Damage control not performance dominates the start of the 2024 MLB season. ESPN reports on the dissension in the Major League Baseball Players Association:
Earlier in the afternoon, a coordinated effort by players had unfolded to replace Bruce Meyer, the union’s deputy executive director and lead labor negotiator, with Harry Marino, the lawyer who had organized minor league players who eventually would become members of the MLBPA. Near the end of the call, the matter had been put to an informal poll, and a significant majority of the dozens of players in attendance raised their hands in favor of change. Faced with his hand-picked No. 2 receiving a no-confidence vote from a large portion of the union’s executive board, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark told the group that it was his decision whether Meyer would be removed from his job.
He was not wrong. Union rules grant Clark, not the players, the right to hire and fire. But the sentiment espoused by Clark in that moment roiled players throughout the game Tuesday and Wednesday, enveloping the union with the sort of palace intrigue typically reserved for a Sunday night HBO series. The veteran was among a large swath of players troubled by Clark’s comment after hearing him say consistently, over more than a decade running the MLBPA, that players run the union. The fallout cast questions across the rank and file not just about Meyer’s murky future but Clark’s long-term viability as executive director.
ESPN.com
One thing I learned from the article is that arbitration contracts are not guaranteed.
Clark failed to fight the collapse of the original union model that limited free agency would drive up prices for all players. Two things killed that. First, the powerful long-time owners who fought the the demise of the reserve clause died out. At that point, the opposition to free agency disappeared. The people running baseball only knew free agency, so they worked to mold it to their advantage, not end it.
Second, front offices became more professional. They became better at valuing players. They also became better at gaming the system through service time manipulation and long-term contracts to young players. They found the cost effective strategy was:
- Bring up a 22 year old a month into the season, giving them seven years of control
- Offer the player a contract through age 30, the first seven years the salary being set by what the players might expect through renewals and arbitration.
- Let the player go at age 30-31 into free agency, where the market no longer favored past prime players.
This pattern was clear by the time Clark took over as head of the MLBPA, but instead of fighting this he gave MLB the power to limit the money given in amateur signings, thinking that money would flow to major league players. That didn’t happen. Is it any wonder younger players are disillusioned? The fight waged in 2022 should have happened ten years earlier.
Then their is the Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal. Nate Silver wrote an excellent evaluation of the situation yesterday, and updated it now that MLB opened a formal investigation into the affair. His big question, did Ohtani make the bets?
I’m not so skeptical. I don’t know Ohtani, obviously. But as a world-famous professional athlete, he’s almost by definition an extremely competitive, wealthy young man in an industry known for being tolerant of gambling (again, MLB players are allowed to place legal bets in sports other than baseball). That profile checks a lot of boxes for someone with a high propensity to gamble. And $4.5 million is money that he can more than afford to lose. His ability to hit a 99-mph fastball, or to throw one, doesn’t particularly provide testament to his character or judgment — and for that matter, Ohtani has shown some considerable lack of judgment no matter which story is true, even if it’s just by trusting Mizuhara too much.
Then there is the fact that a huge percentage of Ohtani’s compensation in his new contract is deferred — all but $2 million of the $70 million. But I’m not so sure that reads well for him either. It’s actually pretty irresponsible financially, since you are giving up a lot of expected value by not investing in e.g. index funds. It may be suggestive of someone who is trying to impose constraints on himself — a gambler self-limiting — because he has had problems in the past.
NateSilver.net
On that last note, Ohtani makes plenty of money from other sources, so I’m not sure how deferring his salary would really help him limit a gambling problem.
Here is the timeline of how the information came to ESPN. Note the last item:
4:13 p.m. ET Wednesday (5:13 a.m. Thursday in Seoul): The Ohtani spokesman tells ESPN that what has actually happened in recent days is that Mizuhara has been able to control information to Ohtani in his position as the interpreter, and that Ohtani hadn’t realized what was happening until the postgame clubhouse meeting, when a new interpreter was brought in.
“He didn’t know any of it, didn’t know there was some inquiry,” the spokesman says. “After the game, that’s when he found out. … He didn’t know what the f— was going on.”
ESPN.com