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| https://www.chron.com/sports/astros/article/MLB-lockout-Astros-players-money-salary-cost-daily-16956687.php |
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2572 - Baseball's Lockout - Don't Get Screwed
Some people in this situation only care about money, and it's not the players.
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Read the following excellent reporting by ESPN's Jeff Passan.
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| https://sports.mynorthwest.com/1585826/mlb-lockout-the-key-sticking-point-and-whats-next-in-cba-talks/ |
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33362477/inside-self-inflicted-crisis-boiling-mlb-lockout-deadline-arrives
Inside the self-inflicted crisis boiling over as MLB's lockout deadline arrives
Jeff Passan
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. Barring a miracle eleventh-hour agreement Monday on a new labor deal that ends its lockout of the MLB Players Association, the league has said it will cancel Opening Day games. That baseball finds itself on the precipice of such an ugly denouement is no accident. It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior -- of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, 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 demonstrable progress. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back.
Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt.
Any of these is a problem. In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players, who even now struggle to pull off the delicate balance of being aggrieved while 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 -- by fighting for itself and for the betterment of the game simultaneously. Now, following a quarter-century of labor peace and the relative complacency that accompanied it, the players are energized and engaged beyond what even they expected.
"We're just trying not to get screwed," one player told ESPN.
Easy as it is to point to the average major league salary ($4.17 million last Opening Day) as a sign players aren't on the wrong end of anything, it's also facile. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. What doesn't go to the players goes to the league and teams, and owners control how their teams spend money. Since the 1994 player strike that canceled the World Series -- and especially over the last two collective bargaining agreements -- the league has through canny negotiating positioned itself to be the aggressor, a role with which it has grown comfortable and familiar.
On Dec. 2, when the league instituted what commissioner Rob Manfred, in a letter to fans, called a "defensive lockout," MLB acted first -- ostensibly in the name of proactivity. "We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations," Manfred wrote. The league then waited 43 days to present the union its next offer.
Now, the sides find themselves at another inflection point, one with the ability to do grave harm to the game -- a "disastrous outcome," Manfred said recently. Without a deal, the league says, games will be missed and player salaries lost. If players don't get paid for 162 games, they say, they'll refuse to agree to postseason expansion, one of MLB's key targets in any new deal. Neither knows for certain if the other is bluffing.
Players do know that they don't trust the league, and those misgivings only amplify concerns that already permeate their 1,200-man group. The next basic agreement will, for better or worse, govern the sport over the next half-decade, and players are well aware of the ways front offices, ever seeking the slightest advantage over their competitors, will plumb the document for opportunities to game the system in their favor.
Getting the right deal is the players' only recourse, and their position is simple: The sport needs to evolve with its aspirations. Baseball remains a game with incredible upside, with a collection of players young and dynamic and eminently likable. There is ample room for improvement to the sport itself, which has grown too plodding for a wide swath of young, would-be fans who regard it as slow and boring. The players have prepared themselves to miss games, to forfeit more than $20 million a day in salaries. They believe a bad agreement -- one that attempts to further neuter their power -- could do even more damage.
It could be a faulty premise. Even if the players outfox the Lords of Baseball -- as John Helyar called the owners in his indispensable book on the history of the game's labor strife, "Lords of the Realm" -- the inherent nature of the owner-worker dynamic may be too strong to reverse. But over the last few months, as they've grown more emboldened, they've found a voice that the MLBPA had lost. The players steeled themselves to stand behind a cause that rang true across the rank-and-file: doing what's right for the game they've spent their lives loving and living.
A week of in-person negotiations in Florida between the MLB and MLBPA might not be enough to keep the start of the regular season from being delayed. AP Photo/Ron Blum
ON DAY 89 of the lockout, with MLB willing to immolate the game to achieve its goals, it's important to understand how far apart the sides are - and why the narrative that the players aren't giving up anything substantive in negotiations is false.
The players walked into bargaining asking for the moon but possessing a weak hand, not exactly the sort of combination that affects change. 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 restraints on free agency -- and attacked them with an extensive set of proposals. Some, like reducing the six-year reserve period for some players to reach free agency, were dead on arrival. Others, such as offering arbitration to all players after their second full season instead of the standard third, were unlikely to gain traction. More still: an anti-tanking plan that would institute a draft lottery to penalize teams for habitual losing and a pre-arbitration bonus pool to enrich the best young players made too much sense for the league to ignore.
What players had to give in exchange for their asks was simple, and the sort of thing that tends to carry the day in labor negotiations: money.
In the week leading up to the lockout, the players offered two chips with significant value. The first was expanded playoffs. Players have stayed firm at moving from 10 teams to 12 but balked at the league's preferred format of 14 teams. Agreeing to it would provide MLB with a guaranteed $100 million from ESPN, which secured the broadcast rights for an expanded wild-card round. The second income stream would come from on-uniform advertising. Between uniform patches and helmet decals, teams would be expected to generate at least $150 million, according to sources. In all, the union can guarantee the league well over a quarter-billion dollars a year in new revenue -- on the presumption that half of it will return to the players.
Certainly the league has taken steps toward some of the union's more right-minded goals. MLB acceded to a lottery. It moved on service-time manipulation. From a financial perspective, however, players continue to wait for the league to match their outlay. The size of the disparity is unclear. The league offered to bump its minimum salary offer Sunday, sources said, something that will be worth tens of millions to players. The league's bonus pool offer, last reported at $20 million, is another priority for the union. Draft bonus pools are expected to grow. Other changes offered by the league, such as implementing the designated hitter in the National League and scrapping a draft-pick penalty for signing free agents, have some value. The more guaranteed money goes to players, the likelier a deal becomes.
None of this is new, of course. Players organized in the 1960s to combat a cadre of owners who had hoarded profits for decades. What has changed is the size of the pot. A $1.3 billion-a-year industry after the strike octupled in size. That has done little to change the rhetoric among some ownership hawks whose desire for a salary cap is the desired endgame. Unlike the NFL, NBA and NHL, baseball's uncapped system does not have a salary floor, allowing teams to spend as little as they want. The Pittsburgh Pirates' final payroll in 2021 was $50.3 million, their lowest since 2010 and less than one-fifth of the Los Angeles Dodgers'. That disparity, baseball long has contended, could be ruinous for the sport. In his letter, Manfred wrote: "(T)he Players Association's vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability for most teams to be competitive."
It was classic MLB, the sort of fear-mongering the league long ago perfected. And though it's undeniable that money does buy a team the ability to weather mistakes more easily, the notion 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 owners: history.
IN 2001, MLB commissioner Bud Selig went in front of Congress and spoke of baseball's great financial woes. The sport had lost more than $500 million the year before, he told representatives who openly doubted the veracity of his numbers. Without a salary cap, Selig continued, not only might baseball need to contract two teams, it would never achieve competitive balance. That phrase has become baseball's tried-and-true alarm bell, red meat for low-revenue markets. Selig didn't get his salary cap, but a year later the league negotiated the framework of the competitive balance tax that exists to this day.
Since the CBT's arrival in 2003, 13 MLB franchises have won the World Series and 19 have played in it. That is the exact same number of teams as in the salary-capped NFL, far better than the nine champions and 14 competitors in the salary-capped NBA and right there with the 11 Stanley Cup winners and 21 finalists in the salary-capped NHL. In the championship seasons prior to the CBT era, 14 organizations won the World Series and 20 made it. The CBT was about competitive balance like "Citizen Kane" was about a sled.
Over that time, the CBT has risen, and the game has not collapsed. Baseball is too random for that, ever subject to the vagaries of chance. Always then, always now, always forever going forward, any restraint on spending will be about restraining spending. MLB sold the CBT as a way to rein in so-called runaway spending by the New York Yankees. Over time, though, the real intent -- a salary cap in sheep's clothing -- revealed itself. The tax rates grew. Draft-pick penalties joined the fray. Of all the brilliant negotiating Manfred did during his time as the league's lead labor lawyer, his work on turning the CBT from carrot to stick stands out. In September 2017, he said the quiet part out loud in an interview with a San Diego TV station.
"We have tried to deal with payroll disparity by limiting, through the use of taxes, the very highest-payroll clubs," Manfred said, adding: "For the first time in the 25 years since I've been in baseball, everybody in the top quartile of clubs had payrolls that actually went down this year due to the increased penalties that were negotiated as part of this collective-bargaining agreement."
Nothing illustrates the evolution of the CBT quite as well as the 2021 season. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres exceeded the $210 million threshold. Five other teams, however, came within $3.4 million of it. MLB had 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. They saw how over the previous two collective-bargaining agreements, the CBT threshold rose about 18% while industry revenues grew by at least 40%. They saw that in 2018, long before COVID existed, their average salaries went down -- as they did again in 2019 and 2020 and 2021, even as the biggest deals in the sport were growing and $300 million-plus guaranteed contracts were no longer outliers. They saw franchise values exploding to the point that in 2021, Forbes estimated, the 30 MLB teams were worth a combined $55.28 billion. Ten years ago, only two collective-bargaining agreements earlier, their combined valuations were $15.68 billion.
They also saw teams continuing to mimic Selig's rhetoric that baseball is little more than a break-even business. Whether MLB claiming a lack of profitability while boasting such gaudy franchise values and generating 11-figure revenues is voodoo accounting, intentional obfuscation or some combination of the two matters not. What does matter is the players saw it, and it infuriated them.
It was all part of the same bigger-than-the-game game the league was playing. Runaway spending leads to limiting through taxes. The six-year reserve period, so sacrosanct, turned into seven years when teams realized they could wheedle an extra season out of a player if they sent him to Triple-A out of spring training. To earn a full year of service, players need to spend 172 days on the major league roster. In his first season, NL Rookie of the Year Kris Bryant was on the Cubs' roster for 171. He filed a grievance. The arbitrator ruled in favor of the Cubs.
"It's horrible," one general manager said. "Six years should be six years. But what are we supposed to do? Not take advantage of them?"
For teams, service-time manipulation was seen as a feature, not a bug. And as it had with the CBT, 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.
As the agreements continued to worsen for the players, little embarrassments started to add up. The Cubs and the Houston Astros won back-to-back World Series in 2016 and 2017 after intentionally bottoming out to get better draft position. Because of the amateur draft pool first implemented in 2012, tanking for draft position -- intentionally fielding a bad team -- became a strategy.
Arbitration has always been a contentious process, and players were livid when they learned MLB celebrated tamping down salaries by awarding a championship belt to the team that did it best. During spring training in 2020, when MLB was reeling from widespread criticism by players that Manfred 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" in an interview with ESPN's Karl Ravech.
"'Piece of metal' was the Gulf of Tonkin," one longtime baseball man said. "It was the aha moment for everyone. And then he did it again recently with everything about how owning a team isn't that profitable. Treating players like they're stupid has never worked. It's never been a great approach."
Baseball, it seems, can't help from doing it, and it's a symptom of those in ownership who regard players with disdain and struggle to stomach the notion that they warrant the salaries they receive. There are good owners, ones who prioritize winning above profits and understand baseball is wildly different from the businesses in which they made their billions.
Sports is a unique industry. Typically, workers make a product. In baseball, they are the product. The game of baseball is the framework, and in it exists two classes: players and owners. Players spend their entire lives chasing the major leagues. Just making it there is improbable. Staying long enough to make life-changing money is a miracle. Owners, on the other hand -- at least those who don't inherit their teams -- join the baseball world just as they would a country club: by buying membership.
If you went and got the next 1,200 best players in the world, the product would suffer greatly. If you handed MLB teams over to any 30 competent businesspeople, the sport would not suffer. Actually, it might improve. It doesn't take a billionaire to leverage a spot in a legalized monopoly with profound built-in revenues.
The Yankees are not the Yankees if Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra don't win. Without the best players, they aren't in the World Series, and without championships, they're little more than an organization in a big market whose laundry features pinstripes. One would think, then, that a league would recognize that its profits exist because of Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Mike Trout, Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, Ronald Acuña Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and others -- and would see players' concerns about the state of the game not as trivial or excessive or outrageous, but vital.
It took until two days before the league's 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 -- in this case, the top two vote-getters in each league's Rookie of the Year balloting. After Manfred's lockout announcement, his contention that investing in stocks is more profitable than owning a team and the general unwillingness of the league to acknowledge that maybe this group of players really is as united as it contends, the move registered less as an important concession and more as an addendum to the part of these discussions that isn't moving -- and could take Opening Day with it.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Manfred and Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLBPA, met at Roger Dean Stadium, the spring complex of the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins where the sides have met all week. Over the four previous days, bargaining had gone nowhere, and in a side session Manfred had asked Clark for a comprehensive proposal that included a move on the CBT. The league had stayed at $214 million and the union at $245 million since the lockout, and the union was under the impression that even if it made a small move on the CBT, the league would reciprocate with something more.
The next day, the union proposed what it considered major moves. It removed from the proposal any changes to the revenue-sharing system. It dropped its ask on Super 2s -- the 22% of players with the most service time in each 2+ class go to arbitration a year early -- from 75% to 35%. And it made that small CBT move, peeling $2 million off its asks in two years of the proposal. Some player leaders disagreed with the strategy, but representatives from all 30 teams signed off on it during a call.
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, head of MLB's labor policy committee. The meaningful counter the union expected instead was a $1 million raise on the CBT for one year and the reduction of overage penalties to 45% for the first threshold, 62% for the second and 95% for the third -- all significantly worse than the 20%-32%-62.5% for first-time offenders in the expired basic agreement. 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.
When apprised of the offer, players' emotions varied. One said he was "furious -- just incredibly pissed." Another: "Deflated. We thought this was going to get things moving." The league regarded the union's offer as another in a long line of bad proposals -- this one because MLB before the lockout already had told the union that revenue sharing and changes to Super 2 were nonstarters to ownership.
The league's declaration of certain topics as off-limits never sat well with the players. This is, as MLB liked to say, a negotiation, and while revenue sharing could be seen as a third rail, expanding Super 2s -- something that has been done multiple times in bargaining -- belonged nowhere in that realm. Whether it's real or the strategy is unclear, MLB's line in the sand only fortified the players' belief that they had engaged in a months long charade.
The coming days will show how real the league's threat of a hard deadline actually is. Multiple agents believe 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. Sunday brought some progress with more CBT discussion, though not the sort that less than 24 hours before a deadline offers much hope. 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 will begin.
The fear and uncertainty of COVID's early days clouded those negotiations, and Manfred said at a news conference following the lockout that he would not equate the two. If they're not the same, they're at very least related. Because the frustration that accompanied the lack of a deal and eventual implementation of a 60-game season by Manfred in 2020 only has grown in the time since.
In the meantime, players will do what they've been doing for months: sending one another messages about the current state of affairs and, more often than the commissioner may realize, screenshots of Manfred's golf scores at Winged Foot, as found on Reddit. Gallows humor is the only kind 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's likely that when there is, little will have changed about what one official called the game's "mangled, Frankenstein economic system." The existential elements of the game -- pace of play, capturing young fans, gambling -- will have gone untouched at a time when real dialogue could've put the game in a far better position.
If there's any hope for 2027 not devolving into something even worse than this lockout, those sorts of conversations should happen regularly and include players young and old, league officials and a cross-section of owners. Pivoting with an eye on the future is best way to salvage the sport and the damage this lockout has done. Though it's not over, and may not be anytime soon, there are lessons to be learned to prevent baseball labor relations from taking a time machine back to the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
Already this is the second-longest period of labor strife 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 won't be the case. This is Rob Manfred's disaster, the league's disaster, the owners' disaster, and it's been a long time coming.
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https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33399780/they-need-stop-treating-us-idiots-how-mlb-salvage-season
'They need to stop treating us like we're idiots': How MLB can salvage this season
Jeff Passan
Nine days into a marathon negotiating session that left all involved weary and worn, Major League Baseball and the MLBPA entered the bargaining room early Tuesday morning with a chance to save Opening Day. MLB was pushing the union to finalize a middle-of-the-night accord on a new collective bargaining agreement. Behind the scenes, team officials were funneling optimistic whispers to anyone who would relay them to the public. And yet on the other side of the table was a union that wasn't ever going to accept an offer it regarded as substandard.
"They need to stop treating us like we're idiots," one veteran player told ESPN.
Communication -- the real, substantive sort -- involves so much more than talking, presenting, proposing. Listening is a skill that has been in too short supply during MLB's lockout of its players, and the unwillingness to change that paradigm is among the primary reasons baseball finds itself here today, threatening to self-immolate for all to see.
Commissioner Rob Manfred canceled the first week of the regular season Tuesday after the sides failed to reach a new deal by a self-imposed deadline to end a stoppage now approaching 100 days. He had warned weeks earlier of the "disastrous outcome" of losing games, and here he was in Jupiter, Florida, after more than a week of bargaining had gone completely sideways, standing in front of a microphone, trying to spin the league's offer as substantive enough.
For the league, it was. To the players, its too-low competitive-balance tax thresholds led them to walk away from the league's final offer and into a cloud of uncertainty: "We're not bluffing." Owners need to believe players when they say this, because doing the alternative leads nowhere good.
The players are ever emboldened by the league's posture, in both these negotiations and before. The MLBPA's first statement in responding to MLB's announcement was to accuse the league of trying to "break our Player fraternity." While any union runs the risk of splintering -- especially as paychecks are missed -- strong evidence points in the direction of player solidarity to challenge it. Star players have expressed to the rank-and-file a willingness to miss a full season. The union's statement concluded: "As in the past, this effort will fail. We are united and committed to negotiating a fair deal."
There always has been a fundamental disconnect between the owners and players, and in these negotiations it has grown increasingly apparent. Everyone needs to do less talking and more listening. There is no issue so fundamental that it warrants putting not just the season's first week but its entirety at risk. Compromise is within reach, and the words of the players and the commissioner Tuesday provided a road map for it.
For months, as the union presented a suite of asks, league officials wondered what the union really wanted to achieve. Players had been saying it the whole time, a point reiterated Tuesday by executive subcommittee member Andrew Miller: "The core goal in these negotiations is to increase competition."
The union provided four clear tenets that offered unlimited opportunities to solve problems: competition, fixing service-time manipulation, getting players paid earlier and removing restraints on spending. MLB tried to address each, first through proposals with minimal likelihood of adoption and, eventually, with more serious approaches. Only as the clock ticked on MLB's deadline did there feel like true compromise, even on things that should have been shared goals.
There were some successes. MLB accepted the union's proposal to give a full season of service time to top Rookie of the Year finishers, even if they start the year in the minor leagues. The implementation of a five-team draft lottery was another win. The best example was the league's willingness to move from a 14-team playoff proposal to the union's preferred 12. The players feared 14 would decrease teams' inclination to spend in free agency because they could sneak into the playoffs with mediocre records.
That playoff expansion -- valued by the league at $100 million for 14 teams and less for 12 -- is a key addition for the owners, and it is even more of a lever now with Manfred saying the league will take away games. Bruce Meyer, the union's lead negotiator, reiterated that regardless of how many games the league cancels, he expects players to be paid for a full 162-game season. The union will yank expanded playoffs from any agreement that doesn't include it.
The longer the league waits to give in certain areas, the more games it loses. The more games it loses, the less likely it is to pay a full 162. And the prospect of losing hundreds of millions in additional postseason revenue over the course of an agreement should provide enough motivation to listen to players when they say something.
If somehow that's not enough, consider the other, more-prominent leverage point left for the players: rebates paid out to the regional sports networks that carry local broadcasts for games not played. Depending on the team, avoiding rebates necessitates between 138 and 150 games broadcast. It provides the basis for a widely shared view among players: that because of the rebate threshold and low April attendance, teams are perfectly fine missing the first month of the season.
Teams must believe the players when they say they will use these last few carrots at their disposal. And in return, the players must hear clearly all the clues that Manfred shared publicly Tuesday. For all of the platitudes that fell flat during his media briefing -- "The concern about our fans is at the very top of our consideration list," he said unconvincingly -- he managed to lend insight into the league's priorities.
"We have a payroll disparity problem," he said.
Whether it's a problem is up for debate -- there's an almost-nonexistent annual correlation between payroll and wins -- but still, this is an exercise in listening, and payroll disparity is clearly important to owners. There are manifold solutions that don't involve an artificially low competitive balance tax, which exists more to impede spending than to promote competitive balance. The union proposed incentivizing lower-spending teams to win through extra draft picks. The commissioner's discretionary fund could help subsidize low-revenue franchises. Elegant solutions abound; Manfred highlighting the concern should be enough to compel the union to help find them.
Cutting through Manfred's rhetoric helped find another issue. "The last five years," he said, "have been very difficult years from a revenue perspective for the industry given the pandemic." Manfred was rightfully roasted for this statement, which conflated the losses teams say they suffered during the COVID-shortened 2020 season with the years surrounding it. The 2017, '18 and '19 seasons were wild financial successes during which revenues and franchise values ballooned, increasing more than half a billion dollars in average value (from $1.3 billion to $1.85 billion), according to Forbes. Arguing that the sport suffers from revenue problems on the day he canceled the very things that enrich the sport didn't exactly register as genuine.
And yet if the owners truly are concerned with present-day revenues, the players should offer a solution. If the CBT truly is the issue dividing the parties the most, the players can relent on lower thresholds in the first two seasons of an agreement in exchange for higher ones later. The league indicated a desire to chart this course with its five-year proposal of $220 million, $220 million, $220 million, $224 million and $230 million. Something closer to the league's desire over the first two years (say, $222 million and $227 million) and more in line with the union's ask for the final three ($237 million, $247 million and $257 million) gives the league the short-term revenue fix it desires while expanding the CBT in later years to be more commensurate with revenue growth.
The final ask takes a leap of faith by the union, a small bit of trust that the league has not necessarily earned through its treatment of players. "My deepest hope," Manfred said, "is that we get an agreement quickly." For months, both sides have accused the other of not wanting to strike a deal, and it has been one of the most insidious parts of the negotiation, this notion that their efforts were little more than an exercise in futility.
It's a deeply cynical premise and one that grows more dangerous by the day. The consequences of not reaching a deal in the coming weeks are devastating. Manfred will cancel more games. The ability to reschedule games and get players paid for 162 will become a logistical near-impossibility. The longer they wait, the more it imperils any sort of season at all.
This is no Chicken Little simulacrum; baseball's sky is metaphorically falling, and now that Manfred put into motion the cancellation of games, urgency is the best method to stop it. Otherwise, the sides will dig in -- because of pride and spite and the emotional torque that has the ability to twist the 2022 season entirely off its axis. Every day there isn't a game, players theoretically lose a projected $21 million in salary. Every day there isn't a game, teams move closer to having to provide rebates to their RSNs.
So as much as it's time to talk, it's even more imperative that the players and owners listen to one another, that their words go not through cochlea of doubt but understanding. If the players insist they can be ready in a three-week spring training, the league must give it serious thought. If the owners say they need extra doubleheaders to make up for this week of lost games, the union must help make it happen.
It's not like any of this is foreign. In 2020, during the most fearful stages of the pandemic, these same parties figured out how to turn a three-week spring training and doubleheader-laden schedule into an actual season. None of it was ideal, but then the potential fallout from Manfred's cancellations doesn't exactly scream normalcy either.
The substitute for diplomacy is chaos, something baseball can ill-afford. When not even a deadline can foster a settlement, it's clear the problems run deep and the approach requires modification. There's a solution here, a deal to be had, an agreement still within reach, a way to render the "disastrous outcome" Manfred foretold moot. They can see it, taste it, even hear it. All they have to do is listen.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2203.04 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2436 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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