TORONTO – Influential hockey agent Allan Walsh considers himself a student of collective bargaining in North American sports, and three NHL lockouts over his nearly three decades in the business have provided plenty of first-hand experience.
He’s drawn hard lessons from each of those owner-imposed shutdowns – leading to 48-game seasons in 1994-95 and 2012-13, plus cancellation of the entire 2004-05 campaign in between – and he sees parallels in Major League Baseball’s current lockout of its players.
That prompted him to tweet out a warning to players after intensive talks broke down last week and his words are all the more pertinent after another session Sunday went sideways.
For him, what’s happening in baseball feels all too familiar.
“I’ve been through this,” Walsh says in an interview. “Everything that you’ve seen so far has been gamed out and orchestrated on the ownership side. There was never a real negotiation. The owners and (commissioner Rob) Manfred agreed very early on: ‘Here is our red line and if we are going to play a full season, this is as far as we will go and no further.’
“They would not have called for a lockout if they already hadn't already gamed out, and all agreed, that there is a date in mind when they need to have a deal done.”
Such an argument can be correlated to the timeline of events thus far.
MLB owners went 43 days without making an offer after locking out players Dec. 2, immediately after the previous collective bargaining agreement expired. Eugene Freedman, a labour expert who serves as counsel to the president of National Air Traffic Controllers Association and frequently shares his insights on baseball’s labour practices on Twitter, has since November pointed to league offers as being “unserious,” designed more to create the illusion of bargaining rather than realistically addressing the needs of the players association.
Incremental moves, initially from MLB and then commensurately by the players, led up to the nine days of talks ahead of a Feb. 28 deadline to save opening day, a line subsequently extended to March 1. A last-minute push brought the sides somewhat closer but too many issues remain unresolved for a Hail-Mary agreement, so Manfred erased the first week of the regular season.
MLB Players Association head Tony Clark in a statement last week said, “what Rob Manfred characterized as a ‘defensive lockout’ is, in fact, the culmination of a decades-long attempt to break our Player fraternity. As in the past, this effort will fail.”
How many games are lost depends on how long each side can withstand the attrition.
Based on his NHL lockout experiences, Walsh underscores the importance of players remaining united “until they get to the dates that (the owners) have circled on the calendar.”
NHL players did that in 1994-95, fighting off a salary cap by staring down a league threat to cancel the season, but splintered in 2004-05, as the league followed through on its threat.
Pivotal in that 1994-95 NHL lockout was a union meeting ahead of a deadline, when Walsh recalled a stirring speech by the late Brad McCrimmon, a deeply respected veteran, that helped cement the group.
“Don't get me wrong, the players stayed united, but there were cracks emerging – you don't go into that situation and have 600 people all on the same page,” he remembers. “There was that element, of 'This is my last year and I've already lost half the season, I can't lose a whole year.’ And Brad McCrimmon got up in front of all the players, and he said, ‘I want you guys to all listen to me right now. Everyone shut up. This is probably my last year. This is the last year of my contract. I'm with the NHLPA. If we lose the year, we lose the year. And if any of you other guys come out and say you want to play and you don't support the union, I'll beat the shit out of you right here right now. Who's ready to go?’ And there was dead silence. It was over. Players were all together.”
There were similar moments in the spring of 1995, when Major League Baseball launched its cockamamie replacement-player scheme. Some teams encouraged their players to cross the line and one player who attended an association meeting back then remembers how powerful left-hander Danny Jackson was while yelling at the group about the importance of holding strong.
“I wasn’t going to cross under any circumstances,” he said, “but that was crazy.”
That type of unity, helped by a U.S. federal court injunction against the owners, allowed the players to survive MLB’s most determined effort to impose a salary cap, and heralded in a 26-year stretch without labour interruption.
Now, a new generation of players is experiencing an extended labour dispute for the first time, and as Toronto Blue Jays union-player rep Ross Stripling put it last week, “we’ve gotten stronger by the day.”
Pivotal is that some of the game’s most prominent players are leading from the front.
“Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole, those guys are set for life and they're choosing to spend their time on this,” says Stripling. “We’ve got basically some of wealthiest players in the trenches fighting for us. I feel like that’s all you need to know.”
The stand baseball players took in 1994-95 changed the trajectory of labour relations in baseball for an extended period, Walsh believes, and only similar resilience will prevent another lockout after this one, the way the NHL came back for more in 2012-13 after getting a salary cap in 2004-05.
Owners realized they had to suspend their salary cap dreams after players “faced Armageddon and showed that they couldn't be crushed or cracked or broken,” he says. “And it works for everybody after. Players made more money. Clubs made more money. Revenue grew. Franchise values exploded.”
Yet as the owner ranks turned over, the institutional memory of what happened in 1994-95, and the disputes beforehand, faded. Teams became better at exploiting collective-bargaining agreement loopholes, often at the expense of players. In recent years, league executives began privately planting seeds about the notion of a partnership with players that guaranteed a revenue split, arguing how beneficial it would be if they built the sport together, euphemisms for some form of cap.
Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick then said the quiet part out loud during the pandemic shutdown of 2020 when he called in to Arizona Sports 98.7 FM.
“The very lack of a revenue-sharing model puts us in an adversarial position when we really ought to be partners and advancing the game and building the revenues because all would win in those circumstances,” he said.
Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported last week that Kendrick was one of four owners to vote against the so-called “best” MLB offer featuring a Competitive Balance Tax threshold beginning at $220 million, well below the union ask.
“I think Manfred was the one who sold them on this,” says Walsh. “‘We can do this. We can crack them. These players are soft. They're weak. They're making too much money to give up paycheques. We've got an opportunity here.’
“As owners are apt to do, they think, ‘They're only players. They are making too much money. We could be making even more profits if we controlled the cost of labour.’ So they're testing the players’ resolve again.
“This is a script.”
Absent player capitulation, only MLB and its owners know when this one ends.
