If MLB and the MLBPA don't agree on a new collective bargaining agreement by the end of Monday, it will be terrible for baseball. There is a time and a place for it. Major League Baseball is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound from a class of owners who run the teams and seem to have designs on running the game into the ground. The league has said that it will cancel the first two games of the season unless there is a last-minute deal to end the labor dispute. Baseball is on the verge of an ugly denouement. It is a study of the consequences of bad behavior, of indignities big and small, of obeying the letter of the law, and of alienating those who make the sport great. The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little progress. They are tired of the game they love saying that it does not love them back. Even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared, player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Service time has been manipulated to keep players out of free agency. The luxury tax was instituted to discourage runaway spending, but it has become a defacto salary cap and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway. The World Series trophy is a piece of metal, and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing salaries a replica championship belt. Any of these is a problem. They served as a call to action for the players, who are trying to negotiate a larger piece of a $10 billion-plus pie. The MLBPA grew into the strongest union in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s by marrying morality and money, and by fighting for itself and the game at the same time. The players are more engaged than they expected after 25 years of labor peace. One player said they were trying not to get screwed. It is easy to point out that the average major league salary is a sign that players aren't on the wrong end of things. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. The league and teams control how their money is spent. Since the World Series was canceled due to the player strike in 1994, the league has been able to negotiate in a way that has made it comfortable and familiar. MLB acted first when the league instituted a defensive lockout in the name of proactivity. The union was given 43 days to accept the next offer from the league. The sides are at a point where they have the ability to do grave harm to the game. The league says that games will be missed and player salaries will be lost without a deal. If players don't get paid for the full season, they will refuse to agree to the expansion of the playoffs. Neither knows if the other is bluffing. The 1,200 men in the group know that they don't trust the league, and those concerns only increase. The next basic agreement will govern the sport over the next half-decade, and players are aware of the ways front offices will try to gain an advantage over their competitors. Getting the right deal is the players only recourse, and their position is simple: The sport needs to evolve with its ambitions. Baseball has a collection of players who are young and dynamic and likable. There is room for improvement to the sport, which has grown too slow for a wide swath of young, would-be fans who think it is boring. The players are going to miss games to make up for the lost income. They think a bad agreement could do more damage. It could be a mistake. The inherent nature of the owner-worker dynamic may make it difficult for the players to outfox the lords of baseball. Over the last few months, they have found a voice that the MLBPA had lost. The players were determined to stand behind a cause that was true to the rank-and-file: doing what is right for the game they have spent their lives loving and living. It is important to understand how far apart the sides are, and why the narrative that the players are not giving up anything substantive in negotiations is false. The players walked into the bargaining room with a weak hand and asked for the moon. They outlined four key areas they wanted the new agreement to address -- getting players paid more earlier in their careers, fixing service-time manipulation, preventing teams from tanking and removing restrictions on free agency -- and attacked them with an extensive set of proposals. Reducing the six-year reserve period for some players was dead on arrival. It was unlikely that the offer of arbitration to all players after their second full season would gain traction. An anti-tanking plan that would institute a draft lottery to penalize teams for losing and a pre-arbitration bonus pool to enrich the best young players made too much sense for the league to ignore. The sort of thing that tends to carry the day in labor negotiations is money. Where did your team's best young players land? Top 100 prospects. The 30 MLB farm systems are ranked. The players offered two chips with significant value in the week leading up to the lock out. The playoffs were expanded. The league wants players to move from 10 teams to 12 but they don't like the format of 14 teams. It would give MLB a guaranteed $100 million from Disney, which would allow for an expanded wild-card round. On-uniform advertising is the second income stream. According to sources, teams are expected to generate at least $150 million between uniform patches and helmet decals. The union can guarantee the league over a quarter-billion dollars a year in new revenue on the assumption that half of it will return to the players. The league has taken steps towards some of the union's goals. MLB accepted a lottery. Service-time manipulation was moved on. The players are waiting for the league to match their outlay. The size of the discrepancy is not known. Sources said that the league offered to raise its minimum salary offer on Sunday, something that will be worth tens of millions to players. The league's bonus pool offer is a priority for the union. The bonus pools are expected to grow. The designated hitter in the National League and the scrapping of a draft pick penalty for signing free agents are some of the changes offered by the league. The more money goes to the players, the better the deal will be. This isn't new, of course. The players organized in the 1960s to fight the owners who had been making a lot of money. The size of the pot has not changed. After the strike, the industry was over a billion dollars a year. The desire for a salary cap is the desired end goal of some ownership hawks. Baseball's uncapped system does not have a salary floor, which allows teams to spend as little as they want. The final payroll of the Pittsburgh Pirates was $50.3 million, their lowest since 2010 and less than one-fifth of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Baseball has argued that the disparity could ruin the sport. The Players Association's vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability for most teams to be competitive, according to a letter written by the Commissioner. The kind of fear-mongering the league used to do was classic MLB. The idea that baseball needs a fixed system to solve a theoretical competitive-balance problem that the capped leagues avoid doesn't stand up to something far more reliable than the desires of the players Bud Selig spoke to Congress in 2001 about baseball's financial troubles. He told representatives that the sport had lost more than half a billion dollars. Baseball would never achieve competitive balance without a salary cap. That phrase has become baseball's alarm bell, red meat for low-revenue markets. The league negotiated the framework of the competitive balance tax a year after Selig did not get his salary cap. 13 MLB teams have won the World Series since the introduction of the CBT. The number of teams in the salary-capped NFL is the same as the number of teams in the salary-capped NBA and the number of teams in the salary-capped NHL. Fourteen organizations won the World Series in the championship seasons before the CBT era. Citizen Kane was about a sled and the CBT was about competitive balance. The game has not collapsed despite the rise of the CBT. Baseball is always subject to chance. Any restraint on spending will always be about restraining spending. The New York Yankees spent so much money that MLB sold the CBT as a way to rein in it. The salary cap in sheep's clothing was revealed over time. The tax rates went up. Penalties related to the draft-picks joined the discussion. During his time as the league's lead labor lawyer, his work on turning the CBT from a carrot to a stick stood out. He said the quiet part out loud in an interview. We have tried to deal with payroll disparity by limiting, through the use of taxes, the very highest-payroll clubs. The evolution of the CBT can be seen in the 2021 season. The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres were the only teams that exceeded the $210 million threshold. Five other teams came close to it. MLB orchestrated the coup of financial coups in collective bargaining, getting what amounts to a salary cap without a floor or a guaranteed revenue split. The players noticed. Over the previous two collective-bargaining agreements, the CBT threshold rose about 18% while industry revenues grew by at least 40%. Even as the biggest deals in the sport were growing and $300 million-plus guaranteed contracts were no longer outliers, their average salaries went down. Forbes estimated that the 30 MLB teams were worth a combined $55.28 billion in 2021. Ten years ago, the collective-bargaining agreements had a combined value of $15.68 billion. Who is the greatest baseball player of all time? The 100 best to ever take the diamond were ranked. The top 25 are: 26-50, 51-100, and snubs.
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Baseball is little more than a break-even business according to Selig. Whether MLB claiming a lack of profitability while boasting such gaudy franchise values and generating 11-figure revenues is a question of accounting, intentional obfuscation or some combination of the two. The players saw it and it made them angry.
The league was playing a big game. Runaway spending leads to taxes being limited. When teams realized they could send a player to Triple-A if they sent him to spring training, the reserve period became seven years. To get a full year of service, players need to spend 172 days on the major league roster. Kris Bryant was on the Cubs roster for 171 in his first season. He filed a complaint. The Cubs won the case.
One general manager said it was horrible. What are we supposed to do? Not take advantage of them?
Service-time manipulation was seen as a feature by teams. The league codified some of its greatest advantages at the bargaining table. After decades of getting dismantled at the table, MLB has in the 20 years since recruited a deep roster of top-notch labor lawyers and economists and succeeded in changing the paradigm beyond its wildest dreams.
The agreements continued to get worse for the players. The Cubs and Astros won the World Series after bottoming out to get better draft position. Tanking for draft position became a strategy because of the amateur draft pool.
The players were angry that MLB rewarded the team that did the best job with a championship belt. During spring training in 2020, when MLB was reeling from widespread criticism by players that he had been too soft on the Houston Astros for cheating during their championship run, he referred to the World Series trophy as a piece of metal.
One baseball man said that the piece of metal was the Gulf of Tonkin. He did it again recently about how owning a team is not profitable. The treatment of players has never worked. It has never been a great approach.
Baseball can't help from doing it, and it's a symptom of those in ownership who don't like the idea of players getting paid too much. Good owners understand baseball is different from the businesses in which they made their billions and prioritize winning over profits.
The sports industry is unique. Workers make a product. They are the product in baseball. The framework of baseball is players and owners. Major league players spend their entire lives chasing the ball. It is not possible to just make it there. Staying long enough to make money is a miracle. The baseball world is just like a country club for owners who don't inherit their teams.
The product would suffer greatly if you got the next 1,200 best players in the world. The sport wouldn't suffer if you handed the teams over to competent business people. It might improve. A billionaire can leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues.
If Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra don't win, the Yankees are not the Yankees. They aren't in the World Series without the best players, and they are little more than an organization in a big market. One would think that a league would know that its profits exist because of Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Mike Trout, Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, Ronald Acu, and others.
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It took until two days before the deadline, but MLB finally accepted the union's idea of awarding a full year of service to players even if they didn't spend 172 days on a roster. The move registered less as an important concession and more as an extension of the stubbornness of the players, who have refused to accept the fact that investing in stocks is more profitable than owning a team.
The sides have been meeting all week at Roger Dean Stadium, the spring complex of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins. Over the four previous days, bargaining had gone nowhere, and in a side session Manfred asked Clark for a comprehensive proposal that included a move on the CBT. Even if the union made a small move on the CBT, the league would reciprocate with something more because they had stayed at $214 million and the union at $245 million.
Major moves were proposed by the union the next day. There were no changes to the revenue-sharing system. 22% of players with the most service time in each class go to arbitration a year early, down from 75%. In two years of the proposal, it was able to remove $2 million from its asking price. Representatives from all 30 teams signed off on the strategy after some player leaders disagreed with it.
MLB sent the proposal to owners, and back came an offer two hours later from lead negotiator Dan Halem and Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort. The union expected a $1 million raise on the CBT for one year and the reduction of overage penalties to 45% for the first threshold, but they were worse than first-time offenders. The nonmonetary penalties, including the loss of a first-round pick in the amateur draft and the theoretical international draft for exceeding the third threshold, were still there, cementing the fact that the CBT that MLB is offering now is worse than the one that just expired.
The players were informed of the offer. One said he was furious and another said he was deflated. The league thought the union's offer was another in a long line of bad proposals because MLB already told the union that revenue sharing and changes to Super 2 were notstarters to ownership.
The players were not happy with the league's declaration of certain topics as off-limits. Expansion of Super 2s, something that has been done multiple times in bargaining, belonged nowhere in that realm, as MLB likes to say, a negotiation and revenue sharing could be seen as a third rail. The players believed that they had engaged in a monthslong ruse because of MLB's line in the sand.
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The coming days will show how real the league is. Multiple agents believe that MLB is handling this like it does an arbitration case: Wait, wait, wait, and then at the last minute, when it looks impossible, get it done. Less than 24 hours before a deadline offers little hope, but Sunday brought some progress with more CBT discussion. Unless the league makes an unprecedented and entirely unexpected move in which it deviates significantly from its position on almost every key issue at the last minute and the union responds in kind, baseball will find itself in the same place it did in the summer of 2020: trying to figure out when the season
The fear and uncertainty of COVID's early days clouded those negotiations, and Manfred said at a news conference that he would not equate the two. They are related if they are not the same. Since the lack of a deal and eventual implementation of a 60-game season by Manfred in 2020 has grown in the time since, the frustration that accompanied the lack of a deal and eventual implementation of a 60-game season is still growing.
In the meantime, players will do what they have been doing for months: sending one another messages about the current state of affairs and, more often than the commissioner may realize, they have also uploaded pictures of his golf scores at Winged Foot. Gallows humor is the only kind of humor that plays these days, when players lives and livelihoods are interrupted for no good reason other than that the owners can.
Eventually, there will be a deal, and it is likely that nothing will change about the game's economic system.
If there is any hope for the future of the game, those sorts of conversations should happen regularly and include players, league officials, and owners. The best way to save the sport is to keep an eye on the future. There are lessons to be learned to prevent baseball labor relations from reverting back to the 70s and 80s.
This is the second-longest period of labor unrest in baseball history, and though it has stopped transactions and doused the hot stove and generally cast the sport in an awful light, until today, the most tangible thing lost was spring training. Soon, that will not be the case. It has been a long time coming, and this is the worst disaster the league has ever had.
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