Tag: arbitration

There’s work to do to fix arbitration

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A few weeks back, I wrote about how arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere, despite MLB’s attempts to get rid of the system they’ve hated since its inception in the days of Marvin Miller. Hell, the fact MLB wants to get rid of arbitration remains the best proof that the system is worth salvaging. Arbitration certainly isn’t a perfect tool these days, though, as teams figure out how to manipulate hearings in a way that earns them victories. While things on the position player and starting pitcher side are a little more evenly split in terms of which side, teams or player, wins out, as Malachi Hayes wrote for Baseball Prospectus, relievers are doomed.

Read the entire feature, but here’s a snippet of the findings:

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Arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

The greatest evidence that exists in favor of arbitration is that Major League Baseball wants to do away with it. It’s not a perfect system, no, given the arbitrators themselves are inconsistent, and MLB spends an awful lot of time coaching up its teams on specific talking points so that they can defend their positions, but in aggregate, there is a reason that the Players Association is in favor of keeping an arbitration system in place, while the league would love very much to be done with it.

Even in an offseason like this one, where the players were trounced in arbitration itself, the system still allows for teams to negotiate with players — for players to ask for more than they could without the threat of an arbitration hearing in place — and end up with a higher salary than they would have with no such event looming in the distance. As I wrote back in 2019 for Deadspin:

Continue reading “Arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere”

If forced to choose between arbitration and free agency proposals, MLBPA should pick arb

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I’ve been thinking and writing about the kinds of demands the MLB Players Association should be making of Major League Baseball in this round of collective bargaining for a few years now, so it should not be a surprise that I have some thoughts on the specific proposals we do have word of from the union’s side. There is a lockout because MLB seemingly wants no change unless it’s the kind that will further benefit the owners’ pockets, while the union is pushing to close off some of the loopholes exploited by those same owners over the duration of the previous CBA. Given this, there is the chance that, even if the PA holds strong and MLB lifts the lockout more because they blinked than because they crushed the union as they hope to, the union won’t get everything it wants — some proposals will need to be dropped, others prioritized.

Two that have received a bit of attention in these early days have been the desire to cut the time it takes to get to free agency from six years to five (with an age threshold component thrown in for players who debut much later and have already toiled within their initial contract for a long time) and cutting the amount of time it takes to reach arbitration eligibility. I don’t think it’s impossible that the PA gets both of these asks, in some form, but if you asked me to bet on it, I’d say MLB moves on one but not the other in order to try to limit the “damage.”. So let’s figure out which of them the union absolutely should not give up on, and why it’s the arbitration proposal.

Continue reading “If forced to choose between arbitration and free agency proposals, MLBPA should pick arb”