Category: MLB

If MLB’s owners wanted a deal, they have a funny way of showing it

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It should have been obvious that Major League Baseball and the Players Association were not close to a deal on Monday night. Still, though, fans can hardly be blamed for letting their optimism be abused by league sources and overly credulous media members; after all, they just wanted to watch some baseball when they expected to be able to watch some baseball, and belief that a deal was imminent helped to keep that particular dream alive.

The league leaned on their favorite reliable mouthpieces and also the likes of Bob Nightengale, who has, let’s say, something of a reputation for hurrying information out on Twitter without vetting it as much as it should be, in a way that isn’t necessarily reflected in his longer form published work, in order to inflate this sense that a deal was imminent — the idea, as was more plainly revealed the next afternoon, was that the league wanted to be able to act as if a deal was close until the players decided to instead face God and walk backwards into hell.

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Understanding 1994, the owners’ leverage, and a shift in media tone

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The benefit of assuming that there would be no deal by the time MLB’s self-imposed bargaining deadline passed is that, now that there is officially no deal and the first two series of the 2022 season have been canceled, there is less catching up to do around these parts than elsewhere. The downside to that level of preparedness is that “where to begin?” in a post-cancelation world is a much more open question: we’ve got much to think about.

Let’s start simple: by recapping a bit. On Monday, Baseball Prospectus ran a feature of mine titled “1994 Explains What ‘Labor Peace’ Never Could,” with the idea behind it being that the owners’ goals in 1994, and how those goals ended up playing out, are far more instructive to us in the present than the decades of “labor peace” are. You can’t think about what’s happening now in terms of how CBAs were negotiated in 2016, or 2011, or even in the aughts. The owners have a goal here, and it’s to crush the union. That, to them, is the goal. It’s the only “fair” outcome in their minds, and anything less is worth sacrificing season to avoid.

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It seems unlikely the 2022 MLB season will be 162 games long

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Let’s rewind for a second, to one week ago. Last Friday, I wrote about how the Players Association had issued an ultimatum to MLB, saying there would be no expanded postseason in 2022 without a full 162-game schedule and full payment for those games. The conclusion:

The union is saying, loud and clear, that they want to play 162 games. Whether they want to play them because they want their full salaries isn’t quite immaterial, but it’s not the most significant point to draw from the declaration. The union is separating itself even further from the idea that it has anything to do with the threat that the season will not start on time. We’ll see if it’s all as convincing and/or panic-inducing to the league as the “when and where” strategy of 2020 was, but for now, we do know that there are plans to potentially meet for bargaining every day next week in order to sort things out before MLB’s imposed “the season won’t start on time if we come to an agreement after this” date of February 28.

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Bargaining isn’t always about midpoints

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​I understand the impulse to think that collective bargaining is always a series of back-and-forth movements from your position, until you end up in a midpoint that neither side is satisfied with. “That’s how you know it’s a good deal,” people will say. That can be true, sure, but it is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes two sides are asking for two very different things, and simply cutting the baby in half isn’t a solution.

Take the pre-arbitration bonus pool proposals between MLB and the Players Association, for instance. MLB is not opposed to the existence of a pre-arb pool, but they are completely against the specific instance of it that the union is pushing for. The owners want a small central fund that all 30 teams would plop what does not amount to much more than a league-minimum salary into, and then those funds would be dispersed 30 ways among the top pre-arb players. The owners don’t want to give the players anything, not really, but if it costs all of $20 million in 2022 to keep anyone from being able to say the owners haven’t moved on anything, well, that’s $20 million well spent, since it could save them far more than $20 million elsewhere if public pressure turns on the players.

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The PA altered a major proposal, but left MLB with an ultimatum

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The Players Association met with Major League Baseball on Thursday for a counterproposal, and the meeting ran 15 minutes before a slightly longer side session between lead negotiators began. We do not know all of the details of what was inside of the PA’s proposal — all of these documents are a whole lot longer and encompass much more than what we have leaked — but there was still plenty made known in the aftermath.

Let’s start with what was learned first. The Players Association pulled back on one of their proposals, and submitted a modified version to the league in the hopes they would be more amenable to that. The league doesn’t seem to be amenable to anything besides the status quo, of course, but the PA has to pick and choose what they’re going to stand completely firm on and what they’re going to give a little on, and it appears they have chosen to avoid changing their minimum salary plan. The arbitration proposal, on the other hand, which previously demanded that all players with two years of service time would become arbitration-eligible instead of having to wait for three years, has been altered.

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‘Conversation’ and ‘engagement’ will not solve MLB’s labor dispute

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You would think that being one of the most successful baseball writers with one of the largest platforms going would mean that ESPN’s Buster Olney had any idea what he was talking about when it comes to labor issues, but you would be wrong. If that seems harsh, consider this tweet from Wednesday morning:

The most surprising/appalling element of baseball’s labor situation over the last 6-7 years is the stark diminishment of engagement and conversation. It costs nothing to talk.

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Rob Manfred said some unbelievable stuff hoping you’d believe it

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On Thursday, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred addressed the media following the quarterly meeting of the league’s owners. There… well, he said a lot of Manfred things, but none more Manfred than his declaration that owning an MLB team is a worse form of investing than the stock market. I don’t want to tackle how that looks from a Business Point of View, because it’s the kind of lie the wealthy who own sports teams want to be told in order to let them continue to operate in this exclusive, money-printing club with little questioning of where their money comes from, but I do want to discuss why we should consider this a lie in the first place.

I’m not even talking about an in-depth look at whether the numbers provided by the investment banker hired by MLB to tell the league they’re all good boys and girls who have been mistreated by the wicked press and players ring true or not. Just like, look at MLB’s history when it comes to how they talk about money, and how they hide how good the owners actually have it, and extrapolate from there.

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Media, please stop falling into the traps MLB sets for you

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MLB’s owners began their quarterly meetings in Orlando on Tuesday, and, given the current labor battle, much of what was said to preview said meeting had to do with the current staredown between the league and the players. Bob Nightengale tweeted this, but he was far from alone in the sentiment contained within:

The owners have their quarterly #MLB meetings beginning today in the Orlando area. Rob Manfred is scheduled to speak Thursday. #MLBPA executives are traveling to Florida and Arizona to meet with players. It leaves about 2 weeks to reach agreement to avoid delaying regular season.

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Mailbag: What is the players’ leverage in bargaining?

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As we’re in the midst of a lockout, there are surely questions that need to be answered about the state of labor negotiations and the processes involved. I’m happy to answer what I can, so please, if you have something in mind, ask away: you can send me an email at marcnormandin at gmail, respond to this newsletter email if that’s the format you’re reading it in, or ping me on Twitter.

Today’s question comes from @ERolfPleiss on Twitter:

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MLB, MLBPA meet again for ‘heated’ discussions

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Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association met again on Tuesday, and if you were still, for some reason, holding out hope that this was all going to be wrapped up soon, allowing spring training to begin on time and, in turn, the regular season, well… you should probably stop doing that. I’m going to kind of bounce around a little today, so bear with me.

A whole bunch of reporters tweeted about the ending of Tuesday’s 90-minute session, but I’ll quote The Athletic’s Evan Drellich here because he described the feeling in of said discussions, too:

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