Baseball.........Anybody still interested?
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@jack walsh13
WTF?!?!?!?
www.si.com
Report: MLB Asks to Eliminate ‘Hundreds’ of Minor League Player Jobs In Latest Proposal
ZACH KOONSFEB 14, 2022
Major League Baseball asked the MLB Players Association for the ability to eliminate ‘hundreds’ of minor league playing jobs in its latest proposal amid heated labor negotiations between the two sides, according to ESPN‘s Jeff Passan.
The league proposed to reduce the maximum number of minor league players on the Domestic Reserve List—the list which governs the number of minor leaguers a team can roster at any time—from 180 to “below 150” for the remainder of the collective bargaining agreement, per Passan. On the proposal, MLB made clear that the number would remain at 180 for the 2022 season.
While the league has no concrete plans to reduce the size of the list in 2023 and beyond, the commissioner‘s office wants the flexibility to do so, according to Passan, who reported later Monday night that the MLBPA will reject this proposal.
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Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred makes comments during a news conference at MLB baseball owners meetings, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. Manfred says spring training remains on hold because of a management lockout and his goal is to reach a labor contract that allows opening day as scheduled on March 31.
Rob Manfred’s Argument About Owning an MLB Team Is False
BY MATT MARTELL
Feb 22, 2022; Iowa City, Iowa, USA; The Iowa Hawkeyes bench reacts during the second half against the Michigan State Spartans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Iowa Hawkeyes Question Baffles ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestants
BY JELANI SCOTT
Alt text: Gonzaga coach Mark Few, standing at left, reacts to a call with Chet Holmgren (34), Nolan Hickman (11) and Hunter Sallis (10) during the second half of the team's NCAA college basketball game against Saint Mary's in Moraga, Calif., Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022.
Gonzaga Falls to Break Record for Top-10 Losses in One Day
BY JELANI SCOTT
The player‘s union does not represent minor league players, but issues that affect individuals on 40-man major league rosters are a part of the bargaining negotiations. ESPN reports that the union declined to comment on the league's latest proposal regarding the Domestic Reserve List.
Get SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's best stories every weekday. Sign up now.
The minor league system has been a major point of contention in recent years and has already undergone sweeping changes. Last offseason, MLB eliminated 42 teams and hundreds of player jobs from the minor-league system as part of a regional reset that gave each major league franchise an affiliation to four minor league teams. MLB did increase pay to minor leagues in 2021 and teams are mandated in 2022 to provide housing for minor league players for the first time. However, a number of issues regarding the minor league system remains unresolved, including whether or not minor league players should continue to be unpaid during spring training.
According to The Athletic's Evan Drellich, MLBPA officials came away “underwhelmed” by MLB’s latest collective bargaining agreement proposal during Saturday’s meetings. No deal has been put into place with spring training already unofficially pushed back, with its original proposed start date of Feb. 16 clearly unattainable and the scheduled start of the 2022 season just over a month away.
WTF?!?!?!?
Report: MLB Asks to Eliminate ‘Hundreds’ of Minor League Player Jobs In Latest Proposal
In its latest proposal to the players union, MLB asked for the power to significantly trim the number of minor league players.
Report: MLB Asks to Eliminate ‘Hundreds’ of Minor League Player Jobs In Latest Proposal
ZACH KOONSFEB 14, 2022
Major League Baseball asked the MLB Players Association for the ability to eliminate ‘hundreds’ of minor league playing jobs in its latest proposal amid heated labor negotiations between the two sides, according to ESPN‘s Jeff Passan.
The league proposed to reduce the maximum number of minor league players on the Domestic Reserve List—the list which governs the number of minor leaguers a team can roster at any time—from 180 to “below 150” for the remainder of the collective bargaining agreement, per Passan. On the proposal, MLB made clear that the number would remain at 180 for the 2022 season.
While the league has no concrete plans to reduce the size of the list in 2023 and beyond, the commissioner‘s office wants the flexibility to do so, according to Passan, who reported later Monday night that the MLBPA will reject this proposal.
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Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred makes comments during a news conference at MLB baseball owners meetings, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. Manfred says spring training remains on hold because of a management lockout and his goal is to reach a labor contract that allows opening day as scheduled on March 31.
Rob Manfred’s Argument About Owning an MLB Team Is False
BY MATT MARTELL
Feb 22, 2022; Iowa City, Iowa, USA; The Iowa Hawkeyes bench reacts during the second half against the Michigan State Spartans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Iowa Hawkeyes Question Baffles ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestants
BY JELANI SCOTT
Alt text: Gonzaga coach Mark Few, standing at left, reacts to a call with Chet Holmgren (34), Nolan Hickman (11) and Hunter Sallis (10) during the second half of the team's NCAA college basketball game against Saint Mary's in Moraga, Calif., Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022.
Gonzaga Falls to Break Record for Top-10 Losses in One Day
BY JELANI SCOTT
The player‘s union does not represent minor league players, but issues that affect individuals on 40-man major league rosters are a part of the bargaining negotiations. ESPN reports that the union declined to comment on the league's latest proposal regarding the Domestic Reserve List.
Get SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's best stories every weekday. Sign up now.
The minor league system has been a major point of contention in recent years and has already undergone sweeping changes. Last offseason, MLB eliminated 42 teams and hundreds of player jobs from the minor-league system as part of a regional reset that gave each major league franchise an affiliation to four minor league teams. MLB did increase pay to minor leagues in 2021 and teams are mandated in 2022 to provide housing for minor league players for the first time. However, a number of issues regarding the minor league system remains unresolved, including whether or not minor league players should continue to be unpaid during spring training.
According to The Athletic's Evan Drellich, MLBPA officials came away “underwhelmed” by MLB’s latest collective bargaining agreement proposal during Saturday’s meetings. No deal has been put into place with spring training already unofficially pushed back, with its original proposed start date of Feb. 16 clearly unattainable and the scheduled start of the 2022 season just over a month away.
MLB Argues For Minor League Players To Remain Unpaid For Spring Training
By Darragh McDonald | February 12, 2022 at 9:24am CDT
For the past two-plus months, the ongoing baseball narrative has been around the lockout and the attempts, or lack thereof, to work out a new collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association. However, the MLBPA only consists of players who are currently on a team’s 40-man roster, as well as those who became Major League free agents at the end of the 2021 season. Separate from that, there is a far larger batch of players who also have ongoing gripes with MLB: minor leaguers.
The challenging conditions faced by those in the minors have been the subjects of controversies recently, with many players voicing frustration over their insufficient salaries which require them to find other jobs in the offseason and/or crowd into cramped apartments during the season. The latter issue was the subject of reports in October that MLB will now require teams to provide housing for minor leaguers.
Although that is surely a welcome development for minor league players, there are still other improvements they are seeking to make. Evan Drellich of The Athletic reports on an ongoing legal faceoff that has MiLB players seeking to be compensated for spring training. As part of this lawsuit, which goes to trial June 1st, an MLB lawyer argued that the players should not be given monetary compensation because the training they receive is their payment, which they value at $2,200 per week. “This figure is an estimate of the costs plaintiffs would have had to incur had they attended a baseball prospecting camp instead of participating in the minor leagues,” is how the argument was framed by Denise Martin, senior vice president at NERA Economic Consulting.
The players’ side, of course, disagrees. “All of a sudden they aren’t employees during the time periods where we call it ‘training,’ even though they’re operating under the same employment contract that requires them to perform services, quote, ‘throughout the calendar year,’” said Garrett Broshuis, an attorney and former MiLB player himself.
The players have long argued that their modest compensation, even when they are paid, has knock-on effects on their diet, sleep, mental health and other areas of their lives, which limits their ability to live up to their potential as athletes. Spending a month at spring training without any pay at all surely only compounds those struggles. In the wake of the news about this lawsuit, one minor league player articulated that particular frustration on Twitter. “I wish I could go to the grocery store and pay with ’an opportunity’,” said Nick Kuzia, who pitched in Double-A and Triple-A for the Padres in 2021. “I think most places only accept US dollars. Will keep you updated.”
www.mlbtraderumors.com
By Darragh McDonald | February 12, 2022 at 9:24am CDT
For the past two-plus months, the ongoing baseball narrative has been around the lockout and the attempts, or lack thereof, to work out a new collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association. However, the MLBPA only consists of players who are currently on a team’s 40-man roster, as well as those who became Major League free agents at the end of the 2021 season. Separate from that, there is a far larger batch of players who also have ongoing gripes with MLB: minor leaguers.
The challenging conditions faced by those in the minors have been the subjects of controversies recently, with many players voicing frustration over their insufficient salaries which require them to find other jobs in the offseason and/or crowd into cramped apartments during the season. The latter issue was the subject of reports in October that MLB will now require teams to provide housing for minor leaguers.
Although that is surely a welcome development for minor league players, there are still other improvements they are seeking to make. Evan Drellich of The Athletic reports on an ongoing legal faceoff that has MiLB players seeking to be compensated for spring training. As part of this lawsuit, which goes to trial June 1st, an MLB lawyer argued that the players should not be given monetary compensation because the training they receive is their payment, which they value at $2,200 per week. “This figure is an estimate of the costs plaintiffs would have had to incur had they attended a baseball prospecting camp instead of participating in the minor leagues,” is how the argument was framed by Denise Martin, senior vice president at NERA Economic Consulting.
The players’ side, of course, disagrees. “All of a sudden they aren’t employees during the time periods where we call it ‘training,’ even though they’re operating under the same employment contract that requires them to perform services, quote, ‘throughout the calendar year,’” said Garrett Broshuis, an attorney and former MiLB player himself.
The players have long argued that their modest compensation, even when they are paid, has knock-on effects on their diet, sleep, mental health and other areas of their lives, which limits their ability to live up to their potential as athletes. Spending a month at spring training without any pay at all surely only compounds those struggles. In the wake of the news about this lawsuit, one minor league player articulated that particular frustration on Twitter. “I wish I could go to the grocery store and pay with ’an opportunity’,” said Nick Kuzia, who pitched in Double-A and Triple-A for the Padres in 2021. “I think most places only accept US dollars. Will keep you updated.”
MLB Argues For Minor League Players To Remain Unpaid For Spring Training
For the past two-plus months, the ongoing baseball narrative has been around the lockout and the attempts, or lack thereof, …
www.mlbtraderumors.com
It's a wrap.
No baseball.
Turned down final offer.
No plans on future meeting.
It's done
millionaires arguing with billionaires about money-that neither can spend in 10 lifetimes
there is NOTHING that man can do at this point to garner ANY respect from the fans.
@jack walsh13
WTF?!?!?!?
Report: MLB Asks to Eliminate ‘Hundreds’ of Minor League Player Jobs In Latest Proposal
In its latest proposal to the players union, MLB asked for the power to significantly trim the number of minor league players.
Report: MLB Asks to Eliminate ‘Hundreds’ of Minor League Player Jobs In Latest Proposal
ZACH KOONSFEB 14, 2022
Major League Baseball asked the MLB Players Association for the ability to eliminate ‘hundreds’ of minor league playing jobs in its latest proposal amid heated labor negotiations between the two sides, according to ESPN‘s Jeff Passan.
The league proposed to reduce the maximum number of minor league players on the Domestic Reserve List—the list which governs the number of minor leaguers a team can roster at any time—from 180 to “below 150” for the remainder of the collective bargaining agreement, per Passan. On the proposal, MLB made clear that the number would remain at 180 for the 2022 season.
While the league has no concrete plans to reduce the size of the list in 2023 and beyond, the commissioner‘s office wants the flexibility to do so, according to Passan, who reported later Monday night that the MLBPA will reject this proposal.
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Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred makes comments during a news conference at MLB baseball owners meetings, Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022, in Orlando, Fla. Manfred says spring training remains on hold because of a management lockout and his goal is to reach a labor contract that allows opening day as scheduled on March 31.
Rob Manfred’s Argument About Owning an MLB Team Is False
BY MATT MARTELL
Feb 22, 2022; Iowa City, Iowa, USA; The Iowa Hawkeyes bench reacts during the second half against the Michigan State Spartans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
Iowa Hawkeyes Question Baffles ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestants
BY JELANI SCOTT
Alt text: Gonzaga coach Mark Few, standing at left, reacts to a call with Chet Holmgren (34), Nolan Hickman (11) and Hunter Sallis (10) during the second half of the team's NCAA college basketball game against Saint Mary's in Moraga, Calif., Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022.
Gonzaga Falls to Break Record for Top-10 Losses in One Day
BY JELANI SCOTT
The player‘s union does not represent minor league players, but issues that affect individuals on 40-man major league rosters are a part of the bargaining negotiations. ESPN reports that the union declined to comment on the league's latest proposal regarding the Domestic Reserve List.
Get SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's best stories every weekday. Sign up now.
The minor league system has been a major point of contention in recent years and has already undergone sweeping changes. Last offseason, MLB eliminated 42 teams and hundreds of player jobs from the minor-league system as part of a regional reset that gave each major league franchise an affiliation to four minor league teams. MLB did increase pay to minor leagues in 2021 and teams are mandated in 2022 to provide housing for minor league players for the first time. However, a number of issues regarding the minor league system remains unresolved, including whether or not minor league players should continue to be unpaid during spring training.
According to The Athletic's Evan Drellich, MLBPA officials came away “underwhelmed” by MLB’s latest collective bargaining agreement proposal during Saturday’s meetings. No deal has been put into place with spring training already unofficially pushed back, with its original proposed start date of Feb. 16 clearly unattainable and the scheduled start of the 2022 season just over a month away.
Shit is so messed up. Manfred is a fuckin piece of shit!!!
Inside the self-inflicted crisis boiling over as MLB's lockout deadline arrives
The disastrous outcome of losing Opening Day to a work stoppage is on the verge of becoming reality. Here's how years of missteps led to this moment.
Inside the self-inflicted crisis boiling over as MLB's lockout deadline arrives
Feb 28, 2022
Jeff Passan
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. Barring a miracle eleventh-hour agreement Monday on a new labor deal that ends its lockout of the MLB Players Association, the league has said it will cancel Opening Day games. That baseball finds itself on the precipice of such an ugly denouement is no accident. It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior -- of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, of alienating those who make the sport great.
The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little demonstrable progress. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back.
Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt.
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Any of these is a problem. In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players, who even now struggle to pull off the delicate balance of being aggrieved while trying to negotiate a larger piece of a $10 billion-plus pie. The MLBPA grew into the strongest union in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s by marrying morality and money -- by fighting for itself and for the betterment of the game simultaneously. Now, following a quarter-century of labor peace and the relative complacency that accompanied it, the players are energized and engaged beyond what even they expected.
"We're just trying not to get screwed," one player told ESPN.
Easy as it is to point to the average major league salary ($4.17 million last Opening Day) as a sign players aren't on the wrong end of anything, it's also facile. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. What doesn't go to the players goes to the league and teams, and owners control how their teams spend money. Since the 1994 player strike that canceled the World Series -- and especially over the last two collective bargaining agreements -- the league has through canny negotiating positioned itself to be the aggressor, a role with which it has grown comfortable and familiar.
On Dec. 2, when the league instituted what commissioner Rob Manfred, in a letter to fans, called a "defensive lockout," MLB acted first -- ostensibly in the name of proactivity. "We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations," Manfred wrote. The league then waited 43 days to present the union its next offer.
Now, the sides find themselves at another inflection point, one with the ability to do grave harm to the game -- a "disastrous outcome," Manfred said recently. Without a deal, the league says, games will be missed and player salaries lost. If players don't get paid for 162 games, they say, they'll refuse to agree to postseason expansion, one of MLB's key targets in any new deal. Neither knows for certain if the other is bluffing.
Players do know that they don't trust the league, and those misgivings only amplify concerns that already permeate their 1,200-man group. The next basic agreement will, for better or worse, govern the sport over the next half-decade, and players are well aware of the ways front offices, ever seeking the slightest advantage over their competitors, will plumb the document for opportunities to game the system in their favor.
Getting the right deal is the players' only recourse, and their position is simple: The sport needs to evolve with its aspirations. Baseball remains a game with incredible upside, with a collection of players young and dynamic and eminently likable. There is ample room for improvement to the sport itself, which has grown too plodding for a wide swath of young, would-be fans who regard it as slow and boring. The players have prepared themselves to miss games, to forfeit more than $20 million a day in salaries. They believe a bad agreement -- one that attempts to further neuter their power -- could do even more damage.
It could be a faulty premise. Even if the players outfox the Lords of Baseball -- as John Helyar called the owners in his indispensable book on the history of the game's labor strife, "Lords of the Realm" -- the inherent nature of the owner-worker dynamic may be too strong to reverse. But over the last few months, as they've grown more emboldened, they've found a voice that the MLBPA had lost. The players steeled themselves to stand behind a cause that rang true across the rank-and-file: doing what's right for the game they've spent their lives loving and living.
A week of in-person negotiations in Florida between the MLB and MLBPA might not be enough to keep the start of the regular season from being delayed. AP Photo/Ron Blum
ON DAY 89 of the lockout, with MLB willing to immolate the game to achieve its goals, it's important to understand how far apart the sides are - and why the narrative that the players aren't giving up anything substantive in negotiations is false.
The players walked into bargaining asking for the moon but possessing a weak hand, not exactly the sort of combination that affects change. They outlined four key areas they wanted the new agreement to address -- getting players paid more earlier in their careers, fixing service-time manipulation, preventing teams from tanking and removing restraints on free agency -- and attacked them with an extensive set of proposals. Some, like reducing the six-year reserve period for some players to reach free agency, were dead on arrival. Others, such as offering arbitration to all players after their second full season instead of the standard third, were unlikely to gain traction. More still: an anti-tanking plan that would institute a draft lottery to penalize teams for habitual losing and a pre-arbitration bonus pool to enrich the best young players made too much sense for the league to ignore.
In the week leading up to the lockout, the players offered two chips with significant value. The first was expanded playoffs. Players have stayed firm at moving from 10 teams to 12 but balked at the league's preferred format of 14 teams. Agreeing to it would provide MLB with a guaranteed $100 million from ESPN, which secured the broadcast rights for an expanded wild-card round. The second income stream would come from on-uniform advertising. Between uniform patches and helmet decals, teams would be expected to generate at least $150 million, according to sources. In all, the union can guarantee the league well over a quarter-billion dollars a year in new revenue -- on the presumption that half of it will return to the players.
Certainly the league has taken steps toward some of the union's more right-minded goals. MLB acceded to a lottery. It moved on service-time manipulation. From a financial perspective, however, players continue to wait for the league to match their outlay. The size of the disparity is unclear. The league offered to bump its minimum salary offer Sunday, sources said, something that will be worth tens of millions to players. The league's bonus pool offer, last reported at $20 million, is another priority for the union. Draft bonus pools are expected to grow. Other changes offered by the league, such as implementing the designated hitter in the National League and scrapping a draft-pick penalty for signing free agents, have some value. The more guaranteed money goes to players, the likelier a deal becomes.
None of this is new, of course. Players organized in the 1960s to combat a cadre of owners who had hoarded profits for decades. What has changed is the size of the pot. A $1.3 billion-a-year industry after the strike octupled in size. That has done little to change the rhetoric among some ownership hawks whose desire for a salary cap is the desired endgame. Unlike the NFL, NBA and NHL, baseball's uncapped system does not have a salary floor, allowing teams to spend as little as they want. The Pittsburgh Pirates' final payroll in 2021 was $50.3 million, their lowest since 2010 and less than one-fifth of the Los Angeles Dodgers'. That disparity, baseball long has contended, could be ruinous for the sport. In his letter, Manfred wrote: "(T)he Players Association's vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability for most teams to be competitive."
It was classic MLB, the sort of fear-mongering the league long ago perfected. And though it's undeniable that money does buy a team the ability to weather mistakes more easily, the notion that baseball needs a fixed system to solve a theoretical competitive-balance problem that the capped leagues avoid doesn't stand up to something far more reliable than the desires of owners: history.
IN 2001, MLB commissioner Bud Selig went in front of Congress and spoke of baseball's great financial woes. The sport had lost more than $500 million the year before, he told representatives who openly doubted the veracity of his numbers. Without a salary cap, Selig continued, not only might baseball need to contract two teams, it would never achieve competitive balance. That phrase has become baseball's tried-and-true alarm bell, red meat for low-revenue markets. Selig didn't get his salary cap, but a year later the league negotiated the framework of the competitive balance tax that exists to this day.
Since the CBT's arrival in 2003, 13 MLB franchises have won the World Series and 19 have played in it. That is the exact same number of teams as in the salary-capped NFL, far better than the nine champions and 14 competitors in the salary-capped NBA and right there with the 11 Stanley Cup winners and 21 finalists in the salary-capped NHL. In the championship seasons prior to the CBT era, 14 organizations won the World Series and 20 made it. The CBT was about competitive balance like "Citizen Kane" was about a sled.
Over that time, the CBT has risen, and the game has not collapsed. Baseball is too random for that, ever subject to the vagaries of chance. Always then, always now, always forever going forward, any restraint on spending will be about restraining spending. MLB sold the CBT as a way to rein in so-called runaway spending by the New York Yankees. Over time, though, the real intent -- a salary cap in sheep's clothing -- revealed itself. The tax rates grew. Draft-pick penalties joined the fray. Of all the brilliant negotiating Manfred did during his time as the league's lead labor lawyer, his work on turning the CBT from carrot to stick stands out. In September 2017, he said the quiet part out loud in an interview with a San Diego TV station.
"We have tried to deal with payroll disparity by limiting, through the use of taxes, the very highest-payroll clubs," Manfred said, adding: "For the first time in the 25 years since I've been in baseball, everybody in the top quartile of clubs had payrolls that actually went down this year due to the increased penalties that were negotiated as part of this collective-bargaining agreement."
Nothing illustrates the evolution of the CBT quite as well as the 2021 season. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres exceeded the $210 million threshold. Five other teams, however, came within $3.4 million of it. MLB had orchestrated the coup of financial coups in collective bargaining: getting what amounts to a salary cap without a floor or a guaranteed revenue split.
The players noticed. They saw how over the previous two collective-bargaining agreements, the CBT threshold rose about 18% while industry revenues grew by at least 40%. They saw that in 2018, long before COVID existed, their average salaries went down -- as they did again in 2019 and 2020 and 2021, even as the biggest deals in the sport were growing and $300 million-plus guaranteed contracts were no longer outliers. They saw franchise values exploding to the point that in 2021, Forbes estimated, the 30 MLB teams were worth a combined $55.28 billion. Ten years ago, only two collective-bargaining agreements earlier, their combined valuations were $15.68 billion.
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They also saw teams continuing to mimic Selig's rhetoric that baseball is little more than a break-even business. Whether MLB claiming a lack of profitability while boasting such gaudy franchise values and generating 11-figure revenues is voodoo accounting, intentional obfuscation or some combination of the two matters not. What does matter is the players saw it, and it infuriated them.
It was all part of the same bigger-than-the-game game the league was playing. Runaway spending leads to limiting through taxes. The six-year reserve period, so sacrosanct, turned into seven years when teams realized they could wheedle an extra season out of a player if they sent him to Triple-A out of spring training. To earn a full year of service, players need to spend 172 days on the major league roster. In his first season, NL Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant was on the Cubs' roster for 171. He filed a grievance. The arbitrator ruled in favor of the Cubs.
"It's horrible," one general manager said. "Six years should be six years. But what are we supposed to do? Not take advantage of them?"
For teams, service-time manipulation was seen as a feature, not a bug. And as it had with the CBT, the league codified some of its greatest advantages at the bargaining table. After decades of getting dismantled at the table, MLB has in the 20 years since recruited a deep roster of top-notch labor lawyers and economists and succeeded in changing the paradigm beyond its wildest dreams.
As the agreements continued to worsen for the players, little embarrassments started to add up. The Cubs and the Houston Astros won back-to-back World Series in 2016 and 2017 after intentionally bottoming out to get better draft position. Because of the amateur draft pool first implemented in 2012, tanking for draft position -- intentionally fielding a bad team -- became a strategy.
Arbitration has always been a contentious process, and players were livid when they learned MLB celebrated tamping down salaries by awarding a championship belt to the team that did it best. During spring training in 2020, when MLB was reeling from widespread criticism by players that Manfred had been too soft on the Houston Astros for cheating during their championship run, he referred to the World Series trophy as a "piece of metal" in an interview with ESPN's Karl Ravech.
"'Piece of metal' was the Gulf of Tonkin," one longtime baseball man said. "It was the aha moment for everyone. And then he did it again recently with everything about how owning a team isn't that profitable. Treating players like they're stupid has never worked. It's never been a great approach."
Baseball, it seems, can't help from doing it, and it's a symptom of those in ownership who regard players with disdain and struggle to stomach the notion that they warrant the salaries they receive. There are good owners, ones who prioritize winning above profits and understand baseball is wildly different from the businesses in which they made their billions.
Sports is a unique industry. Typically, workers make a product. In baseball, they are the product. The game of baseball is the framework, and in it exists two classes: players and owners. Players spend their entire lives chasing the major leagues. Just making it there is improbable. Staying long enough to make life-changing money is a miracle. Owners, on the other hand -- at least those who don't inherit their teams -- join the baseball world just as they would a country club: by buying membership.
If you went and got the next 1,200 best players in the world, the product would suffer greatly. If you handed MLB teams over to any 30 competent businesspeople, the sport would not suffer. Actually, it might improve. It doesn't take a billionaire to leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues.
The Yankees are not the Yankees if Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra don't win. Without the best players, they aren't in the World Series, and without championships, they're little more than an organization in a big market whose laundry features pinstripes. One would think, then, that a league would recognize that its profits exist because of Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Mike Trout, Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, Ronald Acuña Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and others -- and would see players' concerns about the state of the game not as trivial or excessive or outrageous, but vital.
It took until two days before the league's deadline, but MLB finally accepted the union's idea of awarding a full year of service to players even if they didn't spend 172 days on a roster -- in this case, the top two vote-getters in each league's Rookie of the Year balloting. After Manfred's lockout announcement, his contention that investing in stocks is more profitable than owning a team and the general unwillingness of the league to acknowledge that maybe this group of players really is as united as it contends, the move registered less as an important concession and more as an addendum to the part of these discussions that isn't moving -- and could take Opening Day with it.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Manfred and Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLBPA, met at Roger Dean Stadium, the spring complex of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins where the sides have met all week. Over the four previous days, bargaining had gone nowhere, and in a side session Manfred had asked Clark for a comprehensive proposal that included a move on the CBT. The league had stayed at $214 million and the union at $245 million since the lockout, and the union was under the impression that even if it made a small move on the CBT, the league would reciprocate with something more.
The next day, the union proposed what it considered major moves. It removed from the proposal any changes to the revenue-sharing system. It dropped its ask on Super 2s -- the 22% of players with the most service time in each 2+ class go to arbitration a year early -- from 75% to 35%. And it made that small CBT move, peeling $2 million off its asks in two years of the proposal. Some player leaders disagreed with the strategy, but representatives from all 30 teams signed off on it during a call.
MLB sent the proposal to owners, and back came an offer two hours later from lead negotiator Dan Halem and Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort, head of MLB's labor policy committee. The meaningful counter the union expected instead was a $1 million raise on the CBT for one year and the reduction of overage penalties to 45% for the first threshold, 62% for the second and 95% for the third -- all significantly worse than the 20%-32%-62.5% for first-time offenders in the expired basic agreement. The nonmonetary penalties -- including the loss of a first-round pick in the amateur draft and the theoretical international draft for exceeding the third threshold -- were still there, cementing the fact that the CBT that MLB is offering now is worse than the one that just expired.
When apprised of the offer, players' emotions varied. One said he was "furious -- just incredibly pissed." Another: "Deflated. We thought this was going to get things moving." The league regarded the union's offer as another in a long line of bad proposals -- this one because MLB before the lockout already had told the union that revenue sharing and changes to Super 2 were nonstarters to ownership.
The league's declaration of certain topics as off-limits never sat well with the players. This is, as MLB liked to say, a negotiation, and while revenue sharing could be seen as a third rail, expanding Super 2s -- something that has been done multiple times in bargaining -- belonged nowhere in that realm. Whether it's real or the strategy is unclear, MLB's line in the sand only fortified the players' belief that they had engaged in a monthslong charade.
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The coming days will show how real the league's threat of a hard deadline actually is. Multiple agents believe MLB is handling this like it does an arbitration case: Wait, wait, wait, and then at the last minute, when it looks impossible, get it done. Sunday brought some progress with more CBT discussion, though not the sort that less than 24 hours before a deadline offers much hope. Unless the league makes an unprecedented and entirely unexpected move in which it deviates significantly from its position on almost every key issue at the last minute and the union responds in kind, baseball will find itself in the same place it did in the summer of 2020: trying to figure out when the season will begin.
The fear and uncertainty of COVID's early days clouded those negotiations, and Manfred said at a news conference following the lockout that he would not equate the two. If they're not the same, they're at very least related. Because the frustration that accompanied the lack of a deal and eventual implementation of a 60-game season by Manfred in 2020 only has grown in the time since.
In the meantime, players will do what they've been doing for months: sending one another messages about the current state of affairs and, more often than the commissioner may realize, screenshots of Manfred's golf scores at Winged Foot, as found on Reddit. Gallows humor is the only kind that plays these days, when players' lives and livelihoods are interrupted for no good reason other than that the owners can.
Eventually, there will be a deal, and it's likely that when there is, little will have changed about what one official called the game's "mangled, Frankenstein economic system." The existential elements of the game -- pace of play, capturing young fans, gambling -- will have gone untouched at a time when real dialogue could've put the game in a far better position.
If there's any hope for 2027 not devolving into something even worse than this lockout, those sorts of conversations should happen regularly and include players young and old, league officials and a cross-section of owners. Pivoting with an eye on the future is best way to salvage the sport and the damage this lockout has done. Though it's not over, and may not be anytime soon, there are lessons to be learned to prevent baseball labor relations from taking a time machine back to the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
Already this is the second-longest period of labor strife in baseball history, and though it has stopped transactions and doused the hot stove and generally cast the sport in an awful light, until today, the most tangible thing lost was spring training. Soon, that won't be the case. This is Rob Manfred's disaster, the league's disaster, the owners' disaster, and it's been a long time coming.
Feb 28, 2022
Jeff Passan
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. Barring a miracle eleventh-hour agreement Monday on a new labor deal that ends its lockout of the MLB Players Association, the league has said it will cancel Opening Day games. That baseball finds itself on the precipice of such an ugly denouement is no accident. It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior -- of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, of alienating those who make the sport great.
The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little demonstrable progress. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back.
Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt.
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Any of these is a problem. In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players, who even now struggle to pull off the delicate balance of being aggrieved while trying to negotiate a larger piece of a $10 billion-plus pie. The MLBPA grew into the strongest union in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s by marrying morality and money -- by fighting for itself and for the betterment of the game simultaneously. Now, following a quarter-century of labor peace and the relative complacency that accompanied it, the players are energized and engaged beyond what even they expected.
"We're just trying not to get screwed," one player told ESPN.
Easy as it is to point to the average major league salary ($4.17 million last Opening Day) as a sign players aren't on the wrong end of anything, it's also facile. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. What doesn't go to the players goes to the league and teams, and owners control how their teams spend money. Since the 1994 player strike that canceled the World Series -- and especially over the last two collective bargaining agreements -- the league has through canny negotiating positioned itself to be the aggressor, a role with which it has grown comfortable and familiar.
On Dec. 2, when the league instituted what commissioner Rob Manfred, in a letter to fans, called a "defensive lockout," MLB acted first -- ostensibly in the name of proactivity. "We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations," Manfred wrote. The league then waited 43 days to present the union its next offer.
Now, the sides find themselves at another inflection point, one with the ability to do grave harm to the game -- a "disastrous outcome," Manfred said recently. Without a deal, the league says, games will be missed and player salaries lost. If players don't get paid for 162 games, they say, they'll refuse to agree to postseason expansion, one of MLB's key targets in any new deal. Neither knows for certain if the other is bluffing.
Players do know that they don't trust the league, and those misgivings only amplify concerns that already permeate their 1,200-man group. The next basic agreement will, for better or worse, govern the sport over the next half-decade, and players are well aware of the ways front offices, ever seeking the slightest advantage over their competitors, will plumb the document for opportunities to game the system in their favor.
Getting the right deal is the players' only recourse, and their position is simple: The sport needs to evolve with its aspirations. Baseball remains a game with incredible upside, with a collection of players young and dynamic and eminently likable. There is ample room for improvement to the sport itself, which has grown too plodding for a wide swath of young, would-be fans who regard it as slow and boring. The players have prepared themselves to miss games, to forfeit more than $20 million a day in salaries. They believe a bad agreement -- one that attempts to further neuter their power -- could do even more damage.
It could be a faulty premise. Even if the players outfox the Lords of Baseball -- as John Helyar called the owners in his indispensable book on the history of the game's labor strife, "Lords of the Realm" -- the inherent nature of the owner-worker dynamic may be too strong to reverse. But over the last few months, as they've grown more emboldened, they've found a voice that the MLBPA had lost. The players steeled themselves to stand behind a cause that rang true across the rank-and-file: doing what's right for the game they've spent their lives loving and living.
A week of in-person negotiations in Florida between the MLB and MLBPA might not be enough to keep the start of the regular season from being delayed. AP Photo/Ron Blum
ON DAY 89 of the lockout, with MLB willing to immolate the game to achieve its goals, it's important to understand how far apart the sides are - and why the narrative that the players aren't giving up anything substantive in negotiations is false.
The players walked into bargaining asking for the moon but possessing a weak hand, not exactly the sort of combination that affects change. They outlined four key areas they wanted the new agreement to address -- getting players paid more earlier in their careers, fixing service-time manipulation, preventing teams from tanking and removing restraints on free agency -- and attacked them with an extensive set of proposals. Some, like reducing the six-year reserve period for some players to reach free agency, were dead on arrival. Others, such as offering arbitration to all players after their second full season instead of the standard third, were unlikely to gain traction. More still: an anti-tanking plan that would institute a draft lottery to penalize teams for habitual losing and a pre-arbitration bonus pool to enrich the best young players made too much sense for the league to ignore.
In the week leading up to the lockout, the players offered two chips with significant value. The first was expanded playoffs. Players have stayed firm at moving from 10 teams to 12 but balked at the league's preferred format of 14 teams. Agreeing to it would provide MLB with a guaranteed $100 million from ESPN, which secured the broadcast rights for an expanded wild-card round. The second income stream would come from on-uniform advertising. Between uniform patches and helmet decals, teams would be expected to generate at least $150 million, according to sources. In all, the union can guarantee the league well over a quarter-billion dollars a year in new revenue -- on the presumption that half of it will return to the players.
Certainly the league has taken steps toward some of the union's more right-minded goals. MLB acceded to a lottery. It moved on service-time manipulation. From a financial perspective, however, players continue to wait for the league to match their outlay. The size of the disparity is unclear. The league offered to bump its minimum salary offer Sunday, sources said, something that will be worth tens of millions to players. The league's bonus pool offer, last reported at $20 million, is another priority for the union. Draft bonus pools are expected to grow. Other changes offered by the league, such as implementing the designated hitter in the National League and scrapping a draft-pick penalty for signing free agents, have some value. The more guaranteed money goes to players, the likelier a deal becomes.
None of this is new, of course. Players organized in the 1960s to combat a cadre of owners who had hoarded profits for decades. What has changed is the size of the pot. A $1.3 billion-a-year industry after the strike octupled in size. That has done little to change the rhetoric among some ownership hawks whose desire for a salary cap is the desired endgame. Unlike the NFL, NBA and NHL, baseball's uncapped system does not have a salary floor, allowing teams to spend as little as they want. The Pittsburgh Pirates' final payroll in 2021 was $50.3 million, their lowest since 2010 and less than one-fifth of the Los Angeles Dodgers'. That disparity, baseball long has contended, could be ruinous for the sport. In his letter, Manfred wrote: "(T)he Players Association's vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability for most teams to be competitive."
It was classic MLB, the sort of fear-mongering the league long ago perfected. And though it's undeniable that money does buy a team the ability to weather mistakes more easily, the notion that baseball needs a fixed system to solve a theoretical competitive-balance problem that the capped leagues avoid doesn't stand up to something far more reliable than the desires of owners: history.
IN 2001, MLB commissioner Bud Selig went in front of Congress and spoke of baseball's great financial woes. The sport had lost more than $500 million the year before, he told representatives who openly doubted the veracity of his numbers. Without a salary cap, Selig continued, not only might baseball need to contract two teams, it would never achieve competitive balance. That phrase has become baseball's tried-and-true alarm bell, red meat for low-revenue markets. Selig didn't get his salary cap, but a year later the league negotiated the framework of the competitive balance tax that exists to this day.
Since the CBT's arrival in 2003, 13 MLB franchises have won the World Series and 19 have played in it. That is the exact same number of teams as in the salary-capped NFL, far better than the nine champions and 14 competitors in the salary-capped NBA and right there with the 11 Stanley Cup winners and 21 finalists in the salary-capped NHL. In the championship seasons prior to the CBT era, 14 organizations won the World Series and 20 made it. The CBT was about competitive balance like "Citizen Kane" was about a sled.
Over that time, the CBT has risen, and the game has not collapsed. Baseball is too random for that, ever subject to the vagaries of chance. Always then, always now, always forever going forward, any restraint on spending will be about restraining spending. MLB sold the CBT as a way to rein in so-called runaway spending by the New York Yankees. Over time, though, the real intent -- a salary cap in sheep's clothing -- revealed itself. The tax rates grew. Draft-pick penalties joined the fray. Of all the brilliant negotiating Manfred did during his time as the league's lead labor lawyer, his work on turning the CBT from carrot to stick stands out. In September 2017, he said the quiet part out loud in an interview with a San Diego TV station.
"We have tried to deal with payroll disparity by limiting, through the use of taxes, the very highest-payroll clubs," Manfred said, adding: "For the first time in the 25 years since I've been in baseball, everybody in the top quartile of clubs had payrolls that actually went down this year due to the increased penalties that were negotiated as part of this collective-bargaining agreement."
Nothing illustrates the evolution of the CBT quite as well as the 2021 season. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres exceeded the $210 million threshold. Five other teams, however, came within $3.4 million of it. MLB had orchestrated the coup of financial coups in collective bargaining: getting what amounts to a salary cap without a floor or a guaranteed revenue split.
The players noticed. They saw how over the previous two collective-bargaining agreements, the CBT threshold rose about 18% while industry revenues grew by at least 40%. They saw that in 2018, long before COVID existed, their average salaries went down -- as they did again in 2019 and 2020 and 2021, even as the biggest deals in the sport were growing and $300 million-plus guaranteed contracts were no longer outliers. They saw franchise values exploding to the point that in 2021, Forbes estimated, the 30 MLB teams were worth a combined $55.28 billion. Ten years ago, only two collective-bargaining agreements earlier, their combined valuations were $15.68 billion.
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They also saw teams continuing to mimic Selig's rhetoric that baseball is little more than a break-even business. Whether MLB claiming a lack of profitability while boasting such gaudy franchise values and generating 11-figure revenues is voodoo accounting, intentional obfuscation or some combination of the two matters not. What does matter is the players saw it, and it infuriated them.
It was all part of the same bigger-than-the-game game the league was playing. Runaway spending leads to limiting through taxes. The six-year reserve period, so sacrosanct, turned into seven years when teams realized they could wheedle an extra season out of a player if they sent him to Triple-A out of spring training. To earn a full year of service, players need to spend 172 days on the major league roster. In his first season, NL Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant was on the Cubs' roster for 171. He filed a grievance. The arbitrator ruled in favor of the Cubs.
"It's horrible," one general manager said. "Six years should be six years. But what are we supposed to do? Not take advantage of them?"
For teams, service-time manipulation was seen as a feature, not a bug. And as it had with the CBT, the league codified some of its greatest advantages at the bargaining table. After decades of getting dismantled at the table, MLB has in the 20 years since recruited a deep roster of top-notch labor lawyers and economists and succeeded in changing the paradigm beyond its wildest dreams.
As the agreements continued to worsen for the players, little embarrassments started to add up. The Cubs and the Houston Astros won back-to-back World Series in 2016 and 2017 after intentionally bottoming out to get better draft position. Because of the amateur draft pool first implemented in 2012, tanking for draft position -- intentionally fielding a bad team -- became a strategy.
Arbitration has always been a contentious process, and players were livid when they learned MLB celebrated tamping down salaries by awarding a championship belt to the team that did it best. During spring training in 2020, when MLB was reeling from widespread criticism by players that Manfred had been too soft on the Houston Astros for cheating during their championship run, he referred to the World Series trophy as a "piece of metal" in an interview with ESPN's Karl Ravech.
"'Piece of metal' was the Gulf of Tonkin," one longtime baseball man said. "It was the aha moment for everyone. And then he did it again recently with everything about how owning a team isn't that profitable. Treating players like they're stupid has never worked. It's never been a great approach."
Baseball, it seems, can't help from doing it, and it's a symptom of those in ownership who regard players with disdain and struggle to stomach the notion that they warrant the salaries they receive. There are good owners, ones who prioritize winning above profits and understand baseball is wildly different from the businesses in which they made their billions.
Sports is a unique industry. Typically, workers make a product. In baseball, they are the product. The game of baseball is the framework, and in it exists two classes: players and owners. Players spend their entire lives chasing the major leagues. Just making it there is improbable. Staying long enough to make life-changing money is a miracle. Owners, on the other hand -- at least those who don't inherit their teams -- join the baseball world just as they would a country club: by buying membership.
If you went and got the next 1,200 best players in the world, the product would suffer greatly. If you handed MLB teams over to any 30 competent businesspeople, the sport would not suffer. Actually, it might improve. It doesn't take a billionaire to leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues.
The Yankees are not the Yankees if Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra don't win. Without the best players, they aren't in the World Series, and without championships, they're little more than an organization in a big market whose laundry features pinstripes. One would think, then, that a league would recognize that its profits exist because of Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Mike Trout, Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, Ronald Acuña Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and others -- and would see players' concerns about the state of the game not as trivial or excessive or outrageous, but vital.
It took until two days before the league's deadline, but MLB finally accepted the union's idea of awarding a full year of service to players even if they didn't spend 172 days on a roster -- in this case, the top two vote-getters in each league's Rookie of the Year balloting. After Manfred's lockout announcement, his contention that investing in stocks is more profitable than owning a team and the general unwillingness of the league to acknowledge that maybe this group of players really is as united as it contends, the move registered less as an important concession and more as an addendum to the part of these discussions that isn't moving -- and could take Opening Day with it.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Manfred and Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLBPA, met at Roger Dean Stadium, the spring complex of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins where the sides have met all week. Over the four previous days, bargaining had gone nowhere, and in a side session Manfred had asked Clark for a comprehensive proposal that included a move on the CBT. The league had stayed at $214 million and the union at $245 million since the lockout, and the union was under the impression that even if it made a small move on the CBT, the league would reciprocate with something more.
The next day, the union proposed what it considered major moves. It removed from the proposal any changes to the revenue-sharing system. It dropped its ask on Super 2s -- the 22% of players with the most service time in each 2+ class go to arbitration a year early -- from 75% to 35%. And it made that small CBT move, peeling $2 million off its asks in two years of the proposal. Some player leaders disagreed with the strategy, but representatives from all 30 teams signed off on it during a call.
MLB sent the proposal to owners, and back came an offer two hours later from lead negotiator Dan Halem and Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort, head of MLB's labor policy committee. The meaningful counter the union expected instead was a $1 million raise on the CBT for one year and the reduction of overage penalties to 45% for the first threshold, 62% for the second and 95% for the third -- all significantly worse than the 20%-32%-62.5% for first-time offenders in the expired basic agreement. The nonmonetary penalties -- including the loss of a first-round pick in the amateur draft and the theoretical international draft for exceeding the third threshold -- were still there, cementing the fact that the CBT that MLB is offering now is worse than the one that just expired.
When apprised of the offer, players' emotions varied. One said he was "furious -- just incredibly pissed." Another: "Deflated. We thought this was going to get things moving." The league regarded the union's offer as another in a long line of bad proposals -- this one because MLB before the lockout already had told the union that revenue sharing and changes to Super 2 were nonstarters to ownership.
The league's declaration of certain topics as off-limits never sat well with the players. This is, as MLB liked to say, a negotiation, and while revenue sharing could be seen as a third rail, expanding Super 2s -- something that has been done multiple times in bargaining -- belonged nowhere in that realm. Whether it's real or the strategy is unclear, MLB's line in the sand only fortified the players' belief that they had engaged in a monthslong charade.
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The coming days will show how real the league's threat of a hard deadline actually is. Multiple agents believe MLB is handling this like it does an arbitration case: Wait, wait, wait, and then at the last minute, when it looks impossible, get it done. Sunday brought some progress with more CBT discussion, though not the sort that less than 24 hours before a deadline offers much hope. Unless the league makes an unprecedented and entirely unexpected move in which it deviates significantly from its position on almost every key issue at the last minute and the union responds in kind, baseball will find itself in the same place it did in the summer of 2020: trying to figure out when the season will begin.
The fear and uncertainty of COVID's early days clouded those negotiations, and Manfred said at a news conference following the lockout that he would not equate the two. If they're not the same, they're at very least related. Because the frustration that accompanied the lack of a deal and eventual implementation of a 60-game season by Manfred in 2020 only has grown in the time since.
In the meantime, players will do what they've been doing for months: sending one another messages about the current state of affairs and, more often than the commissioner may realize, screenshots of Manfred's golf scores at Winged Foot, as found on Reddit. Gallows humor is the only kind that plays these days, when players' lives and livelihoods are interrupted for no good reason other than that the owners can.
Eventually, there will be a deal, and it's likely that when there is, little will have changed about what one official called the game's "mangled, Frankenstein economic system." The existential elements of the game -- pace of play, capturing young fans, gambling -- will have gone untouched at a time when real dialogue could've put the game in a far better position.
If there's any hope for 2027 not devolving into something even worse than this lockout, those sorts of conversations should happen regularly and include players young and old, league officials and a cross-section of owners. Pivoting with an eye on the future is best way to salvage the sport and the damage this lockout has done. Though it's not over, and may not be anytime soon, there are lessons to be learned to prevent baseball labor relations from taking a time machine back to the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
Already this is the second-longest period of labor strife in baseball history, and though it has stopped transactions and doused the hot stove and generally cast the sport in an awful light, until today, the most tangible thing lost was spring training. Soon, that won't be the case. This is Rob Manfred's disaster, the league's disaster, the owners' disaster, and it's been a long time coming.
MLB lockout only reinforces a certain ugliness about the game
A new breed of personnel now runs baseball, bent on treating it as a Fortune 500 company rather than as a sport.
MLB lockout only reinforces a certain ugliness about the game
1 Mar, 2022
Spring training games have been canceled. Barring an agreement in the next several hours, regular-season games are undoubtedly next.
This, following January's Hall of Fame announcement, which signified another of the game's lowest points: the iconic Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and David Ortiz reduced to a self-imposed spectacle of steroid suspicion and the display of selective justice. Even Derek Jeter, one of the few recent Hall of Famers whose induction came without controversy, made news of his own during the lockout. Jeter, once part-owner of the Miami Marlins, just quit his post as CEO and dumped his equity stake, too. Baseball still can't get it right.
Over the years, as acrimony rose between management and players, one line of thinking suggested the relationship was so toxic that what baseball really needed was new leadership -- that fresh new voices and a new approach on both sides would be the answer to the more-than-half-century of labor conflict between players and owners.
Tony Clark has been executive director of the MLB Players Association since 2013. MLBPA
The appointment of Tony Clark as executive director of the MLB players' union was exactly that. Since its inception in 1966 as a real collective bargaining unit, the union had never been run by an ex-player. Clark's arrival in 2013 -- after the death of Donald Fehr's successor, Michael Weiner -- signaled a different approach. The MLBPA still had its requisite share of lawyers and negotiators, but Clark's vision was a true player's union -- for players, run by players.
MLB's leadership responded to Clark's vision not as a fresh start, but as a golden opportunity to finally break the union. There have been whispers for the past several years that Clark was in over his head. Ownership brazenly gloated over what they saw as a rout vs. the players during Clark's first negotiation. But that, in turn, cemented the resolve of the players, who have been saying for the past two years that ownership was going to see a different adversary on the other side of the table. That resolve has been bolstered by the direction and feel of the sport.
In the middle is the fan, who might be tempted to blame the billionaires and the millionaires -- but that would be incorrect, and simplistic. Some players are millionaires. Nearly all of the owners are billionaires. As the money has risen, the players' share has fallen -- four years in a row and counting. All economies have a middle class, and baseball's -- like America's -- has been shrinking.
The conflicts for anyone who has been watching the game beyond the final score must know money is only one of the most obvious elements of a broken game. Several areas of contention have been building for years.
Baseball -- because of its past, its style, its conservative belief in its traditions -- has always been seen as out of step. When the average game length was a little over two hours in the 1950s, the sport was criticized for taking too long. Shortly after retiring, Jackie Robinson in 1958 told a reporter that baseball was boring to watch, and as a spectator, he much preferred basketball and football. In 1958.
In the past, however, the owners and players appeared to agree to the bedrock nature of the game -- at least in the final negotiation. Today's gaps are philosophical questions of how the future game is going to look, how it's going to be played, and why. Previous manifestations of owner greed, while no more attractive, did not as directly threaten the actual play on the field. Owners have been trying to break baseball's union since the Johnson administration by trying to not pay players or by seeking to wrest back free agency. Whether the fight was titanic, as in 1981 or 1994, or defining but contained, as in 1972, the battle was centrally over matters of money: a pension fight in 1972, free-agent compensation in 1981, a salary cap in 1994. Baseball owners have been trying to kill free agency ever since its inception in December 1975.
Manfred's current lockout, however, more directly impacts the game on the field -- the current rules, already far in favor of owners, aren't enough. Ownership is squeezing the orange without the goal of making the juice taste better. A new breed of personnel now runs baseball, bent on treating it as a Fortune 500 company rather than as a sport, finding loopholes to exert even more control without much thought or interest in its consequences. Today's baseball people are manipulating the sport not to improve it aesthetically but to lessen the import of the players.
Analytics departments attempt to control the game through manipulation, either through the combination of service time (keeping big-league-ready players in the minors to prevent them from reaching free agency on time) and losing on purpose.
The former has had several blatant examples: David Price with the Tampa Bay Rays, Kris Bryant with the Chicago Cubs. Under Manfred, teams have manipulated rosters using the disabled/injured list.
The latter is tanking. The Moneyball generation of fans who think along with the front offices instead of emulating the batting stances of their favorite players may be tolerant of teams losing as a practical method to improve future teams. But players who are expected to perform for a team that is not trying to win are far less forgiving, especially when players hear boos when it appears they aren't giving their all.
The sport has taken on an impersonal, assembly-line characteristic; teams play for outs, but the players play for competition, pride, professionalism. That, combined with Manfred calling the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," told the players the commissioner of the game took no pride in what they did. They were just high-paid widgets.
The owners are still trying to kill free agency, they're now trying to do it in a different way. Even the proposal to expand to a 14-team postseason (disastrous without reducing the length of the 162-game regular season) likely will result in less player movement. If a team needs to be only slightly over .500 to make the playoffs, teams will be less likely to make deals or improve their teams with big signings.
This is especially dangerous in baseball, the one sport in which, because of pitching rotations, teams cannot field their best lineups every game. It is happening through an NFL-style competitive balance tax (spoiler alert: it's a salary cap), and by manipulating service time, teams are pushing back when players can become free agents -- then arguing the players are too old to merit long-term contracts. When the players argued in response to reduce the free-agent eligibility from six years to five, the owners refused.
When the games eventually return, the power of the sport will overcome the people who run it. Fans will get caught up in the taut pennant races and all the wondrous talents on the field, for the players are the game. But every day of this lockout has exposed a loss. The last several months have reinforced a certain ugliness to the sport.
It won't kill baseball -- because the players always save it -- but it has made it a little less attractive, watching it a little less given. It is one thing to watch a business fight over money, but quite another when the people who run the business seem to have little respect for it.
1 Mar, 2022
Howard BryantESPN Senior Writer
Spring training games have been canceled. Barring an agreement in the next several hours, regular-season games are undoubtedly next.
This, following January's Hall of Fame announcement, which signified another of the game's lowest points: the iconic Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and David Ortiz reduced to a self-imposed spectacle of steroid suspicion and the display of selective justice. Even Derek Jeter, one of the few recent Hall of Famers whose induction came without controversy, made news of his own during the lockout. Jeter, once part-owner of the Miami Marlins, just quit his post as CEO and dumped his equity stake, too. Baseball still can't get it right.
Over the years, as acrimony rose between management and players, one line of thinking suggested the relationship was so toxic that what baseball really needed was new leadership -- that fresh new voices and a new approach on both sides would be the answer to the more-than-half-century of labor conflict between players and owners.
Tony Clark has been executive director of the MLB Players Association since 2013. MLBPA
The appointment of Tony Clark as executive director of the MLB players' union was exactly that. Since its inception in 1966 as a real collective bargaining unit, the union had never been run by an ex-player. Clark's arrival in 2013 -- after the death of Donald Fehr's successor, Michael Weiner -- signaled a different approach. The MLBPA still had its requisite share of lawyers and negotiators, but Clark's vision was a true player's union -- for players, run by players.
MLB's leadership responded to Clark's vision not as a fresh start, but as a golden opportunity to finally break the union. There have been whispers for the past several years that Clark was in over his head. Ownership brazenly gloated over what they saw as a rout vs. the players during Clark's first negotiation. But that, in turn, cemented the resolve of the players, who have been saying for the past two years that ownership was going to see a different adversary on the other side of the table. That resolve has been bolstered by the direction and feel of the sport.
In the middle is the fan, who might be tempted to blame the billionaires and the millionaires -- but that would be incorrect, and simplistic. Some players are millionaires. Nearly all of the owners are billionaires. As the money has risen, the players' share has fallen -- four years in a row and counting. All economies have a middle class, and baseball's -- like America's -- has been shrinking.
The conflicts for anyone who has been watching the game beyond the final score must know money is only one of the most obvious elements of a broken game. Several areas of contention have been building for years.
Baseball -- because of its past, its style, its conservative belief in its traditions -- has always been seen as out of step. When the average game length was a little over two hours in the 1950s, the sport was criticized for taking too long. Shortly after retiring, Jackie Robinson in 1958 told a reporter that baseball was boring to watch, and as a spectator, he much preferred basketball and football. In 1958.
In the past, however, the owners and players appeared to agree to the bedrock nature of the game -- at least in the final negotiation. Today's gaps are philosophical questions of how the future game is going to look, how it's going to be played, and why. Previous manifestations of owner greed, while no more attractive, did not as directly threaten the actual play on the field. Owners have been trying to break baseball's union since the Johnson administration by trying to not pay players or by seeking to wrest back free agency. Whether the fight was titanic, as in 1981 or 1994, or defining but contained, as in 1972, the battle was centrally over matters of money: a pension fight in 1972, free-agent compensation in 1981, a salary cap in 1994. Baseball owners have been trying to kill free agency ever since its inception in December 1975.
Manfred's current lockout, however, more directly impacts the game on the field -- the current rules, already far in favor of owners, aren't enough. Ownership is squeezing the orange without the goal of making the juice taste better. A new breed of personnel now runs baseball, bent on treating it as a Fortune 500 company rather than as a sport, finding loopholes to exert even more control without much thought or interest in its consequences. Today's baseball people are manipulating the sport not to improve it aesthetically but to lessen the import of the players.
Analytics departments attempt to control the game through manipulation, either through the combination of service time (keeping big-league-ready players in the minors to prevent them from reaching free agency on time) and losing on purpose.
The former has had several blatant examples: David Price with the Tampa Bay Rays, Kris Bryant with the Chicago Cubs. Under Manfred, teams have manipulated rosters using the disabled/injured list.
The latter is tanking. The Moneyball generation of fans who think along with the front offices instead of emulating the batting stances of their favorite players may be tolerant of teams losing as a practical method to improve future teams. But players who are expected to perform for a team that is not trying to win are far less forgiving, especially when players hear boos when it appears they aren't giving their all.
The sport has taken on an impersonal, assembly-line characteristic; teams play for outs, but the players play for competition, pride, professionalism. That, combined with Manfred calling the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," told the players the commissioner of the game took no pride in what they did. They were just high-paid widgets.
The owners are still trying to kill free agency, they're now trying to do it in a different way. Even the proposal to expand to a 14-team postseason (disastrous without reducing the length of the 162-game regular season) likely will result in less player movement. If a team needs to be only slightly over .500 to make the playoffs, teams will be less likely to make deals or improve their teams with big signings.
This is especially dangerous in baseball, the one sport in which, because of pitching rotations, teams cannot field their best lineups every game. It is happening through an NFL-style competitive balance tax (spoiler alert: it's a salary cap), and by manipulating service time, teams are pushing back when players can become free agents -- then arguing the players are too old to merit long-term contracts. When the players argued in response to reduce the free-agent eligibility from six years to five, the owners refused.
When the games eventually return, the power of the sport will overcome the people who run it. Fans will get caught up in the taut pennant races and all the wondrous talents on the field, for the players are the game. But every day of this lockout has exposed a loss. The last several months have reinforced a certain ugliness to the sport.
It won't kill baseball -- because the players always save it -- but it has made it a little less attractive, watching it a little less given. It is one thing to watch a business fight over money, but quite another when the people who run the business seem to have little respect for it.
And them muthafuckin owners gon wanna raise ticket prices after this bullshit!!!? 
And them muthafuckin owners gon wanna raise ticket prices after this bullshit!!!?
Owners claim they losing money
Player salaries continue to go down
While overall revenue has increased
And they trying to cut all minor leagues
They really screwing over employees who work at these ballparks and the money minor league ball along with spring training in Florida and Arizona bring in. Crakkka billionaire's only care about themselves and people in their economy class. They don't give a shit about anyone else.
They really screwing over employees who work at these ballparks and the money minor league ball along with spring training in Florida and Arizona bring in. Crakkka billionaire's only care about themselves and people in their economy class. They don't give a shit about anyone else.
Super facts cuzzo
this is so tacky. Not a good look at all.MLB Argues For Minor League Players To Remain Unpaid For Spring Training
By Darragh McDonald | February 12, 2022 at 9:24am CDT
For the past two-plus months, the ongoing baseball narrative has been around the lockout and the attempts, or lack thereof, to work out a new collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association. However, the MLBPA only consists of players who are currently on a team’s 40-man roster, as well as those who became Major League free agents at the end of the 2021 season. Separate from that, there is a far larger batch of players who also have ongoing gripes with MLB: minor leaguers.
The challenging conditions faced by those in the minors have been the subjects of controversies recently, with many players voicing frustration over their insufficient salaries which require them to find other jobs in the offseason and/or crowd into cramped apartments during the season. The latter issue was the subject of reports in October that MLB will now require teams to provide housing for minor leaguers.
Although that is surely a welcome development for minor league players, there are still other improvements they are seeking to make. Evan Drellich of The Athletic reports on an ongoing legal faceoff that has MiLB players seeking to be compensated for spring training. As part of this lawsuit, which goes to trial June 1st, an MLB lawyer argued that the players should not be given monetary compensation because the training they receive is their payment, which they value at $2,200 per week. “This figure is an estimate of the costs plaintiffs would have had to incur had they attended a baseball prospecting camp instead of participating in the minor leagues,” is how the argument was framed by Denise Martin, senior vice president at NERA Economic Consulting.
The players’ side, of course, disagrees. “All of a sudden they aren’t employees during the time periods where we call it ‘training,’ even though they’re operating under the same employment contract that requires them to perform services, quote, ‘throughout the calendar year,’” said Garrett Broshuis, an attorney and former MiLB player himself.
The players have long argued that their modest compensation, even when they are paid, has knock-on effects on their diet, sleep, mental health and other areas of their lives, which limits their ability to live up to their potential as athletes. Spending a month at spring training without any pay at all surely only compounds those struggles. In the wake of the news about this lawsuit, one minor league player articulated that particular frustration on Twitter. “I wish I could go to the grocery store and pay with ’an opportunity’,” said Nick Kuzia, who pitched in Double-A and Triple-A for the Padres in 2021. “I think most places only accept US dollars. Will keep you updated.”
MLB Argues For Minor League Players To Remain Unpaid For Spring Training
For the past two-plus months, the ongoing baseball narrative has been around the lockout and the attempts, or lack thereof, …
These idiots are really destroying this game.this is so tacky. Not a good look at all.
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