Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association remain ‘worlds apart,’ according to MLBPA interim director Bruce Meyer via the Sports Business Journal. In a recent call on MLB Network Radio Meyer also said it is ‘extremely hard, if not impossible, to make progress,’ given that the owners are ‘not willing to negotiate with us without a salary cap.’
That was kind of my thesis in Chapter 20, that a lockout is not only likely but entirely inevitable after MLB’s current collective bargaining agreement expires on 1 December, 2026. This labor war did not merely arise over the last month or several months; it has been brewing and boiling now for many years. The owners have seemingly, finally, put their feet firmly in the ground, and right now I do not envision an outcome where they give up their position.
I will say that the MLBPA is in a significantly better place — as in it is like impossible to quantify just how much — with former labor lawyer Bruce Meyer at the helm (in lieu of former player Tony Clark). Vis-a-vis a potential salary cap he cites that the Tampa Bay Rays (with a record of 98-64) and Milwaukee Brewers (103-59) owned the best records in their respective leagues. It’s worthy of note because the Rays rank 26th out of 30 teams in payroll (~$90 million) and the Brewers rank 19th (~$125 million).
Meyer also mentions that former Angels owner Arte Moreno, who was constantly complaining about losing money, recently sold out for $4 billion having purchased the club for just $193 million over two decades ago. It’s honestly the most Major League Baseball billionaire owner line of operating: Bitching about money while year over year getting richer.
It is the type of propaganda that the Players Association must continue pushing out. Bruce Meyer seems to be pretty good at it. The only unfortunate part is that it is particularly difficult finding on the Internet current updates of the ongoing MLB labor war. I literally had to type into the search bar ‘recent cba talk mlb’ and the only articles that appeared were from Sports Business Journal — which gave the MLBPA perspective — and ESPN, which naturally featured commissioner Rob Manfred feigning in August that: ‘We’re planning on playing baseball next year.’
Manfred is a fucking dork. In his decade-plus-long tenure as commissioner his primary contributions to the game — if you would like to call it that — were the implementation of a ghost runner at second base for extra innings contests during the regular season, and the anti-intellectual elimination of the so-called shift. As the sport’s reputation and popularity waned, particularly so in comparison to America’s two other major sports, the NFL and NBA, Manfred did absolutely nothing to stifle the imbalanced relationship between pitching (which grows ever-dominant by the year) and hitting, which is the real root to baseball’s problems.
The blackest mark against Manfred’s credibility occurred in 2017 when the Houston Astros were caught through various means of cheating. They ultimately beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series that year, and as part of his justification for what was a remarkably light punishment — namely, giving Astros players immunity — Manfred famously called his sport’s championship trophy ‘A piece of metal.’ In a 2023 PBS Frontline documentary titled The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball, former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent argued that every Astros player involved should at the very least have been suspended, if not given a lifetime ban.
The Astros fired both their manager (who sat out a year before becoming manager of the Detroit Tigers) and general manager (who no longer works in MLB), and their owner Jim Crane was given a $5 million fine. Since Crane is worth all of $2.4 billion, calling $5 million a ‘fine’ seems rich. None of the players were suspended. The World Series title was not stripped. All the Astros had to do was remove their manager and GM, which seems objectively like a pretty fantastic deal.
Compare that to the recent punishment handed down by the NBA on the Los Angeles Clippers for salary cap circumvention, which cost the franchise five first-round picks — a crippling sanction given the value of draft picks — as well as a $30 million fine against owner Steve Balmer (who is suspended, and banned from team facilities, along with the team’s president, for a whole year). The NBA made an example out of the Clippers, in other words. Rob Manfred failed to do so with the Astros.
Which is important in a sport such as baseball, setting an example, I mean, because cheating and professional baseball go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s part of the fabric of the game. Whether it’s the Black Sox scandal of over a hundred years ago, or the steroid era of the 1990’s and early aughts, to the Astros, of course, to even the simple game-to-game happenings such as pitchers tipping their pitches or opposing players stealing signs from opposing teams. There is cheating, in air quotes, and there is cheating — which is what the Astros were able to accomplish virtually punishment-free.
In recent years Rob Manfred has improved the game of baseball aesthetically, what with the so-called pitch clock — giving a 15-second window for pitchers to exhaust between pitches as a means to quicken the game — along with a challenge system which allows teams twice per game to review a ball/strike call from an umpire. I wish I could give Manfred more credit on the matter, but I have been pining for robot umps for at least the last decade (probably longer). It’s just so obvious of an improvement.
So when Manfred tells us that ‘We’re planning on playing baseball next year,’ he is doing that thing where what he means to say is ‘We’re planning on playing baseball next year on our terms.‘ Our terms are the terms of whom he represents: The owners. The owners want a salary cap. The owners would love to play baseball next year, and for every year henceforth — because this is one of those in-perpetuity deals — but only with a hard cap.
One item working against Manfred and, by direct proxy, the owners, is just how well Major League Baseball currently happens to be doing. As Dayn Perry wrote in July for CBS Sports (emphasis mine): The curiosity is that Manfred’s push for a cap comes as the sport is enjoying a bit of a boom. Attendance is up (on pace for the league’s highest tallies since 2017), television ratings are strong, a scintillating Home Run Derby is freshly behind us, and league revenues figure to grow again this year as MLB heads toward a new — and presumably more lucrative — suite of national-broadcast contracts in 2028. Many of Manfred’s on-field changes, such as the pitch clock and the new ABS challenge system, have proved popular and yielded the desired results. Pushing for a cap, though, requires the league to highlight problems that may not even exist in reality.
I mentioned in my last post on the matter that the labor war is, in many ways, a media war. Assuming both the owners and the players remain deadlocked on the salary cap issue, it does seem like a strange amount of leverage exists on the side of the MLBPA when it comes to stadium attendance and television ratings and franchise valuations, given that they are all on the rise. How do the owners obfuscate those truths to the public?
It also doesn’t help the owners that we do, in fact, happen to have recently concluded a season where both the Rays and Brewers are the kings of their respective leagues. It wasn’t the historically powerhouse Yankees and Dodgers. Neither was it the Red Sox and Phillies. It was not even the Blue Jays and Mets (who, somehow, have the largest payroll in the sport). Rather it was a couple teams that dwelled at the bottom of the middle-tier, and the bottom of the bottom-tier in payroll. You can’t make this shit up. It played out perfectly for the players as means to argue against a salary cap.
As Dayn Perry alluded, the owners are somehow going to have to say that, actually, the sport’s parity is in great peril, and that the solution to even the playing field is a hard salary cap. Forget that people are still coming to games and watching on television. Forget that the Angels, who haven’t made the playoffs in over a decade, just sold for $4 billion. Forget that all arrows in MLB seem to be pointed upwards. Because none of that matters. What matters is that the owners constantly are in need of more money, and the way that they get more money is at the expense of the players.
I remain skeptical that the players will be able to pose enough of a credible threat to hold out, but only because of what I have already mentioned in previous blogs. The owners two strongest points of leverage exist in their ability to have unlimited sums of money, and an unlimited amount of time. Major League Baseball will certainly be played once again. The owners will not simply liquidate the sport over the issue of a salary cap.
But they can hold out a helluva lot longer than the players can, given that the career of each individual has an expiration date. Owners have no such expiration. They die and they leave the business to their children. Or they live on and sell their franchise for a return on investment that the general public rarely realizes during retail trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
For the time being, MLBPA interim director Bruce Meyer is saying all the right things. Very soon baseball will be entering into the postseason, and in a month or so the World Series. It is the most watched and paid-attention-to time of the year for MLB. Little, if anything, will be mentioned about the impending lockout, but come November when there are no more games is when the rubber will have meet the road. One side or the other will ultimately have to blink.
In this proverbial game of chicken I do think it will be quite interesting the intestinal fortitude that Meyer and the Players Association exhibit. My perspective remains that the players will cave to the owners demands, but that is only because recent history is not so kind to labor in its ongoing struggle against the capitalist class. No one ever went broke betting on the billionaires to continue cutting their workforces down at the kneecaps.
Humbly, I find the most reasonable aspiration imaginable to be the players forcing ownership to state their fledgling case to the public. That is all I want. I want Rob Manfred to speak publicly and twist himself into pretzels about why baseball is in need of a shakeup, even though both the economics and optics of the sport are in better shape currently than they have been in at least a half-decade — since the last CBA was in effect.
And I hope that everyday Americans will be able to recognize bullshit when they hear it, and see it. Unsurprisingly, I was standing recently on a dead blackjack table when one of my coworkers opined — albeit mistakenly — that the problem with baseball is ‘guaranteed contracts.’ He said once a player gets paid, his production goes downhill. It’s fine, you know? Not everybody is dialed in, and not everybody is meant to be a sports fan.
Even if he (my coworker) was right, though, why would his instincts lead him immediately to the side of those paying the player rather than the player himself? In other words, why is it the player’s fault that a team (i.e. a general manager, i.e. an owner) made a bad business decision? Isn’t the organization culpable for not doing their homework, or simply running into bad luck? Should the player, therefore, feel sorry and give the money back? No. Obviously not.
Which is kind of, unironically, a decently-portioned topic of this particular collective bargaining agreement: Service clocks. Players are attached at the hip to their team for six years, and for half of that time they are making the league minimum salary. For the latter half they are in arbitration, still making less than they would otherwise in free agency. That’s six years of a man’s life where he has no real choice on where he plays, or how much money he makes. Do the owners ever compensate them, or offer backpay, for that time served?
Moneyball theory — which to varying degrees every MLB organization relies upon, and makes decisions through — revolves around taking advantage of market inefficiencies and capitalizing on the surplus value thereof. We have established over the prior two decades, based on the average annual value (AAV) of a contract, the cost in dollars of each individual WAR (Wins Above Replacement). When I began on my journey into sabermetrics, and economics, inside the extensive world of professional baseball, the dollar equivalent for each WAR was roughly $4 million. But that was back in like 2011. Present day it is probably double that, if not more.
In many (or most) instances the team that such a player provides so much surplus value for lets them sign elsewhere in free agency for the big dollars. They say thank you very much, and then they move on to someone younger, and cheaper. There is no loyalty from the owners. Yet in our silly little human brains, always we expect the star players on our favorite teams to take a so-called ‘hometown discount’ and re-sign for cheaper than they could attract on the open market.
In the meantime it is the general managers — as an extension of the owners who pay their salaries — whom we celebrate for making deft business decisions when they let such players walk as free agents. After all, they squeezed out the juice for all it was worth, knowing the best years of that player are now very likely behind him. It’s just basic math. It’s Mortimer and Randolph Duke from Trading Places: Buy low, and sell high.
Random coworkers such as mine, who see only the aftermath of this dynamic, when the player is post-prime and no longer living up to the massive contract he signed, are everywhere. They have no idea the way MLB economics work, or service clocks, or the fact that for six years every player is essentially an indentured servant; they just see what happens when a player turns 32, or 33, never knowing that the best years of his career were spent making significantly less money than he was worth.
Just so there is no confusion: I am not arguing for GM’s and owners to sign off on bad contracts to aging, post-prime players. I am also not faulting general managers, whose job it is to make good business moves (whether in free agency or via trades), to reward players for what they have already accomplished (in the past, on their rookie contracts) rather than what they are about to accomplish (on their current deals). That is what gets a GM fired. And that is what makes a losing team.
All I am saying is that these are the rules of the game, and the facts of the matter. Most professional baseball players generate more value for the organizations they play for than they are ever compensated for. And by the time they are compensated, by virtue of signing a contract in free agency with a new team, it is the player who gets blamed (by fans, or the media) for not living up to such a contract.
Here, again, is why the public relations war during collective bargaining negotiations is such a difficult one for the players. No one will ever be able to convince the average everyday working American making $50,000 or $60,000 per year, or the coworker like mine making double that, or the small business owner earning a half-million dollars annually, that MLB players earning the absolute bare minimum salary of $780,000, or the ones making millions, or tens of millions, are the ones actually getting a raw deal.
Put in different terms: An American worker earning $100,000 per year equates roughly to 12.5 per cent of the league minimum MLB player. The league minimum MLB player making roughly $800,000 per year, on the other hand, equates roughly to 0.02 per cent of what the average owner nets in revenue on a yearly basis — because the average owner of an MLB franchise brings home $400 million every year.
This is far different, in other words, than comparing apples to oranges. This is comparing apples to a goddam nuclear weapons manufacturer. I have always argued politically that the guy making $250,000 per year has a helluva lot more in common with the average worker than he or she does a multimillionaire or billionaire, and thus his or her political interests should be significantly more in line with poor people than the ultra-wealthy. Insofar as the labor war between the MLBPA and the owners is concerned, it is ultimately the same paradigm.
If you simply recalibrate your brain to compensate for the scale of money at hand, you might if you squint be able to recognize that the guy making hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, is actually the poor one. There was a time in American History, about sixty years ago — a quite fruitful one for workers, when unions were strong and the rich were taxed heavily — when owners made only about thirty times their lowest paid employee. Sometimes they lived on the same streets, and drove the same cars.
The American government since the Ronald Reagan Presidency of the 1980’s destroyed unions and cut taxes on the corporations and owners of industry, and the at that point the dream was dead. Republican governments and Democratic governments alike, unions have kept dying and taxes on the wealthy have kept shrinking, and the dream has died further. There is now no reversing this course. We must eat shit. All of us.
But whilst we eat the shit that is given to us, we are at the same time allowed to hope, and cheer for the best of outcomes, and at every possible turn take whatever wins we can. Few and far between are those wins, and that’s okay. It makes the struggle that much more valuable to us. It makes us appreciate each time the little guy has a chance. It is how we dream in the modern era.
It is thus how the Players Association is giving us this opportunity to dream again. Right now, on 30 September, we are lightyears away from the 1 December, 2026, deadline of the current CBA, and so the window is wide open on how ambitious we might dream. The closer we get to the deadline, the more information we will have, and in turn the window will not be so wide and so open as it is now. That is why we must appreciate where we are.
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