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With spring training well underway and games that count in the standings a few weeks off, MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark has been making the rounds. On Friday, he spoke to a few media members regarding the possibility of a lockout in 2026, when the current collective bargaining agreement ends. The union is historically quiet when it comes to speaking publicly about what’s going on with negotiations and the like — that’s actually how these things are supposed to go, you know, but given the incessant leaks and proclamations from the ownership side, you’d never know it — however, Clark had something to say this time around, with good reason:
“Unless I am mistaken the league has come out and said there’s going to be a work stoppage,” Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, said Friday morning to a few members of the media after meeting with the San Francisco Giants players at Scottsdale Stadium. “So, I don’t think I’m speaking out of school in that regard.”
Clark said he’s basing that opinion on recent rhetoric from commissioner Rob Manfred, who told The Athletic in January that offseason lockouts are not necessarily a bad thing.
Manfred, if you’ll recall, talked about the usefulness of a lockout to getting the conversation going and forcing bargaining to happen. Which is a lie, of course, especially when, at the time of the comments, the league and PA were over a year from even beginning their negotiations in earnest. If the league wants to bargain, then they can just do that — they don’t need to wait until the existing CBA has expired so that they can lock the players out and force the issue. Maybe they’ve forgotten as much, though, since they very intentionally avoided taking bargaining seriously in 2021 until the CBA had expired and they could enact their plan of a lockout, as they attempted to force the players to take a bad deal while the clocked ticked away the days until the season was supposed to open.
What’s especially funny about all of this is Manfred’s “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” follow-up, sans hot dog costume, from shortly after his interview at The Athletic where he brought up the likelihood and utility of a lockout in the first place:
For his part, Manfred has recently tampered down his rhetoric, saying during an early February spring training press conference in Phoenix he’d prefer to negotiate MLB’s position at the bargaining table rather than through the media.
“I’m not going to speculate how we’re going to negotiate with the PA. We’re a year away,” he said. “I owe it to the owners to coalesce around our bargaining approach. And quite frankly I owe it to our fans not to get into this too early. It’s bad enough when you’re doing it and bargaining, and everyone is worried about it. We’re just not there yet.”
Oh, you don’t want to negotiate through the media? You mean the venue through which you said a lockout was a weapon to be used, but more like a .22 caliber than a shotgun or a nuclear weapon? The one where you said enacting a lockout was going to be the norm going forward? Manfred isn’t stupid or forgetful here, he knows exactly what he’s doing and has done. He’s not distancing himself from his words or switching to “tampered down rhetoric,” either. He said what he felt needed to be said, and now he’s not willing to say anything else on the subject, because what he felt needed to be said is already out there. It’s more “alright, leave me alone now” than it is walking back anything or changing any behavior. A way to try to keep the story, which probably did not land the way Manfred intended it to, from being a point from which players can find some unity and organization in.
The league is still planning a lockout. Tony Clark spoke to reporters knowing just what Manfred is doing when he says “oh yeah let’s not talk about the hugely inflammatory thing I talked about before.” Which again, given how much the PA likes to keep things quiet, should tell you something about how ineffective this plan of Manfred’s is to pretend as if he’s all about the bargaining table, and not pressure and intimidation through the media.
And while Clark is unlikely to harp on this, given that tendency toward only speaking up in public when he’s not “speaking out of school” as he put it, it is worth pointing out, once again, that there is an entire year between now and when the two sides are supposed to begin, formally, to discuss the next CBA at the table. The representative of the owners bringing up the likelihood of a lockout tells us, and the union, about how seriously they plan to take that start of negotiations. To them, the discussions don’t actually begin until the players are locked out, and everything else is wasted time. The owners will waste all the time they want, however, if they think it’ll give them more control over the players in the future.
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