This is a tweet, I think, that explains more about baseball’s labor negotiations than it meant to:
“They should really extend this deal a year, but the players hate it.”
Jayson Stark is not a bad reporter. He’s not dumb either, and if you asked him the question, “Should the owners get everything they want in the collective bargaining agreement negotiations?” then his answer would be no.
But look at that last sentence, saying the two sides should extend their deal another year. The owners won the last CBA, and they won handily. They got the luxury tax as a de facto salary cap, and the players didn’t secure any financial guarantees during the most lucrative time in MLB history, instead settling for quality of life improvements. As a result, as more and more money got funneled into the sport, it disproportionately went into the pockets of the owners. Instead of reinvesting that money into the players, they, uh, did something else with it and then claimed they lost money.
The financials of major league organizations are notoriously opaque, so I guess we just have to take their word for it. Oh well!
In the face of this, the players should just…settle for the same crappy deal that they hate for another year. Why do they hate it? Let’s turn to Fangraphs for the answer (from an article looking at total MLB payrolls as of mid-February):
We’ll have to see what these numbers look like at the end of the year, but even including the bump in payroll from 2016 to 2017, players are averaging under 1% gains every year while revenue grows at a pace more than five times that amount without even factoring in the billion-dollar sale of MLB-owned BamTech to Disney. Since 2017, when the current CBA started, players have lost close to 1% of Opening Day payroll despite the slight uptick this season.
Yes, they don’t like it and it’s not actually necessary to extend it right now, but at the same time, the owners like it. And the owners have the power to throw a hissy fit and cancel the 2020 rump season if they don’t get an unfair deal tilted in their favor. So throw them an unfair thing tilted in their favor and hopefully we can have baseball soon!
It doesn’t work like that. Give the owners a dollar and they’ll rob you blind. Give them an inch and they’ll rob you blind again. The reason they’re holding out for a lopsided deal is that they want to and they can. There’s no more to it. It’s not about strategy, or negotiation tactics, or financial necessity, or principle. It’s about power. They want to control the players utterly, and terribly, and clearly, and finally.
That’s winning, and they want to win.
The latest owners’ proposal (quotes here are from Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich in The Athletic) is that the players will get slightly less money than their last proposal, but they’ll play more games:
The league’s proposal Monday included a $989 million guarantee to players that was less than the $1.03 billion it offered in its initial 82-game proposal, prompting the union to consider it a worse offer and one agent to call it “a step backward.”
But! If you listen to league officials, it’s a better offer because maybe it’ll be improved down the line! And sure, guaranteed money went down, but possible playoff money went up, so assuming the playoffs aren’t wiped out by the inevitable second wave of COVID-19, you know, that’s more money.
A league official, however, said the proposal moved “materially” in the players’ direction and indicated a willingness by MLB to further negotiate the terms. The upside for the players in the latest proposal is their potential postseason earnings increased in total dollars from $200 million to $443 million. But the players do not believe they should be required to assume a greater share of risk in the postseason.
It’s the same story that’s been driving a wedge between the two sides all along: the players take all the risks, and only have a limited time in which to play the game, and are the important part of baseball, while the owners try to nickel-and-dime them and won’t give any proof of their supposedly dire financial condition. Boy, this sure is an ethical doozy.
And then, even when you get beyond the awful economic aspects of the deal, you get this:
Economics remains the principal area of dispute between the parties, but differences also remain on health and safety. The league, according to sources, wants players to sign an “acknowledgment of risk” waiver that would eliminate their ability to hold the league and clubs accountable if they do not create a safe work environment.
If the owners are negligent in providing an environment that keeps players safe, the players will have no recourse against them. There is no enough for them. They want to make all the money and be insulated from all the risks. I understand this goal, because I would also like to make a lot of money without taking any risks, but that’s not really a plausible goal, is it?
When one side is being wildly unreasonable, there is no compromise possible. There is no blame to assign to both sides. Any sins on the players’ side are just irrelevant because the owners are committed to an impossible position. If they hold firm, there’s nothing to negotiate. If they don’t, then they literally haven’t even started to negotiate when there are big, legitimate issues out there. If this whole thing is a stall to get the 50-game schedule they want, then it’s unequivocally entirely the owners’ fault that we won’t have baseball until late July or early August. No matter how you look at it, they’re the ones to blame.
Which is why it’s frustrating that Jayson Stark — who is generally good and I like and I don’t mean to pick on, but he keeps retweeting his article every day so he’s gonna have to be the example here — is playing a Both Sides game.
People on each side will tell you it’s the other side’s fault we haven’t seen those big ideas yet. Each side will tell you it’s the other side’s fault that these negotiations have felt so rancorous. Well, here’s what they all need to know: If this blows up, America won’t care whose fault it was.
When the only way for the players to make a deal is to take less money in order to take more health risks, they will never do that. They shouldn’t and they won’t. It is the job of a baseball reporter to make fans understand the situation, like Andrew Baggarly:
Or Ann Killion:
The players want to be paid at their prorated rate for number of games played, to which they agreed in March. Their distrust of ownership comes with context, not only of a long history of labor disputes that happened mostly before their time, but with the continual animosity stemming from the arbitration process, pay scales and free-agency manipulations.
…
When the time comes to sell [a franchise which has significantly appreciated in value], will the players — who have a limited career span and are being asked to take cuts now — get a share of those profits they helped build? Obviously not.
…
Baseball is suffering from a sickness. And it’s not the coronavirus. It’s a non-novel virus called greed.
We like to see conflicts as two-sided. This one’s not, and all the pleas in the world to save baseball won’t do a thing if the people who own it aren’t listening.