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Mailbag time. If you have a mailbag question you’d like to see answered, either respond to this newsletter email, or hit me up on @Marc_Normandin on Twitter. Let’s get to it.
Continue reading “Mailbag: Separate bargaining units, salary floor”
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With no collective bargaining agreement news on the horizon at the MLB level, it’ll be a little quieter in that regard than it has been the past few years once the postseason and offseason hit. Not silent, no, but it’s not the story of the winter, as it was of late. Instead, there will be focus on what goes into the first-ever CBA for MLB’s minor-league players, now that they’re unionized and the league has voluntarily recognized them as such: how long that process will be is unknown, how much of a fight will be put up by MLB or even by the players themselves is a mystery, too. But that’ll be the topic du jour until it isn’t, considering its historic and ongoing nature.
I’ve got coverage plans, of course, both reactive and proactive, but I wanted to send out a note requesting mailbag questions from y’all, on the very subject of this minor-league bargaining unit of the Players Association, the CBA they’ll be negotiating, and whatever else comes to mind on the topic. Given how long I’ve been covering minor-league unions in other sports and the potential for one in MLB, the chances are good I’ll either have an answer to your question, or know who to ask to get one. So let’s sift through all of this together.
You can reply to this newsletter with a question if you’re reading it in your inbox, or you can reach me on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin. And if you have non-MiLB unionization questions, feel free to ask those, too, but, as with lockout-related questions last offseason, there’s a reason to ask for these targeted questions. Depending on the question and the answer, they could be featured as part of a mailbag featuring multiple questions, or as an article unto itself.
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Last week at Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about how the new minor-league bargaining unit within the Major League Baseball Players Association is going to be bargaining for more than just money. Some of that, as described in the article in question, is in relation to how MLB will no longer be able to just unilaterally change rules in the minors, but instead would have to bargain over rule changes just like they have with the MLBPA in the past. There are other areas where change is coming too, though, also related to the way the PA has bargained in the past.
I’ve said this before, but it’s just weird that… well, let’s just quote me from this past July, shall we? This is from a piece celebrating the fact that the PA and MLB couldn’t come to an agreement on instituting an international draft to replace the current international free agent signing period:
Continue reading “Who bargains over the international draft now?”
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It’s kind of wild to be typing this out even after having the weekend to process it, but Major League Baseball won’t be fighting the formation of a minor-league bargaining unit within the MLB Players Association. Instead, they’ll voluntarily recognize it, assuming the card check on Wednesday shows that there is, in fact, the support the PA says there is for this.
Continue reading “MLB will voluntarily recognize minor-league union”
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You aren’t about to hear me say that the Major League Baseball Players Association has always had the needs of minor-league players in mind during their negotiations, but there is at least one persistent criticism of the union’s handling of minor leaguers that doesn’t carry much weight, and that’s the fact that they weren’t already part of the MLBPA. There have been reasons for things being split the way they are for decades — for the entire history of the Players Association as we know it today — and it’s only just recently that the environment has changed in a way where the PA could more formally lend assistance to the organization of minor-league players.
Back in 2012, Slate spoke to the PA’s first executive director, Marvin Miller, as well as Gene Orza, who spent 26 years working with the PA after being brought on as an associate general counsel, about the decision to not include minor-league players in the organizing of the MLBPA:
Continue reading “Why the MLBPA hadn’t already organized minor leaguers”
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Late on Sunday night, there was major breaking news: the Major League Baseball Players Association was going to try to help prove that there’s enough support across Minor League Baseball for a union. They’re going to do this by distributing voting cards, per ESPN’s report and Evan Drellich’s confirmation, the idea is that, “The MLBPA will present the cards confidentially to the [National Labor Relations Board] to show both that a significant number of minor league players support having the MLBPA represent them and that a union election should be held.”
If you’ve never been in a union before, or part of a union that’s forming, the whole authorization card thing might be a little confusing. Essentially, it is a vote: whether it’s a vote that will be recognized by MLB and the NLRB depends on just how in favor of the PA’s representation and forming a union the over 5,000 minor-league players are. If, for instance, 75 percent of these cards are returned in favor of a union, MLB would be in a position where they should voluntarily recognize the union’s existence — essentially, the wide-ranging support would prove an actual formal vote isn’t necessary. MLB is unlikely to voluntarily recognize anything, however, whether it has 75 percent or unanimous approval, because they will want to wait this thing out as long as they can in order to hope that some turnover in the ranks of the players decimates support.
Continue reading “Let’s break down the MLBPA moving to unionize minor-league players”
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Toward the end of July, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 17-page letter explaining all the reasons why the anti-competitive antitrust exemption that gives Major League Baseball total control over minor-league players and their earnings is actually good for those players. The numbers he reported as evidence might have been accurate, in the sense that those numbers do exist, but the context within which he deployed them was purposely misleading, an obfuscation designed to hide the true nature of minor-league compensation.
It’s not just your friendly neighborhood Manfred Disbeliever who feels that way, either. Advocates for Minor Leaguers first issued a short statement that said:
Continue reading “No one is buying Rob Manfred’s letter to Congress”
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Admittedly, I’m not much of a math guy. I can do basic arithmetic, though, and luckily, with the way Rob Manfred spins his stories, that’s about all you need to show that something is amiss. It’s not that Manfred’s numbers used to show how much MLB teams are spending on minor-league players are inaccurate in a vacuum, necessarily: it’s that everything he says with those figures is intentionally skewed so that it looks like more is being done than is, and that compensation is already in a good place.
This is from Manfred’s letter to the United States Judiciary Committee, in an attempt to justify the continued existence of MLB’s antitrust exemption:
Continue reading “Rob Manfred is lying about Minor League compensation (again)”
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The MLB Players Association has been pretty quiet about their feelings on an international draft, which shouldn’t be a surprise: those negotiations are ongoing, with a deadline of July 25 to work out a deal with Major League Baseball’s owners, and the PA rarely comments on ongoing negotiations in public. We know that, at this point, the PA has submitted proposals where a draft does, in fact, exist (boo), but the good news is that submitting proposals isn’t the same thing as a future where a draft is created (hooray).
We received a reminder of this during the All-Star week festivities, where executive director of the MLBPA, Tony Clark, got a chance to speak with the media, and did so in a way that… well, it doesn’t really have me feeling optimistic heading into the weekend before the deadline, but I do feel better about the chances that no agreement is reached than I did. As Evan Drellich tweeted:
Continue reading “A reason to be optimistic about the failure of international draft talks”
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Some of you still hold out hope that a better commissioner for Major League Baseball is out there, that things would be different if only someone else were in charge besides the robotic, seemingly unfeeling Rob Manfred — a commissioner so actively disliked, so cold in his approach to the game, that multiple features have been published during his tenure where he has been given a chance to say, “no, no, I love baseball, I don’t hate it, go baseball, hooray.”
Rob Manfred is nearly a perfect commissioner, though, if you recognize what the job truly is: to serve as a buffer between the owners and the public. Profits are up, outside of the pandemic-shortened season no one had any control over. Selling a team still brings back a wildly profitable return. Minority investments in teams have also been opened up a bit, which helps further those franchise values, and while attendance is down, the league is squeezing out more money per customer, and they continue to find new places willing to give them money to broadcast baseball, like with the Peacock and Apple TV deals that began in 2022. Owners love the guy, because he’s helping to make them money.
Continue reading “Of course Rob Manfred ‘rejects the premise’ of minor leaguers’ reality”