Category: Management Bullshit

Senne v. MLB reached settlement, but the fight goes on

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It has been years and years already, but we finally have a resolution to the class action lawsuit that former minor-league players brought against Major League Baseball. Aaron Senne et al v. Kansas City Royals Baseball Corp, more commonly referred to as Senne v. MLB, was filed eight years ago, picked up class action status in 2019, had that status upheld in early 2020 in the Ninth Circuit, and then, later that year, had the Supreme Court come to the same decision. Then, in March of 2022, Judge Joseph Spero, who was set to preside over the case when it went to trial in June, made some preemptive decisions about it: he declared that the suing minor-league players were, in fact, year-round employees, and were owed damages for all the time they had spent not being treated that way.

And now, the trial won’t be happening, as the two sides have reached a settlement. The terms of the settlement are actually unknown at this stage — and that’s by design — so we can’t start discussing whether the amount the players will receive is large enough or too small, if it is notable enough to inspire additional lawsuits or demands from active minor-league players, and so on. There’s still plenty to discuss, however, even without those specifics.

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MLB’s changing baseballs are a labor issue

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I know I just wrote a whole Baseball Prospectus piece with a tone that said, “I can’t believe I am writing about the baseballs again, please let me stop writing about the baseballs,” but it turns out I have even more to say on the matter, so now we’re all going to be subjected to yet another round of it. MLB constantly changing the baseballs, and doing so without the approval or even the awareness of the players, is a labor issue. It’s a lot of other issues, too, but for our purposes here, let’s focus on the labor part of things.

This isn’t a new thought, from myself or others. I wrote as much back at Deadspin in 2019:

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A salary floor should be a priority, yes, but not at any cost

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Last week for Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about how a priority in the next collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Association should be a salary floor. Too many teams get away with not spending the money they bring in each year, whether it’s revenue-sharing checks received after the season, their share of national television revenue, or even their own local revenues: a salary floor wouldn’t force everyone to spend as much as they are able, no, but it would at least force the lowest number trotted out their each year to be higher.

There were a few things I didn’t get into in that piece that I’d like to discuss now, though. For one, last week’s feature was mostly about why a salary floor was a necessity, given the current competitive conditions and the revenue even the poorest teams in MLB are bringing in annually. Second, though, is that these other issues deserve more time to themselves, so, let’s give that to them.

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Just one more reason to pay minor leaguers during spring training

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At the end of last week, Minor League Baseball Players received their first paychecks since October of 2021. Minor leaguers aren’t paid year round, and they aren’t paid for spring training or fall leagues, either, not unless teams are making some kind of exception for extended seasons and instructionals, as they did during 2020, when there was no regular season at all. And since the first paychecks weren’t even for a full work schedule, as far as paid time goes, they were meager, even for minor-league pay.

Advocates for Minor Leaguers shared a few screenshots on Saturday of these direct deposits: one for $50.44, another for $62.96, a third for $54.98, and the largest of the bunch, a whopping $79.16. That’s it. The players have bills to pay, they have food to purchase and eat, and they’re getting basically nothing from their first paychecks from MLB in six months.

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ah, so you persecute Phil Castellini just because he has different beliefs?

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A fun thing about the Cincinnati Reds is that they finished the 2021 season with a record of 83-79, third in the National League Central. They had Nick Castellanos and his 34 homers, they had the Rookie of the Year, second baseman Jonathan India, a rotation where every regular starter was between league-average and legit great, and they had some intriguing prospects like Hunter Greene on the way as reinforcements. They missed the postseason, but there was the start of something here, if only the team would build on it — especially since the expectation was that the postseason would be permanently expanded for 2022, which did, in fact, come to pass.

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The Pirates are making much, much more money than they’re spending

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It’s good that the Players Association didn’t drop their revenue-sharing grievances against various MLB clubs during the collective bargaining that shaped the new CBA. The league tried to get them to do so again and again, but the union held firm to the idea that combatting the way teams were using revenue-sharing funds — or, more accurately, the way teams were not using revenue-sharing funds — was vital. We got one pretty good reminder of why recently, since the A’s keep on cutting payroll despite being re-added to the revenue-sharing recipients pile, and now we have another: the Pirates reportedly “often” make enough money from their gate alone to cover their payroll, which leads you to wonder where the local and national television revenue is going, and what those revenue-sharing dollars they receive are being used on, too.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the details on Sunday (this link has been removed due to an ongoing strike at the Post-Gazette):

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Minor-league players aren’t paying clubhouse dues anymore, except for when they are

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Let’s hop back to November 16 of 2020 for a moment:

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The Pirates don’t want draft picks, they want to manipulate service time

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​On Tuesday, the Pirates announced that top prospect Oneil Cruz would be optioned to Triple-A Indianapolis to start the season, rather than breaking camp with the big-league club. This despite Cruz’s brief stint in the majors last season, in which he hit a homer and collected three hits overall in nine at-bats, and, more importantly, despite his playing well enough at Double-A last summer to earn a promotion to Triple-A, where he hit five homers in six games with a line of .524/.655/1.286 before getting the call to the bigs at year’s end.

Sure, the samples are small, but Cruz has legitimate power, and should be able to hold his own at shortstop despite the concerns about his size — as has been noted all around, Cruz, at 6-foot-7 and 210 lbs., would easily be the largest shortstop you’ve ever seen. Baseball Prospectus rated him the number one prospect in the Pirates’ system earlier this year:

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A’s price hike reminder tickets aren’t related to payroll

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During the lockout, if you looked in the Twitter mentions of any major MLB reporter pushing out updates on the negotiations between the league and the union, you would find fans complaining about how the players were greedy and it was going to cost families more to go to a baseball game because of them. This is simply not true: ticket prices and player salaries aren’t connected, even if they have both grown next to each other for some time now. And our most recent reminder of this fact is the way the Oakland A’s are currently operating: by selling off much of what isn’t nailed down to other teams, and then raising ticket prices for the 2022 season, anyway.

SF Gate’s Alex Espinoza wrote a story on this earlier in the week:

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Bernie Sanders threatened MLB’s antitrust exemption, and an old task force better support that

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A little over one year ago, I wrote about how it’s too late for the United States Congress to save Minor League Baseball like some of its members had hoped to prior to MLB’s disaffiliation of dozens of teams, but that there was still time to punish the league for their monopolistic actions. The punishment that would work best was and is the removal of MLB’s antitrust exemption, the existence of which allowed them to get away with shrinking the minors without anything stopping them from doing so in the first place.

While there was basically silence on the issue coming from Congress from the time I wrote that last February until now… well, now is a little different, because Senator Bernie Sanders is making the removal of MLB’s antitrust exemption a priority. Legislation has been introduced, and as Sanders explained on HBO’s Real Sports, it’s not just because of MLB’s removal of 40 minor-league clubs, but also the owner-imposed lockout that was clearly designed to just break the union and gain further control and power over the players.

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