Tag: mlbpa

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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Dick Moss, MLBPA legend, passes away at 93

One of the union pillars that helped banish MLB’s reserve clause passed away over the weekend.

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The names you so often hear associated with the end of Major League Baseball’s reserve clause are players Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, as well as MLB Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, for encouraging this challenge to be made in the first place. Those players didn’t argue their own case in front of an arbitrator, however: that job went to Dick Moss, who had been hired by Miller as the union’s general counsel in 1967, and won his most famous and vital case eight years later, representing Messersmith and McNally, but in reality, far more players than just those two. His is a name worth remembering, too.

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Fanatics claims it owns your kids’ likeness rights, forever

Fanatics has their latest cost-cutting scheme, and it’s trying to get perpetual likeness rights from children and potential future minor leaguers years before they go pro.

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Thanks to some excellent reporting from Britt Ghiroli at The Athletic, we now know what the latest chapter in the “everything Fanatics touches is terrible in some way” saga is. Fanatics is partnering together with Perfect Game, the “world’s largest baseball scouting service” which serves as both a showcase for amateur players and a high-level competitive environment for amateur baseball, in order to create memorabilia for these kids. Sounds innocent enough, right? Of course there’s another layer to all of this.

Perfect Game already had kids giving up the rights to their likenesses, as agents have been warning parents for a couple of years now about the practice, but, as Scott Boras told Ghiroli, “They have now gotten into profit-taking on this.” Amateurs can’t have agents, but agents can advise them, and not signing is one thing they’re being advised about now.

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On the salaries of MLB’s ‘disposable pitchers’

A day in the majors isn’t worth what happens to the salary of this new class of churned-through pitcher.

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Last week, I shared a Baseball Prospectus story written by Jarrett Seidler and Rob Mains on the rise of the “disposable pitcher.” A trend has emerged, with teams calling up a pitcher — a not-really-a-prospect kind of pitcher — on the 40-man roster up from the minors for a very temporary stay in the majors, and then designating them for assignment after they’re done with them rather than optioning them back to the minors. This allows for them to, effectively, stream a 40-man roster spot for additional call-ups like this down the road, while also allowing them to avoid exposing any genuine prospects to the majors or the need to be optioned before they feel like those players are ready for the show.

As I wrote last Friday:

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MLBPA picks up a win, awful uniforms will see changes

And the Players Association would like everyone to know Fanatics wasn’t the issue here.

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Not every labor win has to wait for bargaining. Take the recent issue with MLB’s uniforms, for instance: in short, they’re terrible, and now they’ll be fixed. The when of that is a bit more up in the air — according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, it’ll be early 2025 at the latest — but hey. The players won, despite the defense of MLB this spring basically being a gaslighting, “no, we’ve always been able to see your balls.”

It’s not just that the fabric was see through, either. Pants and tops didn’t match. The lettering on the jerseys was small, and looked like it belonged on children’s replica jerseys. The pants would rip at seemingly the drop of a hat. The supposedly breathable fabric of the new-style jerseys resulted in a lot of pictures of players absolutely dripping with sweat from games played during the coldest part of the season. It was all a terrible experiment in… well, in who knows what, really. The kind of innovation companies always looking to make more money or cut costs play around with, that results in messing with what already works in a way that makes it worse? The Google, if you would. Nike didn’t need to do any of what they did here, with the players even warning them they didn’t like the directions they were taking, and yet, here we are.

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Notes: Other teams unhappy with A’s, gambling, Scott Boras axed

Catching up on a week of news that wouldn’t stop.

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Last week, Buster Olney tweeted out something that made the whole internet groan. Not at Olney — not this time — but at pretty much all of MLB. You can probably figure out why just from reading what was said:

Within other organizations, there is a lot of disgust with how the A’s have handled the ballpark situation — especially when there’s no actual ballpark plan settled in Las Vegas. And there is an assumption the A’s will tank in the next few years, because their revenue stream will be down to a trickle. “This makes us all look bad,” said one person.

This was met with a chorus of “why did they approve the A’s move, then?!” which, understandable. A few things I’ve been thinking about, though, that should get a mention. For one, Olney doesn’t clarify whether this is from an owner, or an executive who happens to work for one, who had nothing to do with the move being allowed. It would be helpful if we knew: my guess is that it’s an executive who knows how bad of a look this is, and not one of the owners, who by and large are too removed from humanity to ever consider how something will make them “look” to people at large.

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Notes: MLBPA, Orioles ownership change, A’s boycott

A normal week, a change of hands via loophole, and John Fisher getting embarrassed. A busy Friday, really.

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As promised, my latest for Baseball Prospectus is a reaction to the news that there is a whole lot of internal grumbling going on in the Players Association — grumbling that, for a brief time, made it look as if there was going to be major leadership turnover in the form of lead negotiator and deputy director Bruce Meyer and executive director Tony Clark losing their jobs.

That time has passed, however, the worst possible damage from the storm now evaded. However, that storm is not quite finished. Luckily, as I get into, everything left is honestly just normal business: the kind of behaviors that you’d expect from a union that is nearly six times the size now as it was when it signed the 2022 MLB collective bargaining agreement, thanks to the addition of 5,400 minor leaguers as a sub-unit under the PA’s umbrella.

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Notes: J.D. Davis, MLBPA’s ‘coup’ attempt

Loopholes and growing pains.

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My latest for Baseball Prospectus published on Thursday, and it covered the J.D. Davis/Giants saga. Davis was awarded a $6.9 million salary in arbitration for the 2024 season, and then the Giants signed free agent Matt Chapman. Davis was shopped around for a trade, placed on waivers for anyone willing to take him and the $6.9 million for ’24, and then, when no one bit on either method of acquisition, San Francisco cut him.

They did so using what was described as a loophole in the collective bargaining agreement, but as I got into for BP, that’s not an entirely accurate way to explain what went down. What the Giants did was not great, in the sense they made a move they needed to make in a way that is only technically correct if you’re willing to grant them a whole lot of leeway on the spirit of that rule. Like, to the point of it being a different rule entirely: Davis was not cut because of a sudden injury or decline in his skills, but because the team signed a better player, and only after his arbitration hearing had already come and gone.

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No ‘information bank’ for free agents, says MLB’s deputy commissioner

That doesn’t mean teams will stop operating in bad faith, but it’s still nice to see the union extract this kind of thing in writing.

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The 2022-2026 MLB collective bargaining agreement has been active for over a year now, but the official, finalized version of it only recently became thus — once everything was translated into acceptable legalese. And, there are other reasons to discuss it at this point in time as well. For instance, MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem sent a letter to the executive director of the Players Association, Tony Clark, stating that there would be no “information bank” kept by the league for free agents. It’s not just a letter, either, as it’s an attachment in the current CBA, which was recently made available to read online once it was all official.

There’s not much to it, either, as this is the entirety of said letter, found on page 207 of the CBA:

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Notes: Kumar Rocker injury, Writers’ Strike

Kumar Rocker is a pitcher, and pitchers get hurt.

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Kumar Rocker will reportedly undergo Tommy John surgery, ending his 2023 and impacting his 2024 as well. The Rangers’ pitching prospect famously wasn’t signed by the Mets after they drafted him due to concerns with his physical and his long-term health, which kicked off a series of events that led to owner Steve Cohen tweeting a little too much about it and having those tweets used against the defense in Senne v. MLB (a class action suit that MLB lost).

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