MLB, players have much to lose as labour talks intensify

Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports joins the show to discuss his report of MLB owners considering locking out players if they cannot reach a new CBA by December 1st.

Relax. This isn’t 1994; there’s no way the powers that be will kill spring training, let alone Opening Day of the 2017 Major League Baseball season.

The issues aren’t serious enough and the tone not draconian enough. It’s a $10 billion industry – $10 billion, 10 times what it was in 1994! – with an average salary of $4 million and thanks to the NFL caving in to its moral vacuum and a monolithic presence on the internet, baseball is positioned to claw back some of the three decades of ground lost in North America’s sports consciousness. MLB has flourished as a regional sports product and it even has blind luck going for it, in the form of strength in major markets. Plus, the World Baseball Classic is scheduled for this spring – an event that operates as a formal partnership between owners and players.

Of course, Donald Trump was never going to be president, either.

What struck me as remarkable about the reaction to Tuesday’s report by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports that owners were thinking of voting to lock out players if a new collective bargaining agreement isn’t reached by Dec. 1 is how used we’ve all become to labour peace in baseball; how we’ve become accustomed to no news being good news just as the two previous CBAs materialized out of thin air.

As one long-time, former player agent told me on Tuesday after Rosenthal’s report came out: “You’ve all gone soft. This used to be par for the course – one side leaks one thing, the other leaks another. Everybody digs in.”

It will come as a shock to a generation of baseball fans, players and possibly even agents, but this is the way it used to be. No, actually, this is the way it was supposed to be. From 1975-1995, baseball had eight labour stoppages – five of them player strikes, three of them lockouts. The last stoppage killed the 1994 regular-season – the Montreal Expos, and all that – but some of us also remember how delicate negotiations became in 2002, when an agreement in the wee hours of the morning averted a strike just hours before the first pitch of an Aug. 30 afternoon game at Wrigley Field.

There were reports on Wednesday that the Major League Baseball Players Association was busily giving players an update on negotiations, essentially telling agents to ensure their players shut up, stay off Twitter, and realize that ownership could very well be preparing to spin items that would create a sense of urgency that might not be useful to the players.

This is the first CBA negotiated with former player Tony Clark as head of the MLPBA – his predecessors, Marvin Miller, Donald Fehr and Michael Weiner were all accomplished legal and union minds – and it is the first in which Rob Manfred has been commissioner as opposed to Bud Selig’s chief labour negotiator. Do not under-estimate the change in view that results from the change in job.

Part of the issue could very well be a lack of institutional memory on both sides: some of the old ownership  ‘cold warriors’ of previous skirmishes have been replaced; unclear is who among the players have replaced veterans such as Tom Glavine and Mark Loretta who played integral roles in previous negotiations. What you are left with is a bunch of people who know nothing more than they make more and more money with each passing season. What’s not to like?

Yet as Richard Justice of MLB.com noted on Tuesday, the make-up of the association has changed, too: almost 31 percent of Major League players are Latino or Asian, a complicating factor particularly when it comes to discussing the concept of the international draft. Currently, only U.S., Canadian and Puerto Rican-born players are subject to the draft and most of them can use U.S. colleges as leverage in discussions with teams.

That’s not necessarily the case with players from the Dominican Republic, who as free agents can go to the highest bidder. Manfred favours an international draft because it adds an element of transparency to a process that has been rife with cheating; all the players see is a way of screwing future generations of players out of money. Ownership is said to be willing to trade draft pick compensation for free agents in return for an international draft; the players don’t see that as a net gain.

Rosenthal’s report suggested that this has emerged as the chief sticking point in negotiations, along with the luxury tax threshold which could be resolved by simple mathematics. That hardly seems a reason to shut down the game, and there is a school of thought that what this report was really all about was forcing the players to pick up the pace, as opposed to slow-playing negotiations.

(As University of Georgia associate professor Nathaniel Grow suggested on my show Wednesday morning – Grow writes on labour relations for FanGraphs and one week ago detailed how a stoppage might play out – this could be in and of itself a negotiating ploy by the players.)

So where is this all going? The guess Wednesday was that at most, owners vote to lock out players if there is no agreement by Dec. 1., which would effectively shut down the off-season business of baseball. The first and perhaps only casualty would be Major League Baseball teams and officials pulling out of next month’s Winter Meetings; the second might be free agents such as Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista being forced to wait a few weeks later than expected for offers.

But even that move would be a far cry from locking out players from spring training sites, and in point of face there is nothing preventing players and owners from agreeing to continue negotiations after Dec. 1 and allowing the current system of player procurement to remain intact.

This is not a repeat of the bad old days – as Rosenthal himself made that clear in his usual peerless reporting. These circles will be squared somehow, because my guess is the players don’t have the stomach to go nuclear. And when it’s done, I hope there are at least cautionary lessons for this generation of players, such as don’t ever again hurt yourself by publicly suggesting you want tougher drug testing because you’re tired of having people suspect you’re all cheats; all that has done is resulted in ownership putting the possibility of tougher testing on the negotiating table, a nagging impediment in an already complex progress.

Their predecessors could have told these guys that you don’t ever – ever – give ownership even the slightest opening; that any issue worth discussing on Twitter or in public is better utilized as a bargaining chip. That was a sign, I feel, that this new generation of players needs a little education about this whole process and here’s hoping that’s what happens as a result of this little negotiating wobble, because an engaged, smart and aware players association is a necessity for a successful professional league. School’s back in, fellas. Nobody wants recess.

 

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