MLB Whiffs with Initial Proposal to MLBPA

Fans should expect CBA negotiations to drag on and potentially impact the 2022 season.

Representatives from Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association met on Thursday regarding a new collective bargaining agreement. As expected, MLB made a weak proposal and the MLBPA didn’t like it, so the two sides left the table without having made any progress, per ESPN’s Jeff Passan and USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale.

MLB was expected to get the ball rolling with a “core economics proposal.” As Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post noted, they did not address free agency or the competitive balance tax threshold (also referred to as the “luxury tax”) – two very major issues in the eyes of the union. According to Passan, MLB offered to “funnel” some additional money to players with two or more years of service time, award draft picks to teams that don’t manipulate the service time of their top prospects, and to tweak the draft lottery.

In negotiations between competent parties, one side never starts off with an enticing, compromising offer. It’s like the opening moves of a chess match: mostly pawns moving up a space or two while bigger, more important pieces remain covered and protected. Furthermore, MLB under commissioner Rob Manfred has always been obstinate in negotiations anyway.

Consider how negotiations went in 2020 when the two sides were trying to put together a season in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The league halted operations in mid-March as cased surged. The two sides negotiated the details of a season in the ensuring months. By June, Craig Calcaterra characterized negotiations between them as “very, very ugly.” It mostly had to do with prorating the players’ pay and the total number of games in the season. The players wanted to play more games; the owners wanted fewer. The players wanted to be paid the same (prorated); the owners, obviously, wanted to pay them less.

One of MLB’s early offers included a “sliding scale” salary structure for the 2020 season. For example, a player making the MLB minimum salary ($563,500 in 2020) would have made $285,000 prorated for an 82-game season (which was the thought at the time). The sliding scale would’ve bumped that down a bit more to $262,000. However, a star player earning a $35 million salary would’ve made $7.84 million with the sliding scale as opposed to $17.7 million prorated — a significant pay cut. As I noted at the time, it was a clever move intended to drive a wedge between the union’s haves and have-nots – to get them bickering among themselves rather than with MLB. Fortunately, the union didn’t fall for it and the players quite literally laughed it off.

As far as season length, the union proposed a 114-game season in May of 2020, but it was roundly rejected by the owners. In June, they lowered that proposal to 89 games and again, it was shrugged off. In fact, the owners accused the union of “not trying,” even though the union kept reducing the number of games with each offer while MLB budged not an inch. Shortly thereafter, the Associated Press reported that some players and staff had tested positive for COVID-19. It was, at the time, a very big deal and a potential stick in the mud as far as pulling off a season. That made several labor-minded players, including reliever Sean Doolittle (then with the Nationals), suspicious of the timing. The thought being: MLB, obstinate as it is, felt it was giving up too much and was looking for a reason to cancel the season. Remember, they wanted fewer games, not more. On the spectrum of most to least ideal, zero games was most ideal to them. That some players thought MLB was capable of leaking player health information to the press tells you all you need to know about how dirty the league is willing to play.

That’s just a taste of how Major League Baseball operates in negotiations with the union. The league has also used the media to accuse the union of feeling “entitled to an additional billion dollars,” playing into the thought that fans would side with them over the players. Additionally, Minor League Baseball accused MLB of making misleading public statements regarding negotiations between the two sides over MLB’s plan to shrink the minors (which they eventually did). The league has also bashed agent Scott Boras publicly on more than one occasion. Boras is the most successful among player agents, so he is naturally hated by the people who have to cut checks to those players.

All of this background is to say that CBA negotiations between the league and the union aren’t going to move at anything more than a glacial pace, and the league is going to play dirty throughout with their cards close to their chest. Passan, reporting on today’s news, suggested that the idea of spring training starting on time is “in peril.” That has always been the case and the results of today’s proposal haven’t moved the needle any. The union knew MLB would come forward with a weak offer.

Manfred likely prefers to see the season interrupted due to labor negotiations. In 1994-95, when there was also a work stoppage, the remainder of the 1994 season and playoffs as well as the early part of the ‘95 season were canceled. Fans blamed the players, not the owners or their reps. The players were villains, greedy millionaires who took the game fans love out of their ballparks and off of their TV sets. A majority of fans in 2022 are still pro-ownership, as can be seen in any lively comment section about these labor negotiations. They use the same tropes – “greedy millionaires,” “pampered players,” etc. Thus, if spring training is interrupted and if the regular season has fewer games, fans are likely to again blame that on the players, not on the league. That’s even more likely to be true if the league is aggressive with their messaging through the media, as their reach is much wider than the union’s. As a result, it’s in the union’s interest to prevent that, and Manfred can use the threat of an interrupted spring training and regular season as a bargaining wedge.

The union wants players to be able to become free agents sooner, for the minimum salary to rise, for draft pick compensation to no longer be attached to free agents who sign with new teams, and for the abolition of the CBT. Whether the union succeeds or not in their quest depends on their ability to wait out the league’s barrage of bad faith offers and public smear campaigns. Manfred, both before and during his time as commissioner, has shown he has absolutely no shame and will stop at nothing to get the owners what they want.