Lockout continues; Manfred cancels opening day
Major league baseball owners have decided to continue holding the sport hostage in order to preserve their ability to stuff a relatively small amount of money into their already overflowing pockets. Woof.
So let’s talk about it!
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MLB owners were playing games the whole time. This group of billionaires, who already have more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime, view the game of baseball as nothing more than a tool for wealth extraction and appear willing to lose at least a month of the season to preserve an economic status quo that became increasingly tilted in their favour over the course of the CBA that expired in December. They may be willing to blow up an entire year rather than give in to minimal demands from players that barely keep up with inflation.
All of this seemed true during the weeks of non-negotiating the league did heading into Monday’s artificial deadline for a deal to be reached. But then, as the clock ticked toward midnight, suddenly there was optimism. There was “momentum.”
Or so we were told.
In reality, there appeared to be a concerted effort by the owners — and seemingly some of the friendly media members either trying to preserve their access or explicitly working for league-owned organizations like MLB.com and MLB Network — to give the appearance of progress, extend their self-imposed deadline, and try to paint the players as the unreasonable party once they made a clearly unacceptable final offer. That kind of tactic continued on Tuesday as the two sides failed to come to an agreement before MLB’s self-imposed deadline.
If you had told me two weeks ago that this would be the outcome of two days of marathon negotiating sessions at the brink of the point when regular season games will need to start being cancelled I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. But it is a bitter pill to swallow given the way that owners toyed with the emotions of the baseball world over these last 24 hours. They gave us hope and then they took it away to try to turn fans against the players. They simply do not care and will never be made to care about anything except adding as many crumbs of wealth to their overwhelmingly large piles — not about fairness, and certainly not about baseball.
The gaps between the two sides here ought to mean little to an industry of 30 franchises totalling $57,150,000,000 in value combined (per Forbes’ 2021 franchise valuations). Especially considering that just a decade ago those same 30 franchises were valued at just $15,681,000,000 (per Forbes’ 2011 franchise valuations). The game is full of cash. It’s everywhere. Yet salaries are stagnating, a huge number of players make the league minimum or less, and now owners are potentially ready to throw away a season to ensure they continue to keep as much as possible to themselves.
It’s stupid, it’s reckless, it’s greedy.
Actually, based on the way the even lower-paid people that make the league work are paid and treated, I think it’s safe to say it’s worse than that. These are bad people.
But OK, let’s have a look at some specific numbers, by way of an excellent thread from the Athletic’s Evan Drellich, to see what little they really are arguing about.
• Per Drellich, “MLBPA today offered to drop its request on the new pre-arbitration bonus pool to $85 million in the first year, w/a $5m increase annually over course of deal, source said. Union previously was at $115m. MLB has offered $25m.”
That $85 million figure is interesting, because according to the New York Post’s Andrew Marchand, it’s the exact same amount that MLB would make from ESPN by expanding the league’s playoff field from the current 10 teams to 12 — something the players have already made a very major concession on. (MLB in their “final” proposal raised their bonus pool offer to $30 million.)
• More Drellich: “MLBPA’s most recent CBT proposal (MLB’s most recent in parenths for comparison):
2022: $238m (220)
2023: $244m (220)
2024: $250m (220)
2025: $256m (224)
2026: $263m (230)”
The league is apparently not budging off these numbers, which are only modest increases from the current threshold of $210 million. As the Athletic’s MLB staff showed us in a competitive balance tax explainer last month, the CBT threshold has not kept pace with revenue over the last decade or more. Average payroll — unsurprisingly given that we’ve all watched the CBT function as a de facto salary cap for all but a small handful of teams — has hewed much closer to the CBT number than what teams are actually making.
Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus chimes in on Twitter to note that “if the CBT had grown with revenues over recent CBAs, the CBT would be at $297 million.” The players deserve a fairer share of the spoils. They’re the product we’re all paying to see.
• Drellich again: “MLB’s best, final offer before pulling down games, per MLBPA official:
• Minimum salary starting at $700k, going to $740k over course of deal. PA starts $725k.”
This one is truly baffling to me, and really shows just how willing the league is argue over what amounts to pocket change for them. We can actually tease the numbers out here somewhat. If about 50% of the league — or 13 players per team, on average — makes the minimum or thereabouts, the $25,000 gap between the two sides amounts to a difference of just $325,000 per team per year.
This is the kind of issue it’s worth missing games over??? To MLB, apparently yes. Especially, one assumes, if they’re April games — their worst-attended and least watched.
Or so we all must hope.
So is there anything more tangible to be hopeful about in all this? Maybe one small item.
Speaking to reporters at Tuesday’s presser, Manfred made clear that the league “never used the phrase ‘last, best, final offer’ with the union. We said it was our best offer prior to the deadline to cancel games. Our negotiations are deadlocked right now… but that’s different than using the legal term impasse, and I’m not going to do that right now.”
Legally, that distinction is important. Labour lawyer Eugene Friedman called it “the only positive thing he’s said.” In an earlier thread, he explained:
“This phrase, ‘best offer’ is part of a term of art - ‘last, best offer’ that management makes before it declares impasse — upon rejection by the Union. This would be something even more profound than merely announcing the cancelation of games. It would mean they are going to stop bargaining and potentially unilaterally impose their last, best offer. That will, of course, lead the Union to file a ULP charge and likely the NLRB Regional Director to issue a complaint for failure to bargain in good faith.
“But, it also could be their best offer today in advance of canceling games. That would not suspend the parties' duty to bargain. They would still have to keep negotiating until they reached agreement or impasse (even then they have a duty to bargain). They might take a break to clear their minds and caucus internally with all of their leaders/members before taking the next steps. That's what I would hope for. Impasse is a completely different can for worms with a lot of litigation involved. Taking a step back, causing internally and figuring out next steps is a much better path forward for everyone.”
In other words, we’re not into the courts yet with this stuff, and that gives MLB some more time to actually, finally, maybe try doing some negotiating in good faith. Sadly, that’s a mighty hard thing to believe in right now, given that Manfred spent much of the rest of his press conference spinning, or spewing outright lies.
Update: Welp!
As he’s been doing throughout this lockout, Ben Nicholson Smith of Sportsnet hit it out of the park:
What a mess. Give us baseball back you jerks!
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Glad to see there's at least one writer who resolutely refuses to carry water for the owners and will stand on the side of right. Good on ya, Andrew, and thanks for your clear and insightful writing on the issue.
Great summation. In the past, it's often been "a plague on both your houses". But in this case, the economics of the sport have become so egregiously tilted toward the billionaire owners that their position has become indefensible. It's absurd that a sport that has revenues massively higher than the NHL has a lower minimum salary than hockey players (who get $750,000 as a minimum).
I guess it's microcosm of society as a whole, where inequality expands massively and nothing is done about it. So the owners feel, "Why should we be any different?" And even though the players are well paid, they are (to paraphrase Curt Flood), nothing more than well-paid serfs.
Amazing to see such arrogance when we're just getting through the worst pandemic in generations, and now the worst war in Europe in over 50 years and baseball owners say to the fans, "F*ck you"