid them too much.
This article does a great job showing why the biggest issue is minimum salary. It’s lower than the NFL where they have twice as many players on the active roster, and the NBA and NFL have rookie scale contracts above the minimum for higher picks, and a fast route to free agency for late picks and undrafted players who prove themselves.
Service time manipulation is annoying, anti-competitive, and makes following the sport less fun, but there are only a handful of players each year affected by it and most of them got big rookie or IFA bonuses and will go on to earn a ton of money in their careers. Kris Bryant is probably getting a guaranteed 9-figure deal as soon as this is over. He should have gotten it earlier, it’s better that he gets paid instead of the Ricketts family, but he’s going to be doing great no matter how the next CBA looks. Having half the league get paid a significant amount more is more important and I hope the players don’t compromise until they get it.
I’m sure there’s a lot of information that non-insiders like me are missing, mostly in the area of the true cost and income from ownership. But even assuming that the owners make more than they’re willing to disclose, I think the players are fighting the wrong battles. It seems that even if they do manage to win in a given area that’s been discussed, , in will affect them negatively in other areas that they don’t want to anticipate.
The free market in baseball does exist but it has to exist inside the straddles of a less-free framework.
The only player issues that I have heartfelt support for is the devotion a much larger piece of the pie to the minor league and complex players and increased base salaries on the 0-3/4 year windows.
Driving players towards free agency faster is not helpful for most players careers.
I agree with the players winning at one end will lose at another. It seems like the point isn’t brought up all that much that the owners will pay what they are going to pay for their roster, so if the cost of their pre-arb players go up by $2mil and they are on the hook for $2mil to go into a $60mil pool for pre-arb players (just pulled that out for easy calcs) – they have increased their pre-arb player expense by $4mil, so what is more likely:
1) they add $4mil to their payroll going forward,
2) They keep their payroll basically the same and don’t sign that $5mil/year RP and instead bring up one more AAA RP?
I think it’s all good to pay the younger players more, but what is likely going to happen is that less and less players who get to FA will get the contracts we are seeing during the last 5 years and those just above average players who usually hang around the league for 7 – 9 years will now just have 3 – 6 year careers because there is no use in signing a Free agent bench player/RP for $2 – 5 mil a year when you can bring up a $650k player from the minors (this is already happening but you can bet it will happen more and more going forward.)
Er… The player negotiation movements were just as small and ridiculous as the owners… Regardless of the merits of either side. Ultimately public negotiation sucks because it becomes politicized…. Do you really think the mlbpa doesn’t have a very good sense of revenues?
The players have proposed a 12-team playoff structure. That’s an immediate nine-figure revenue generator for teams. What have owners proposed that’s anywhere near that scale?
We need to clarify that no details of the PA’s proposal on playoffs expansion have been reported, but it’s not quite as simple as that. The PA proposed that in exchange for a complete reorganization of the divisional structure, $115mn in a bonus pool for pre-arb players that would absorb the entirety of any financial gains for the owners from expanded postseason, the introduction of a draft lottery and eliminating of revenue sharing (which screws small market clubs in particular), plus a near-50% raise for all minimum salaried players, a roughly 25% increase in the CBT thresholds, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus the players were to receive revenue shares in the expanded playoffs, so basically they proposed something that benefits them and called it a concession. The economic value, to the owners, of the full package on offer is negative.
The owners haven’t offered a ton, but they’ve offered the players more money in aggregate in a variety of different ways, while the players have proposed less money for the owners in aggregate in every one of their offers. Which is their right, but it’s not very hard to see why the owners haven’t enthusiastically signed up.
Yeah the concessions so far seem to be expanded playoffs and international draft in exchange for the creation of a bonus pool, draft pick compensation, and minor changes to the draft. The NL DH seems to be something closer to neutral that MLB is spinning as a victory for players.
Even if the bonus pool is set at $15M, then overall that’s a concession by owners because it’s brand new. Dropping a demand for something that hadn’t existed (reducing revenue sharing) in the prior CBA isn’t really a concession.
Did you even read the article?
Players could probably sell a whole bunch of tickets to pickup games at Phoenix Muni on dates that ASU isn’t playing there.
The root of the problem is that the players got hosed over the last two CBAs because they were not analytically-inclined enough to see what was being done to them. Now that they are more savvy, they are trying to get a big chunk of what they lost back in one negotiation. The problem is that’s not how negotiations work. In order to get something, you need to give something. The players saying “hey, we just woke up to the fact that you guys fleeced us over the last 20 years” is going to be met with “no one forced you to sign those agreements” by the owners. It’s going to take the players several CBAs to claw back what they lost through their own ineptitude.
Stick to being a comic. You don’t know much about union contract negotiation, and it shows.
Ignoring the repeat offender clause in the current CBT, under the current owners’ proposal, teams would have payroll cost less under than today until payroll exceeds $217 million. After that, the effective cost goes up. Presenting this as anything significant is absurd. Effing owners.
It’s interesting how you analyze the owners side of the negotiation without going into the union side much. The union’s offers would have if granted their wish would have significant consequences to league parity and health of the game. Lowering team control (thankfully, they’re aware how much of a non-starter that was), slashing revenue sharing, jumping CBT by 40%+, making 0-3 service time much more expensive, then there is the draft issues. You could say almost every single proposal by the union hurts half the league (or more). The players seem more focused on extracting from the top 30% of the league the other 70% be damned. The players are looking out for themselves not for league sustainability. (Which is why the reflexive nature of fans to support the players is so odd – the players would win with their proposal but fans for more than half the league would get killed)
Do we really want a league where the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers spend 300$ Mil a year and paper over any FO deficiency while the Rays, Pirates, A’s, Brewers, etc. run 60$ mil payrolls of entirely pre-arb players (with higher turn-over as salary escalates and less team control) because they can’t even afford low end FA anymore?
Many of the MLBPA’s positions would hurt parity. However, a soft floor of around 75Mil with increased revenue sharing might help parity. In this scenario, if the Orioles and Pirates want to tank hard, they have to swing a trade for Heyward or Hosmer to get above the floor. Or they sign some FAs to get better. Either way, it would give the players more money. I don’t think the players really pushed for this at all. It may have been a nonstarter for the owners, but it would be an easier sell to fans (improve parity, make tanking pay).
Agreed with your overall point. A league that favors the big spenders too much will create a larger number of loser franchises who don’t try to win for longer periods of time.
Yes? What the CBT and revenue sharing have done is decouple winning from team revenue. If any team is incentivized to spend more money, that will be because they get more revenue out of that increased payroll.
The biggest problem right now is teams take the revenue sharing money and don’t spend it on the team. They don’t spend it on payroll. They don’t spend it on players, at the minor league or major league level.
What we have is a league where the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers spend $200+ million a year and are constantly competitive while the Orioles and Pirates and A’s and Rays take that revenue sharing money and put it in the bank. That’s not sustainable either.
Care to provide the data because the data shows that teams like the A’s, Ray’s, Brewers, etc. spend more on players as a % than the large markets. What you don’t realize is you can’t spend what you don’t have. You slash revenue sharing its not going to make the Rays up their payroll. In what world does that make sense? I guess to people who think money grows on trees and every team is financially similar…
People need to get their head out of the clouds and back to reality.
By the way, your supposition that $ and winning is decoupled is wrong, just google it there’s like 5 articles on fangraphs alone showing winning and $ spent is closely linked. What revenue sharing and CBT does is give a slim chance to half the league. Without it you’d have 10-15 teams you write off every year. What’s the fun in a league with 10 Detroit Lions and 5-6 New England Patriots? The A’s, Guardians, Rays, Brewers are GOOD for the game. They are perennial contenders. Don’t run your nose too far up the players backsides and kill the game.
For reference:
https://www.pinstripealley.com/2019/4/16/18305860/yankees-2018-spending-payroll-percentage-revenue-lowest-mlb-priorities-winning-steinbrenner
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/in-2019-team-payroll-and-wins-are-closely-linked/
The MLBPA filed grievances against the Athletics, Pirates, Rays, and Marlins in 2018, then filed grievances against the Pirates, Rays, and Marlins again in 2020. The reason the Athletics weren’t included again in 2020? They were disqualified from revenue sharing payments in 2020.
Without access to the actual revenue sharing amounts, we don’t have actual data. But we do know that the Athletics’ opening day payroll of $81.7M in 2017 dropped to $68.53M in 2018. We’ve see payrolls for these teams decrease despite them receiving revenue sharing payments.
Years: 2017 -> 2018 -> 2019 -> 2020 -> 2021
Athletics: $81.7M -> $68.5M -> $91.3M -> $35.5M -> $74.6M
Marlins: $111.8M -> $98.6M -> $71.2M -> $28.6M -> $49.4M
Rays: $70M -> $78.7M -> $53.4M -> $28.7M -> $60.4M
Pirates: $100.6M -> $87.9M -> $74.8M -> $24.8M -> $35.9M
People need to get their heads out of the clouds and look at the numbers. There’s no reason any of these teams should have *decreasing* payrolls in nominal terms. If revenue sharing is supposed to support payrolls, why are payrolls going down? They were going down before the pandemic.
What revenue sharing has done is made it so teams can get lots of revenue without putting a winning team on the field. Or even trying to do that. That’s what has been decoupled.
Get your head out of the owners asses for a minute, will ya?
“(Which is why the reflexive nature of fans to support the players is so odd – the players would win with their proposal but fans for more than half the league would get killed)”
Fangraphs is one of the very few places where the commentariat is generally pro-player. In my experience the vast amount of discourse in other forums is about how greedy the players are, how they should feel lucky that they get paid to play a kid’s game, and how the commenter would be happy to play in MLB for free (the greatest bit of nonsense in the whole statement). These are the bits of wisdom that crop up during every labor dispute in every sport. And most non-sports labor disputes as well.
Way to shoe-horn in whatever point you’re trying to make while completely ignoring my point. The CBA players the player prefer would kill like 60%+ of the teams in the league. You think fan engagement is poor now, just wait when you’re on year 17 of losing 90+ games while the Yankees and Dodgers spend 300+ million a year and are in year 8 in a row of either team being in the World Series. The other leagues don’t allow the popular “high revenue” teams spend 5x as much as the less popular “low revenue” teams. If the players make it impossible to field a 75 mil competitive team for smart franchises then you essentially bifurcate the league into a lot of Detroit Lions and a few Tom Brady New England Patriots. Good luck.
They could fix all of these problems with contraction. If we got rid of the bottom 10 teams, then there would be no need for a competitive balance tax, we could slice a year or two off of free agency, the average salary would go up considerably, and the quality of the product would increase exponentially. There are multiple markets where the fans won’t show up unless the team can win 100 games or even if they are on that pace. These cities really don’t need baseball teams.
It’s the fans who are wrong!
Yeah, I’m sure ten owners would be delighted to turn in the keys to the Cadillac…
The whole competitive balance tax/service time issue is a smokescreen. Players want to return to the era where mediocre free agents got huge contracts just for putting in time and staying in the lineup. That is not going to happen no matter what changes are made to the competitive balance structure. And the system is going to be gamed no matter what rules are put in place for service time.
The real meat is in the minimum salary and bonus pool, I think. As has been pointed out this is where the majority of the players are. I was quite surprised how low the minimum is relative to other sports.
Initially the players proposed an increase to 775,000 over the current 570,500, a 36% increase. Owners countered with the three year average of ~668,333, a 17% increase.
Seems to me an average increase of 25% or so would get it done, maybe a minimum of 700,000/725,000/750,000 for the first three years. Some tinkering with the competitive balance tax, and a bonus pool of around 30 million, and then I think we are back to watching baseball.
They need to get it together. In person attendance has been in a steady decline for the last 15 years or so, the big TV contracts were an anomaly that is not going to be repeated, and the average age of baseball fans just keeps getting older relative to the NBA and NFL. For a while this helped as they were moving into the prime spending/advertising target range, but now it just means the pool of baseball fans is getting smaller.
i mean, how is this situation anything but a microcosm for our capitalist society in general, complete with people (that are presumably working-class americans) commenting how greedy a group of workers is for wanting to get paid commiserate to the giant “piece of the pie” they are seeing the people that run the show getting. people defending the billionaires!!!! what is this world.
The world is run by global corporations, the rest of us are here to adapt to it.
This makes me happy. Hoping a good portion of the season is lost because of the DH debacle.
Hate to break it to you but whenever they come back – be it in 10 days, 10 months, or 10 years – it will be with a universal DH.
Well aware of that. Whether its 10 days or 10 years, if they lose a little money and some fans (hurts business) as a result, then that will bring me some joy, not enough to make up for the loss of joy with the DH though.
It’s interesting how you relish seeing people lose money because they made a decision that you don’t like. It says some things about you…not good ones
How do changes get made for these billion dollar sports industries, because those running it are hurt in the pocket book, other wise they don’t care about the fans, only that they are getting money from the fans. Money is the only real influence fans have on the leagues.
If your conclusion is “DH bad, let’s damage the health of the sport because of it,” just stop being a fan instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
So, draft-and-follow just seems like a way for them to further gut the minors, no? It allows them to use a JuCo as free development with the guarantee they still hold that player’s rights. Between (meager) player salaries, stadium costs, coaching salaries, travel, etc, would it possibly be cheaper for a team to draft several guys that way and eliminate their A ball team?
The idea of nicknaming a new rule after Kumar Rocker is kind of funny since he wouldn’t actually have been covered under the rule. If he had taken a physical, it seems likely that none of the whole brouhaha would have happened.
Kind of like in hockey where a goal+assist+fight is a Gordie Howe hat trick, when he had only two of those in his career and Brendan Shanahan is the career leader.
So the mediator was called in “prematurely” but also was pointless because it would take them too long to get up to speed? Which is it?
This is the usual union versus non-union rhetoric. Those in the union want the freedom to be as rich as possible while simultaneously complaining about those who’ve already done so.
If that’s your takeaway, you’ve forgotten to read the article before commenting.
Or you’re just lazy. Or carrying water for the powerful at the expense of the game. Whatever the reason, this is an extremely ignorant post.
Rob Manfred is a tool and a dunce. That doesn’t make the MLBPA blameless. Far from it. The fact is that the players are trying to recapture multiple rounds of collective bargaining where Tony Clark gave away territory, and they are asking for a lot at one point in time.
In addition, the MLBPA keeps talking about franchise value while the owners talk about cash flow. Value only matters if you’re looking to sell a business. Manfred did himself absolutely zero favors by calling a baseball team a bad investment – it’s not. But I think his point was that baseball is not a cash cow for the owners, and has especially not been so over the last couple of years. This is a point with merit – not absolute value, but not immaterial either.
For context on the proposed luxury tax line (MLB proposal = $214mm), the NFL’s hard salary cap is $208.2mm per team this year. The NFL also has a minimum team salary ($180mm in 2021).
MLB and MLBPA are negotiating in the $615k-$775k range for minimum pre-arb salaries. Current NFL Player Minimum Range based on tenure is $705k-$1.1mm.
The one component I side with the players and not the owners is in regards to service time. Service time should begin the first time that players step on a field for the organization. Whether that is in the majors or in single A ball. That would prevent any form of holding players down, when they can contribute, they would be in the majors. If you need more time to develop players, then don’t draft so many young players, let them go on to college, develop there and get them into your organization at 21, 22, or 23 so they are closer to major league ready and not spend years in the minors.
I hope the players remain locked out the whole damn year and make the owners feel the pain of no playoffs. I’ll survive. Will the owners’ debt covenants and internal solidarity?
Thanks for the thorough write up. The draft bonuses element for prospects would be a fun counterfactual to game out for teams that have had a lot of recent success with homegrown talent.
For example, the Astros would’ve been able to weather the draft pick punishments:
Luis Garcia – 2021 ROY
Christian Javier – 2020 ROY
Yordan Alvarez – 2019 ROY
Dallas Keuchel – 2015 CY
Carlos Correa – 2015 ROY
And…2/17 Union counter proposal RAISED the Union request. The Union Does not/has not attempted any rtesolution. None. Zero. No matter that Fangraph writers are overwhelming UNION talking heads that DO NOT WRITE FACTS. 100% one sided, biased writing. The Union and Fangraphs are in bed together to ruin ANOTHER American industry as Unions have done repeatedly. There are NO AMERICAN industries benefited by Unions. None.
they raised the request for the pool because they stepped back their request on all players with 2 years of service time being eligible for arb and moving more players into the bonus pool (100). I’m not 100% pro union in this, but they are negotiating and showing what is most important to them and their reasoning isn’t crazy. Why not have some very reasonable increases to the min pay over time as well as the CBT? If you look at what they were in 2012 and increase them by 3.5% each year (average inflation) then we probably have a min value and CBT (closer to what the players have offered up vs the owners.)
a team is going to go broke with increasing pre-arb payroll by $3-4 million. and the owners are only going to pay a combined total player salary of what they want for in the end – I’m sure they can make it work. if owners will struggle with this increase, then maybe they shouldn’t have bought a team in the first place (all business owners are facing working cost increases this year – why expect MLB to be any different?)
The only thing I can care at all about is minor leaguer player salaries.
Everything else? I can’t care about any of it.