Category: Management Bullshit

This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball

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“This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.” For years, this statement, or at least some form of it, followed stories published at MLB’s website. It is technically correct legalese, which as you know is the best kind of correct in that arena: sure, the stories published at MLB.com were not making their way to the desk of the commissioner’s office before their publication, but you can bet that the approval of that office mattered for whether the author would get to publish anymore stories in the future.

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Happy new year, MLB’s lockout is ongoing

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Just because it’s now 2022 on the calendar doesn’t mean that we’re going to see progress in collective bargaining anytime soon. Nothing has changed from mid-December, when I published a newsletter titled “Don’t expect a quick resolution to the MLB lockout.” It’s now January, so, as was reported at the time by Evan Drellich, the two sides are expected to discuss core economics eventually, but “discuss” and “agree on” are not the same thing. MLB and the Players Association might be closer on a few items than MLB’s staunch refusal to take bargaining seriously pre-lockout might have indicated, but there is seemingly enough distance on other issues that it’s going to take more than a discussion or two before things can be ironed out in a meaningful way.

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The year in creating sports coverage, featuring leftism

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The end of 2021 approaches, which means another year of this labor-focused newsletter has wrapped up. It was an eventful year, for both major- and minor-league players, and the goal of this particular column, as always, is to remind you of the year that was. Let’s get right to it — each paragraph represents a month, and I’ll highlight a few pieces from all 12 of them.

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Rob Manfred and the ‘mistake’ of 1994

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“We made the mistake of playing without a collective bargaining agreement in 1994, and it cost our fans and our clubs dearly,” [Rob] Manfred said. “We will not make that same mistake again.”

This line from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has been bothering me since I first read it in the New York Times, back when this offseason lockout kicked off. It’s just so disingenuous, on a number of levels. Yes, it was a strategic mistake, in a vacuum, for the league to play without a CBA, because it gave the players room to strike when they wanted to — closer to the end of the season, to put the postseason and World Series in doubt and the decision to go forward with those in the hands of the league and owners. To try to say the fans suffered for this mistake, though, and to lump the clubs in with said suffering, implying in the process that it was the players’ decision to strike that “cost” these two groups dearly, is where the bullshit lives. The decision was not made in a vacuum: it was made within the context of its time, and was a calculated choice by the commissioner and owners that they hoped would forever tip the balance of power back in their favor.

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MLBPA rep Ian Happ spoke on MLB’s inaction before the CBA expired

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The players haven’t said much with regards to specifics about the collective bargaining sessions with Major League Baseball, but we got a little bit of insight on the pre-lockout process from Cubs’ union representative, Ian Happ. The Chicago outfielder explained to 670 The Score how negotiations went in Dallas in the final days before the lockout began, and it all serves as further evidence that MLB had no intention of actually attempting to work things out before the previous CBA expired.

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MLB’s lacking luxury tax increase a reminder of the limitations of bargained thresholds

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Just a few weeks back, in reaction to one of the few economic proposals Major League Baseball actually bothered to submit while the now-expired collective bargaining agreement was still active, I wrote about how MLB’s pay-for-WAR, algorithmic plan to replace arbitration could not work without revenue scaling. Two days into the lockout, it’s time to give another example as to why any of these plans that rely on bargaining financial thresholds have the same inherent problem, and that’s because of how MLB has treated the raising of the luxury tax threshold during talks so far.

As was reported by Evan Drellich, MLB proposed raising the luxury tax threshold from the 2021 figure of $210 million to $214 million, with it eventually reaching $220 million by the final year of the new CBA. That’s clearly just a starter offer in terms of raising the luxury tax threshold — the numbers would almost surely be at least a little bit bigger if the two sides were finished negotiating by now — but what sticks out to me is that it’s presented as a concession at all. Not by Drellich, who is one of the few writers at a major outlet who is actually nailing the framing and depth of their coverage, but by MLB. Inflation exists. Revenues climb. The value of money changes over time. The luxury tax threshold increasing should just be a thing that is expected to happen, not something that is considered a concession, especially not with the minuscule bumps the league is proposing.

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You still can’t trust MLB, because they still don’t deserve trust

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It turns out that MLB used two different baseballs during the 2021 season, and didn’t tell, well, anyone about that decision. You can and should read the entire piece on the issue written by Bradford William Davis, but I don’t want to simply reiterate what was said within here. No, instead, this thing everyone is talking about is going to be used as a hook to discuss something else everyone is talking about. I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain of the writing process.

The point we need to take from Davis’ piece, for our purposes here, anyway, is that MLB remains completely untrustworthy, and undeserving of trust, as well. That’s not a new concept, of course, but the timing of a reminder could not be better, considering we’re mere hours away from the start of a lockout of the players that doesn’t need to even happen once the current collective bargaining agreement expires, but will happen just the same. How are you supposed to believe MLB is competent, or acting in good faith, or any other positive you can ascribe to them in bargaining when they seemingly go out of their way to act in the worst possible ways? Or, if they aren’t purposefully lying and hiding the truth of things and so on, are so incompetent about how they go about their business that you can’t tell the difference in the results, anyway?

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Please don’t believe the things Rob Manfred says about labor disputes

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MLB commissioner Rob Manfred spoke up on the state of labor negotiations with the MLB Players Association, and it was a doozy: Per Evan Drellich’s story on the subject at The Athletic, Manfred closed the owners meetings with a speech that included this line: “I can’t believe there’s a single fan in the world who doesn’t understand that an offseason lockout that moves the process forward is different than a labor dispute that costs games.”

That Manfred is even attempting to make a distinction should tell you where things are probably headed: this is some preemptive justification, in the hopes of controlling the story before the Players Association, which is often silent on what are supposed to be private negotiations, can. Manfred says there is a difference between an offseason lockout and an in-season “labor dispute,” but there is not. The owners want to lock the players out during the offseason before any games are missed, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but to attempt to break the players’ solidarity and force them to a resolution. All the players need to do is wait out the owners in a lockout by refusing to give in to whatever the demands are that caused a lockout, and then, all of a sudden, games are being missed, too.

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It’s time to pay MiLB players more, and more often

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While the clash between Major League Baseball and the Players Association is front-and-center at the moment thanks to the ongoing collective bargaining and the imminent expiration of the current CBA, we shouldn’t forget that minor-league baseball players have their own share of troubles and problems to solve. Advocates for Minor Leaguers pointed out on Tuesday evening an issue that those players are struggling through right now: the fact that players are not paid year-round, even though their contracts stipulate that they must work with their baseball careers in mind year-round.

Advocates’ tweet included two screenshots from the uniform player contract to make their point, the text of which read:

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MLB’s pay-for-WAR proposal can’t work without revenue-scaling

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There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical of MLB’s most recent economic proposal to the Players Association, one that includes replacing arbitration with an algorithm based on some kind of wins above replacement-esque figure. The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal had the initial report on this story on Thursday, and ESPN’s Jeff Passan followed up with some additional details on Friday.

You should read both of those pieces, to get an understanding of just what it is that Major League Baseball is proposing — if you’ve been following along with me for, well, years now, I guess, you know that I’m generally opposed to replacing the arbitration system, as it’s basically the only remaining economic lever where MLB does not have full control. It needs some updating and modernizing, for sure, but the chances of it being outright replaced by a better system are slim, because MLB wants to get rid of arbitration primarily because it works. Do you think they’re going to replace a working system with one that will work against them even more? Certainly not intentionally, no: something would have to be snuck in the back door, a loophole they don’t see, like… [checks notes] arbitration was.

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