Category: Labor

Diamond loses more teams, what’s next

Three more teams leave Diamond for a MLB-controlled game broadcasts.

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On Tuesday morning, Baseball Prospectus published a feature of mine on the Diamond bankruptcy proceedings, and what they meant for the coming MLB offseason. As discussed last month, MLB already pointed out that the trajectory of the bankruptcy saga means impacted teams won’t be able to plan their budgets for the 2025 season, and the addition of another couple of teams — and the threat of more joining them — meant that we were going to be in for another quiet offseason.

On Tuesday afternoon, it was announced that three more teams whose deals with Diamond had been dropped would not seek to renegotiate with the regional sports network… network… and would instead work through MLB to broadcast its games. The league already did this in 2024 with the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Padres, and they’ll now be joined by the Guardians, Brewers, and Twins. (The Rangers have also separated from Diamond, but they’re going to peddle their wares on their own, without MLB handling things, so they aren’t part of this conversation.)

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Phillies, A’s open up about spending, could not be more different

The Phillies and A’s both talked recently about the need for spending, but for some weird reason it’s a lot easier to believe one of them than the other about actually doing it.

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The Philadelphia Phillies are in the postseason, preparing to head to Citi Field to take on the Mets in their home after evening up the NLDS 1-1 on Sunday. Before the series began, Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein ran a story on the team and its owner, John Middleton, saying that he provides “an unsparing blueprint for his peers.”

The gist of the feature is that Middleton not only spends on payroll at a higher rate than most of the league — and does so consistently, with the team ranking fourth in opening day payroll in each of the last four seasons — but that he’ll invest in the players off the field, too. The food the players want? That’s what the team chefs make. When J.T. Realmuto said the team’s jet was behind the times enough that even the lowly Marlins had a better one? The Phillies got a new, much fancier aircraft. Clubhouse accoutrements, better equipment, an entire hibachi spread when Kyle Schwarber mentioned having a craving for that — if the Phillies want it, Middleton lets them have it, with Dave Dombrowski feeling confident enough in not even going up the ladder for the stuff that isn’t jet-sized to just authorize it himself.

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What was Ken Kendrick trying to do, exactly?

Ken Kendrick took the blame for signing Jordan Montgomery by talking about how bad of a decision it was to sign Jordan Montgomery. Oh boy.

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Jordan Montgomery’s 2024 season didn’t exactly go as planned, either for Montgomery or the team that signed him, the Diamondbacks. Montgomery was real good for the Cardinals in 2023 before a midseason trade shipped him to the Rangers, where he was a revelation, and a significant part of their first-ever World Series championship — a title they won for besting the Diamondbacks. This year, though, Montgomery made just 21 starts (and 25 appearances), totaling 117 innings, and produced an ERA+ of 67 in the process.

Given an ERA+ of 100 is supposed to represent an average performance, Montgomery was awful. Throw in that he managed a 136 mark in the stat in 2023, and entered 2024 at 116 for his career, and that 67, somehow, looks even worse. It’s not an entirely unexpected outcome, however. Montgomery, despite his strong 2023 and years of above-average work, sat on the sidelines as a free agent for the entire offseason, and then some. He didn’t agree to a deal with the Diamondbacks until March 29 — not only was this after the start of spring training, it was after the start of the actual regular season, which had begun the day before.

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Dick Moss, MLBPA legend, passes away at 93

One of the union pillars that helped banish MLB’s reserve clause passed away over the weekend.

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The names you so often hear associated with the end of Major League Baseball’s reserve clause are players Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, as well as MLB Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, for encouraging this challenge to be made in the first place. Those players didn’t argue their own case in front of an arbitrator, however: that job went to Dick Moss, who had been hired by Miller as the union’s general counsel in 1967, and won his most famous and vital case eight years later, representing Messersmith and McNally, but in reality, far more players than just those two. His is a name worth remembering, too.

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Notes: MLB’s latest threat to Bally Sports, NCAA unfair labor charge

MLB and Bally continue to go at it, while Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team ups the ante.

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There’s been some progress in the Bally/Diamond broadcasting rights bankruptcy debacle of late, but only for the National Hockey League and National Basketball Association. MLB is continuing to have issues with the regional broadcasting giant, and the latest stems from the agreement Bally made with the NHL and NBA. Evan Drellich has the full story at The Athletic, but there’s one specific thing I want to focus on here:

“Major League Baseball and those clubs are unable to plan to obtain revenue and to have certainty with respect to the 2025 season,” James Bromley, a lawyer for MLB, said in court Tuesday.

Judge Chris Lopez on Tuesday approved deals Diamond recently reached with both the NBA and NHL, calling them “a step in the right direction.” But contained in those agreements is a key date that has put MLB on the offensive: both require Diamond to come out of bankruptcy by April 1, shortly after baseball’s season begins.

Speaking for nearly 14 minutes straight, Bromley warned Diamond that it cannot wait that long to figure out its plans in a bankruptcy process that’s already taken nearly 18 months, and called the status quo a “Band-Aid.”

Nine teams are under contract with a Diamond-operated RSN for 2025, with another three facing expiring contracts after this season. So we’re talking about over one-third of the league not knowing just how much money they’ll be getting in 2025 for their television rights, and from where. Diamond, per Drellich, seems unfazed by the threats from MLB to escalate their legal action if this isn’t figured out sooner than later.

Here’s what matters about this from this newsletter’s perspective: whether 9-12 MLB teams actually will have a problem with revenue and cash flow in 2025 isn’t what we should be concerned about, but that their public position is that the lack of resolution from Bally will keep them from being able to plan out rosters for 2025 is an issue. Now, I’m not saying these clubs are absolutely all fine, that there won’t be issues with their numbers or what have you; it’s more that, by saying this, you know that they’re going to act as if there definitely are. As if 2025 is something of a lost year, before it even begins, one in which general managers of these clubs are probably going to have to work overtime to make creative upgrades to the roster that won’t increase payroll.

The 2023-2024 offseason was already a slow one. Yes, massive contracts were handed out to the very best talent out there, but the winter, for most, was a slow-going affair, one that resulted in a number of players signing very late, even during spring training, which in turn impacted the year they had. It took Blake Snell months to finally be the guy he’s supposed to be, to make it deeper into games (well, deep for Snell) and look dominant and healthy. Jordan Montgomery still hasn’t recovered from his late start and lack of prep. We’re probably just going to do that again, which shouldn’t be a surprise, really. Even without the broadcasting issue, the current CBA has just two more seasons on it before it expires. The league’s owners want to tighten their grip a bit before then, to help create problems that need to be solved in bargaining, in order to try to extract more from the players once more.

It’s not a new tactic, but the Bally issue helps give them an excuse for the kinds of behavior they’d be displaying, anyway. This is an ongoing story to watch, basically, that is about more than it’s about on the surface.

Late last month, Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team union filed an unfair labor practice charge against the school with the National Labor Relations Board. The charge? A refusal to bargain with players. The union, formed in March, has certainly been patient with Dartmouth College, which has refused to enter collective bargaining with the players despite the NLRB’s regional director already declaring them to be employees.

In a way, this is all a positive, though. Dartmouth’s refusal to bargain, with the defense being that the NLRB has made a mistake, means that this is a case that’s probably going to end up in court, with decisions that reverberate throughout college athletics. The school wants a federal court to review it, even! Now, federal court could certainly be a blow to the idea of unionized college athletes, especially with how much more conservative they’ve become in recent years, but look at the current situation, where the NLRB has declared that these athletes are employees and should be treated as such. Dartmouth refuses to acknowledge this to be the case, so nothing has changed. The courts could force a change, and the results would then be NCAA-wide, because what separates Dartmouth College from every other institution with college sports on campus? Not a thing, other than that their students struck first.

No need for a full monthly check-in on the White Sox since I already did that on Friday, pre-Labor Day holiday, but just for the sake of having something here in early September all the same: the White Sox lost every game since that piece was published. They finished August 4-22, just one win better than July with the same number of losses, despite losing 16 in a row that month. They’re 0-3 to begin September, already set a new franchise record for losses in a season with weeks left to go, and are 14 losses away from setting the modern-day league record with 22 games to go.

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Notes: NPB free agency, NWSL’s new CBA, NBA’s second apron issues

Japan’s baseball players are looking to make a major change, the National Women’s Soccer League already has, and concerns about what the NBA’s new salary cap rules are doing to player movement.

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According to Evan Drellich at The Athletic, Nippon Professional Baseball players are preparing to fight for a major overhaul of the system used to keep them in place, and in Japan, for as long as it does. They plan to combat the reserve system “on antitrust grounds,” per Drellich, which would mean significant changes to not just movement within the NPB, but for leaving Japan for a league such as Major League Baseball, as well.

Players in Japan have two forms of free agency: domestic and international. Domestic free agency, the freedom to switch to another NPB team, is achieved after seven or eight years in the league, depending on whether the player was drafted out of college or high school.

But to leave as a free agent for a foreign league like MLB, the wait is nine years. Players can depart sooner, but only if their team posts them for bidding. Instead, NPB players want what’s in place in MLB: free agency after a blanket six years, regardless of entry or destination.

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MLB’s rumored innings minimum is the league showing its hand

Whether the idea is a good one or not is beside the point here: just recognize that this is all a warm-up for CBA talks.

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For the last month or so, there have been leaks and instances of Rob Manfred speaking at press conferences that give you an idea of what’s being discussed in MLB’s offices. Which is always notable to some degree, but at this point, this far into the current collective bargaining agreement, it’s worth maybe noting all of it a little bit more than it would have been a year or two back.

The current CBA kicked off in 2022, so it will end after the 2026 season, which means we’re less than two years away from the serious ramp up that leads to the actual end of things. Remember, the 2021 deal expired in the offseason without a new deal in place, and MLB imposed a lockout: that could always occur again, if the league thinks the strategy of purposefully waiting out the players worked for them, or, helped expose rifts within the ranks of the players that the league would like additional chances to exploit.

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Notes: Scheduling jewel events, trading draft picks

All-Star Game week means All-Star Game week press conferences to pick apart.

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MLB’s All-Star week means it’s time for the Home Run Derby and a glorified exhibition game, but more importantly for our purposes, it’s also a time of press conferences. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred fields all kinds of questions related to the health of the game, and he even manages to answer some of them without being visibly annoyed about it, too.

One question was related to the Rangers receiving the 2024 All-Star Game, despite the fact that they don’t have a Pride Night during the season. Which is a thing that’s weird in a vacuum, but when you add in the context that they’re the only MLB team that doesn’t hold a Pride Night event, well. It sticks out, you know?

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The NBA’s ‘second apron’ seems bad, to me

A new threshold of punishment for spending has arrived in the NBA, and it’s not great.

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It’s not that Major League Baseball’s rules regarding the luxury tax and penalties are great. Let’s just get that out of the way now. The luxury tax has effectively been a salary cap for the league, albeit a soft and unofficial one, and new restrictions like the “Cohen tax” meant to discourage the wealthiest teams from truly and continuously flexing their financial muscle already makes that much more apparent. When teams like the Yankees can lie about their available resources and you can also kind of squint and get why they’d want to lie, that’s a problem.

All of that sounds pretty good in comparison to what the NBA has going for it starting with this upcoming season, however. A “second apron” has been introduced that makes the NBA’s actual soft salary cap more like a hard one. In short, you can basically spend and spend to retain players already on your roster, within the existing rules of what max contracts look like in that capped system, but if you’re over this second apron — it’s a threshold, just like with MLB’s system — and need to acquire more players. Well. You basically can’t. Per The Ringer’s explanation:

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Notes: Record stadium subsidy, John Henry speaks, gambling threats

The Rays are close to getting an admitted horrible deal for St. Petersburg, John Henry reminded people why he doesn’t give interviews anymore, and players are being threatened by gambling addicts.

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Usually the story told to cities and the public about stadium subsidies is that the new sports venue will be great for the local economy, it’ll pay for itself over time, etc. etc. So it’s kind of perversely funny that it’s already known that St. Petersburg’s nearly approved deal for a new Rays stadium will provide no revenue return to the city. City council member Richie Floyd, who is against the deal, has already said as much publicly: it didn’t even take some digging into the proposed deal from journalists to uncover that key piece of information.

What makes it even worse is that this is a $1.6 billion stadium subsidy, per Neil deMause’s calculations last month: the current record is Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium, at $750 million, which means St. Pete is more than doubling that rate. Completely absurd, but just five of their eight city councilors are needed to approve the deal, anyway, and they’ve supposedly got the numbers for the July 11 final vote.

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