Tag: collective bargaining

Thoughts on MLB’s 2025-2026 offseason

Some thoughts on what to look out for this offseason, as MLB and the MLBPA enter the final year of the current collective bargaining agreement.

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A little bit of end-of-season collecting of loose ends here, to start the offseason. We’re entering the final season of the current collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Association, so while there are always trends or happenings to watch out for, that’s even more the case in this scenario — what can be gleaned from the last full offseason before MLB decides to go lockout mode in 13 months?

First, there is going to be a lot of discussion about the Dodgers, and if they are ruining baseball because they spent a ton of money. There is actually some nuance to this discussion — I’ve already seen a whole lot of everything-is-a-nail style arguments about their spending both in terms of those who are against it and those who support it — that is being missed, but here’s where I stand.

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Notes: WPBL announcements, WNBA CBA battle, Stop Falling For It

A new league makes announcements, WNBA bargaining is getting heated, please stop assuming that the Dodgers will force a salary cap, and more from my recent writing.

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The WPBL announces its first four cities, sort of

The Women’s Pro Baseball League will play its inaugural season in 2026, and used this week where baseball fans are quietly waiting for the World Series to make some announcements. First, the first four cities were selected, and they make a whole lot of sense: New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. All four are historic MLB cities with massive media markets and fan bases, which should give them a built-in edge when it comes to getting attention.

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90s kids remember Bud Selig, George F. Will, and Japanese baseball

Deeper looks at two freelance pieces I wrote this week,

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I had two reasons to dip into the past this week in my freelance writing. At Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about how the present-day Red Sox and Dodgers, at the least, seem open to the idea of Rob Manfred’s centralized broadcast revenue and TV rights plan, which would allow MLB’s revenue-sharing to look more like that of the NFL’s — albeit without a salary cap, since, as has been discussed before, that’s just not likely at least during this round of bargaining, not if the owners want 2028’s broadcast negotiations to pay off as they hope and need them to.

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The Rays won’t have a new stadium in St. Petersburg after all

The Rays are likely to stay in the Tampa region, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be in St. Petersburg.

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Earlier this week, at Baseball Prospectus, a piece of mine published explaining why it was that commissioner Rob Manfred — along with some team owners — were pressuring Stu Sternberg to sell the Rays. This one is free to read with an email login, so you can check out the whole thing if you’d like, but the key idea to take from it for right this second is that Sternberg was very likely to blow up the stadium deal he had been working on with St. Petersburg practically forever, because he only realized it was a bad deal for the Rays after agreeing to it.

Over the weekend, The Athletic reported that Manfred and Co. would even go so far as to use collective bargaining to pull a reverse A’s on Sternberg, if he couldn’t be convinced to sell the team before then. Basically, rather than using bargained and temporary revenue-sharing funds to help the Rays along in their search, like happened with the A’s, the other owners would instead use the CBA to throttle the Rays’ share of the revenue. If Sternberg barely has the funds he needs to operate the team at a high level now, or to pay for the increased costs that the delay in coming to a final agreement supposedly created, then having his revenue-sharing checks cut down was not going to help matters.

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Do MLB owners want a salary cap, or for everyone to believe that’s true?

Like with free agency, you have to think of why certain positions are stated in public.

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There’s been a whole lot of discussion lately, from the ownership and league side, anonymously and with names attached, to the idea of both an MLB lockout in 2026 when the current collective bargaining agreement expires, and the desire for a salary cap being part of the impetus for said lockout. I’ve already written about the lockout portion of things, but I wanted to reiterate something this morning, given that the owners wrapped their winter meetings in Florida, where the subject of discussion was often the game’s economics.

Evan Drellich wrote a story last week about part of that, headlined, “MLB owners debate push for salary cap at summit this week”. A key section from that piece, for our purposes:

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Ignore Rob Manfred: lockouts exist to preempt strikes

Lockouts are a necessity for one thing only, and you’re not going to hear Rob Manfred say what that is.

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MLB commissioner Rob Manfred can say whatever he wants about the need for a lockout as something of a routine part of collective bargaining. And he certainly has, as evidenced by a recent interview with The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. A pertinent excerpt:

But one action looks virtually certain. Manfred said an offseason lockout, as there was in 2021-22, should be considered the new norm.

“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” he said. “There is leverage associated with an offseason lockout and the process of collective bargaining under the NLRA works based on leverage. The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”

To which MLBPA executive director Tony Clark’s responded by saying that, “Players know from first-hand experience that a lockout is neither routine nor positive… It’s a weapon, plain and simple, implemented to pressure players and their families by taking away a player’s ability to work.”

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Orioles’ owner publicly wishes for salary cap

David Rubenstein spoke up about his wishes for a salary cap, which signals we should be watching to see if other owners start bringing it up, too.

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There’s been all kinds of talk in MLB lately about the need for a salary cap. There is no need at all, of course, given it’s attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist in more ways than one: there’s what Rob Mains pointed out last week at Baseball Prospectus, in that the competitive imbalance cited as evidence of the need for a salary cap doesn’t actually exist, and there’s also what I’ve been harping on for some time now, where the problem is not the teams like the Dodgers that are outspending everyone, but the huge chunk of the league that wasn’t spending enough years ago and isn’t spending more now even as other clubs do increase spending.

It keeps coming up, though, so let’s dive in again. Jeff Passan, over at ESPN, wrote a piece last week that included this bit that I want to highlight:

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Time skip

More teams are spending the resources they have even as others run in place, the next CBA is Manfred’s last, with his final major act likely being a landscape-altering broadcasting deal. Pieces are starting to come together that will still be in play at the end of the decade.

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The Juan Soto deal has me thinking about the future a bit. Not Soto’s future, but what’s going on in MLB. You’ll have to excuse me for using this space to get some thoughts down and further organize them, but it’ll end up resulting in another piece or two down the line once that’s all done.

Event: The Dodgers spend and spend some more, deferring even more money, and are projected for a $279 million Opening Day payroll after kicking off 2024 at $267 million — please recall that Shohei Ohtani was paid just $2 million in 2024, with the other $68 million in the deal deferred until the playing time portion of the contract expires for 2034. The Dodgers ranked third in payroll, but second for luxury tax implications, as more of Ohtani’s deal counts towards that figure in the present than in the figure calculated with actual dollars.

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The Fair Ball Act would close an exploitable loophole

A collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its minor leaguers only goes as far as federal and state exemptions allow it to.

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Minor league baseball players might have unionized in the fall of 2022, leading to their first-ever collective bargaining agreement early the next year, but that alone isn’t enough. This was obvious at the time, as, even while MLB was at the bargaining table with the Players Association, the former was trying to support an exemption that would allow them to a CBA workaround in Florida — one that would have let them avoid adhering to the state’s minimum wage laws.

Here’s what I said at the time about that, in March of 2023:

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Notes: Tony Clark on pitching, RSN viewership, Those Two Yankees Fans

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With the World Series starting, MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark had some time for the assembled reporters. A number of topics were brought up, such as the Rays’ and A’s stadium situations — one caused by a natural disaster and the other by a manufactured one — but the thing I want to focus on is his comments on the state of pitching in MLB:

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