The business of Major League Baseball is broken. The owners and players agree on that.
But that’s about the only thing they agreed upon when the first labor stoppage in more than 26 years began 10 days ago. That’s when the owners instituted a lockout as the 5-year-old collective bargaining agreement expired.
The lockout caught no one by surprise. The tension between the two sides has been building for years. Furthermore, the players believed that the last CBA, negotiated in 2016, shifted financial power to the owners.
The hard feelings between the owners and players escalated last year over negotiations about how to conduct the 2020 regular season after baseball was suspended during spring training by the coronavirus pandemic.
The owners’ decision to lock out the players and shut down MLB’s offseason was a preemptive strike supposedly aimed at pushing the union toward more urgent negotiations. Though neither side wants to begin a season without a new CBA in place, the owners were wary that the players would strike either close to the start of the season or during the season when the players’ leverage is much higher.
“This shutdown is a dramatic measure, regardless of the timing,” the MLBPA said in a statement. “It is not required by law or for any other reason. It was the owners’ choice, plain and simple, specifically calculated to pressure Players into relinquishing rights and benefits and abandoning good faith bargaining proposals that will benefit not just Players, but the game and industry as a whole.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote a letter to the fans in an attempt to explain why the owners instituted a lockout.
“Simply put, we believe that an offseason lockout is the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season,” his letter said. “We hope that the lockout will jumpstart the negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time.
“This defensive lockout was necessary because the Players Association’s vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive.”
Public posturing escalated when the business of baseball came to a halt. Since then, however, both sides have been mostly quiet.
The big issues
While expanded playoffs and various in-game rule changes will be argued over, money, of course, is at the heart of the conflict.
The players strongly believe the emergence of analytics as a major tool for roster construction has hurt veteran players. They believe that second- and third-tier players, usually nearing age 30, are not getting fair compensation when they finally achieve free agency after six years of major league service time (three years at the minimum salary followed by three years of arbitration).
The MLB Players Association is also fighting for better pay for talented, young players in their prime.
Also at issue is what the union sees as manipulation of service time. The players believe MLB general managers sometimes delay calling players up from the minors, turning the six seasons needed to qualify for free agency into seven.
The poster boy for the union’s argument is former Chicago Cubs star Kris Bryant. In 2015, the Cubs gained an extra year of control over Bryant by waiting a few extra weeks into the season to call him up. Bryant lost a grievance over the matter last year.
Then there is the issue of free-agent spending. Ever since players gained the right to be free agents in 1976, they have fought against anything resembling a salary cap. The owners, however, want to find ways to keep spending under control.
The MLBPA believes the competitive-balance tax (CBT), which was $210 million in 2021, functions as a salary cap. The union wants it gone, or at least watered down.
The owners’ counter-argument is that it’s not technically a salary cap because if teams go over the CBT marker, they have to pay in both money and draft picks.
The union, as well as super-agent Scott Boras, also say the failure of teams to spend money is the root cause of “tanking.” Boras calls it a “tanking epidemic,” in which teams skimp on payroll and purposely lose in order to obtain high draft picks and rebuild with cheaper players.
Despite a so-called luxury tax system, some big-market owners are willing to spend dramatically more than others. Per Spotrac, the Los Angeles Dodgers had the highest payroll with $271 million in 2021 while the Baltimore Orioles had the lowest at $42 million.
The owners have pitched the idea of a salary floor of $100 million, in which all teams would have to have a payroll at least that high. But they also want to lower the CBT threshold to $180 million.
The MLBPA views that as a way to limit free-agent spending — in effect a salary cap — and it’s unlikely to bend on the issue.
New York Mets’ pitcher Max Scherzer, 37, a future Hall of Famer, has been outspoken on the issue. He signed a three-year, $130 million contract before the lockout. He’ll be making $43.3 million per season — the highest in the sport’s history.
“We see a competition problem with how teams are behaving and certain rules that are within that,” he said. “Adjustments have to be made to that in order to bring up the competition. As players, that’s absolutely critical to us, to have a highly competitive league, and when we don’t have that, we have issues.”
Manfred and the owners, however, point to the free-agent frenzy prior to the lockout as proof teams are willing to spend.
This offseason teams have already committed more than $1.7 billion to free agents. That surpassed last winter’s free-agent spending by almost $400 million. And many high-profile free agents remain on the market, including Carlos Correa, Freddie Freeman, Trevor Story, Nick Castellanos, Clayton Kershaw, and Bryant.
At some point this winter, probably after the holidays, the two sides are expected to begin negotiating in earnest. Many in the game believe a new CBA will be hammered out in late January or early February.
Could regular-season games be lost in 2022? It’s possible, but right now it seems unlikely. Could spring training be delayed? That’s a definite possibility.
As the deadline of the regular season approaches, both sides will feel greater urgency to strike a deal. Both the owners and players lost a lot of money during the pandemic. Moreover, a season cut short by a labor war would be disastrous for baseball, both economically and in the court of public opinion.
Men at the table
The main cast of characters who will attempt to hammer out a new CBA this winter is led by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark. Deputy commissioner Dan Halem is Manfred’s right-hand man, and Bruce Meyer, the union’s senior director of collective bargaining and legal matters is the players’ lead lawyer.
The MLBPA’s eight-man executive subcommittee consists of veteran players Zack Britton, Jason Castro, Gerrit Cole, Francisco Lindor, Andrew Miller, James Paxton, Marcus Semien and Max Scherzer. The seven owners on the labor-policy committee includes chair Dick Monfort (Rockies), Mark Attanasio (Milwaukee), Ray Davis (Texas), Ron Fowler (San Diego), John Henry (Boston), Jim Pohlad (Minnesota) and Hal Steinbrenner (Yankees).
Wordplay
When the owners’ instituted a lockout on Dec. 2, both sides followed off a salvo of words in order to sway public opinion. Here’s a sampling:
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred
“If you play without (a CBA), you are vulnerable to a strike at any point in time. What happened in 1994 is the MLBPA picked August, when we were most vulnerable because of the proximity of the large revenue dollars associated with the postseason. We wanted to take that option away and try to force the parties to deal with the issues and get an agreement now.”
MLBPA executive director Tony Clark
Clark, who’s accused Manfred of “misrepresentations,” is on a mission to regain some of the clout many believe the players lost in the last CBA:
“At the first instance in some time of bumpy water, (MLB’s) recourse was a strategic decision to lock players out … From the outset, it seems as if the league has been more interested in the appearance of bargaining than bargaining itself. And contrary to (Manfred’s) statement that imposing a lockout would be helpful in bringing negotiations to a conclusion, players consider it unnecessary and provocative.”
Bruce Meyer, the MLBPA’S chief lawyer
Before the 2017 season, the union hired him as its new lead negotiator. Meyer’s a tough, veteran labor lawyer who had worked for or with the players’ unions of the NBA, NHL and NFL.
“(There is) a whole list of topics that (MLB) told us they will not negotiate. They will not agree, for example, to expand salary arb eligibility. They will not agree to any path for any player to achieve free agency earlier. They will not agree to anything that would allow players to have additional ways to get service time to combat service-time manipulation. They told us on all of those things they will not agree.”
The Link LonkDecember 12, 2021 at 07:45PM
https://www.denverpost.com/2021/12/12/mlb-lockout-explainer/
Examining the MLB lockout: Money matters and hard feelings - The Denver Post
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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