Major League Baseball immediately imposed a lockout on the players with the expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement at midnight early Tuesday morning. Both sides issued statements on the negotiations. Rob Manfred tries to convince you the players have the best deal in sports:
When we began negotiations over a new agreement, the Players Association already had a contract that they wouldn’t trade for any other in sports. Baseball’s players have no salary cap and are not subjected to a maximum length or dollar amount on contracts. In fact, only MLB has guaranteed contracts that run 10 or more years, and in excess of $300 million. We have not proposed anything that would change these fundamentals. While we have heard repeatedly that free agency is “broken” – in the month of November $1.7 billion was committed to free agents, smashing the prior record by nearly 4x. By the end of the offseason, Clubs will have committed more money to players than in any offseason in MLB history.
MLB.com
The MLBPA notes how they are being pressured.
It seems we’re stuck in a paradigm shift once again. In the twenty years of labor disputes from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s, the battle raged between the old guard of owners who wanted to keep control, and players who wanted some freedom of movement. Despite great growth in attendance and fandom during this time, owners fought to limit free agency. Of course, that just made the players who became free agents more valuable, as it kept the quantity supplied under the demand. Eventually, new owners and general managers who never worked under the old reserve system took over, and arbitration and free agency simply became the way they did business.
Their focus turned from “how to we get rid of this system” to “how to we work efficiently in this system.” They came to accept the proposition that younger players under team control are much more cost effective than free agents in their 30s. They discovered they could manipulate service time and offer long-term contracts to capture the prime years of players. They also found out that the union did not care about amateur players. The MLBPA agreed to limits on the money paid to both drafted players and international signings, thinking that the money would flow to major league players.
One day, the players woke up and realized they failed to see that redistribution of wealth is trickier than they thought. So now, the players want to lift restrictions on the freedom of movement, and owners and GMs who are used to a particular way of doing business don’t want to give it up.
The players were on the right side in the 1970s. It took twenty years for MLB to accept the new system, and another fifteen to learn how to game that system to their advantage. On the players side, they should have seen this efficiency movement and done something two CBAs ago. They could have fought harder against service time manipulation and free agent compensation at that time. They could have resisted saving MLB money on amateur signings.
They, in fact, could have constantly pushed for more freedom. Now that they are finally doing so, they face an ownership that learned the union will cave on those issues. As in the 1970s, the players are on the right side here. Getting younger, better players into free agency quicker will be good for the game, just as the limited free agency of the 1970s was good for the game. The end of service time manipulation, and a year less to free agency, and no free agent compensation likely gets a deal done quickly. People value freedom, and an offer of real movement in that direction is needed right now. I hope MLB doesn’t make the mistakes of 50 years ago and stubbornly cling to a paradigm that is out of date.
The CBT is a salary cap. Which is frustrating to us Yankees fans. Hal has the money, he just doesn’t want to fund other teams as well.