Baseball Musings: Collusion or No Collusion?

October 30, 2006

Collusion or No Collusion?

Maury Brown now believes the collusion agreement in the CBA is not a big deal:

Fast-forward to the new CBA. What appears to have been negotiated is a number of these outstanding grievances that have been sitting in limbo waiting to be addressed. In the case of the grievances regarding collusion, it appears what has happened is a case where management said, "Look, we don't want to have this issue from 2002 clouding the new agreement. Agree to settle these outstanding grievances involving claims of collusion, so that we can place wording in the new agreement that says this matter from 2002 can no longer be grieved. Let's not sour this new deal with these matters from the past."
So, apparently, the sides agreed on the matter. The paltry dollar figure associated to the settlement underscores that this was more of a book-clearing incident, than the type of colluding we saw during the '90s.

The 1980's actually. During that era, teams refused to offer players contracts. So players like Tim Raines, one of the great leadoff men, missed their big payday. The more recent alleged collusion is more of a price fixing scheme:

Bill Madden has confirmed that offers "were actually being determined for the clubs by MLB's central office."

But we knew about this. The league was advising teams on the value of free agents, since, I guess, some GMs are mathematically challenged. Collusion would occur if teams refused to bid over that level. I'm not sure that happened, but the settlement made the question moot. This is similar to a defendant paying off a plaintiff to make a case go away, because it's cheaper than actually defending your innocence. In any case, any collusion that occured recently was on a much smaller scale than what happened in the late 1980s.

Posted by David Pinto at 12:54 PM | Union | TrackBack (0)

Comments

re: collusion

First, it's the commissioners' office, not the league. Selig abolished the NL and AL President's offices in 1999. He centralized both leagues into one office of the commissioner in that year, so everything is run out of one office now.

Second, assuming that there were arm's length labor negotiations of any kind between a team and a player agent, it would have been illegal or an unfair labor practice for the commisioner's office to advice in any way on the matter, since the commissioner represents all major league teams as well as the player's union, in theory.

That's why that would be collusion and illegal price fixing as well as an unfair labor practice.

The collusion in 1985-87 was real, and there were money damages awarded by an arbitrator that were monetary and substantial. The owner's outrage over that award led in large part to the firing of Fay Vincent, the election of Bud Selig, and the ill-advised strike/lockout of 1994, which in turn led to baseball's need to crank out homers to drive back attendance to its previous levels, which in turn led to baseball ignoring the steroid problem.

In short, the owners' greed generated the steroid problem.

What the current CBA shows is that if the owners had been reasonable back in 1990, the MLPA would have been willing to settle their collusion claims in return for other concessions, and the 1994 strike need never have happened, and the steroid controversy could have been addressed by a still sitting comissioner Fay Vincent.

It's sad when baseball like other industries finds labor peace twenty years too late.

--art kyriazis, philly

Posted by: art kyriazis at October 30, 2006 03:48 PM

True that the actual collusion occurred in the '80s. The awards occurred in the early '90s. I covered this in an essay for Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders, which Rob and the folks at Fireside have allowed me to republish on the Biz of Baseball site.

Collusions I, II ... and III (A Hard Lesson Learned)

Posted by: Maury Brown at October 30, 2006 09:56 PM

If the players and owners agree easily, something is quite wrong and fans will or have paid. I believe nothing on matters of import emanating from either side.

Posted by: susan mullen at October 31, 2006 10:16 PM