Mar 10

Agreement reached!

Today the owners voted 30 – 0 to approve the deal the players’ union agreed to earlier in the day. The players’ representatives weren’t unanimous; their vote was 26 – 12. According to CBS Sports, “The union voted to approve a new proposal by a 26-12 margin (a simple majority, or 20 votes, was all that was required for the new agreement to pass, but it’s notable that the eight members of the executive subcommittee all voted no).”

From MLB.com:

The deal came to fruition a day after MLB postponed Opening Day until April 14 in the absence of a new agreement and announced that each team’s first four series were removed from the schedule. However, as part of this agreement, a full 162-game schedule will be played, and the four series that were previously removed from the calendar will be rescheduled. The new five-year CBA includes increased minimum salaries, a new pre-arbitration bonus pool to reward the top young players in the game, a raise in competitive balance tax thresholds, the introduction of a universal designated hitter, the widest-ranging Draft lottery in pro sports, a system to prevent alleged service-time manipulation and limits on the number of times a player can be optioned in a season to address concerns regarding “roster churn.”

The deal also includes an expanded 12-team postseason format, bringing playoff baseball to two additional markets each year.

As part of the agreement, a Joint Competition Committee will be formed comprised of four active players, six members appointed by MLB and one umpire. Beginning in 2023, the committee will be tasked with adopting changes to playing rules such as a pitch clock, base size, defensive positioning and automatic ball/strike zone.

Notable:
The minimum salary jumps from $570,500 to $700,000, the largest single-year increase in history.

The Competitive Balance Tax jumps to $230M from $210M

A new Pre-Arbitration Bonus Pool of $50M will be created from revenue earned from sources like national television rights sales. It will be distributed to the top 100 players based on awards and statistical performance). Examples: “Under this system, NL Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes would have seen his salary jump from $608,000 to $4.2 million last season, while Rookie of the Year winners Randy Arozarena and Jonathan India would have seen their respective salaries more than triple in 2021.

An International Draft will be instituted. “International Draft would be 20 rounds (600-plus selections), increasing the total compensation earned by amateurs by more than $20 million annually.”

Other rules changes:
Contracts for arbitration-eligible players will be guaranteed.

Top prospects who finish 1st or 2nd in the Rookie of the Year voting will receive a full year of service.

Clubs promoting top prospects to Opening Day rosters will be eligible to receive Draft picks if the player finishes in the Top 3 in the Rookie of the Year voting or Top 5 in MVP/Cy Young voting.

Expanded postseason: 12 teams, with the top two division winners receiving a bye.

Universal designated hitter.

Players may only be optioned five times per season.

Mar 04

Players fund ushers, concessionaires, parking lot attendants during lockout

In a sign of good sense and good public relations, the players recognize that the owners’ lockout harms others beside themselves and do something about it.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Players launching $1 million fund for workers affected by MLB owners’ lockout

NEW YORK, March 4—Players are launching a $1 million fund to help support workers affected by the lockout and cancellation of games by Major League Baseball owners.

The fund will be administered by Major League Baseball Players Association and the AFL-CIO and distributed to stadium workers and others who face financial hardship through no fault of their own due to the MLB franchise owners’ lockout.

The lockout was implemented by owners on Dec. 2 after spending months avoiding meaningful bargaining over issues of importance to players, including improving competition, providing fair compensation for younger players and upholding the integrity of MLB’s market-based economic system.

MLB announced on Tuesday that it would postpone the start of the regular season, depriving workers who are depending on baseball games for employment.

“There are a lot of people who make our game great. Many aren’t seen or heard, but they are vital to the entertainment experience of our games,” MLBPA Executive Board leaders Andrew Miller and Max Scherzer said Thursday. “Unfortunately, they will also be among those affected by the owner-imposed lockout and the cancellation of games. Through this fund, we want to let them know that they have our support.”

The MLBPA will work with the AFL-CIO in the weeks ahead to determine the hardest hit communities and align resource distribution to those who need it most.

Staging more than 2,500 Major League Baseball games each year requires thousands of skilled workers — from concession crews, electricians, ushers, security, transportation and janitors to television and radio broadcasting crews and groundskeepers—who serve in their roles with pride and dignity.

“Whether you’re a worker on the baseball field, or a worker behind the scenes, we all deserve respect and dignity on the job,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “The labor movement will do everything in our power to support these and all workers.”

The Players Association has worked closely with the stadium and hospitality workers across the country who are integral to Major League Baseball in recent years, and it recognizes the value they provide to the industry’s success.

“This fund is intended to support workers who are most affected by the MLB-imposed lockout but whose livelihoods have been disregarded by the owners in their efforts to pressure Players into accepting an unfair deal,” MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark said.

Feb 18

Open Thread #8, 2022

The only thing new about the negotiations between players and owners is the brevity of yesterday’s meeting: 15 minutes. From SB Nation:

ESPN’s Jeff Passan has some details of the MLBPA’s proposal. The union backed off its request for salary arbitration for all players with 2+ years of service time and instead requested 80% of the players. The players also requested an increase in the pre-arb bonus pool from $100 million to $115 million. Remember the league offered just $15 million for the bonus pool in their latest offer.

USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports that the league consider’s the union’s most recent proposal of changes to the arbitration system a non-starter.

In other unhappy news, Calvin Jones has died of cancer. He was 58. He was the Dodger scout who studied and advocated signing Clayton Kershaw back in 2005-2006. Published six years ago at Bleacher Report, it’s a good story.

A couple of things about the 2006 draft: it had some very good pitchers in it. Here are the six players who went ahead of Kershaw:

  1. Luke Hochevar
  2. Greg Reynolds
  3. Evan Longoria
  4. Brad Lincoln
  5. Brandon Morrow
  6. Andrew Miller
  7. Clayton Kershaw

Then, three picks later, the Giants selected Tim Lincecum. Right after that the Diamondbacks picked Max Scherzer.

Not a bad draft, huh?

Feb 02

Open Thread #7, 2022

As if losing Seager and Scherzer and possibly Kershaw aren’t enough, now comes word that the Dodgers tried to extend RHP Walker Buehler’s contract last spring and he turned the offer down. Now, he’s under club control for another three years, hard as that may be to believe, but he’s in line for big raises through arbitration in each of the next two years, and by the time he hits free agency he’ll be about to enter his age-30 season in 2025. What if Turner, Kershaw, Bellinger and Urias are gone by that point? All of them will have completed their current contracts by that season. Will the team want to spend millions on one pitcher if the entire roster has been depleted?

Or maybe their roster will have been reloaded by then, given their Baseball American farm system ranking of #8. But is that a good bet?

The future is occasionally scary to contemplate.

Jan 18

Open Thread #6, 2022

The Dodgers announced a passel of front office moves today.

The Dodgers announced multiple front office moves Tuesday, including the promotion of former Vice President, Assistant General Manager Brandon Gomes to General Manager.

In addition, the Dodgers promoted Alex Slater to Vice President, Assistant General Manager, Brandon McDaniel to Vice President of Player Performance and Thomas Albert to Head Athletic Trainer. Damon Jones has also joined the Dodger front office as Vice President, Assistant General Manager & Baseball Legal Counsel.

Gomes, 37, becomes the 12th general manager in Dodgers history and the first since Farhan Zaidi departed to become the Giants’ President of Baseball Operations in November 2018.

Two Brandons, huh?

Jan 03

Open Thread #5, 2022

The lockout continues. CBS Sports says there are four things fans should know as the new year begins:

  • 1. Talks should get serious in January
    “owners and the union before the new year were set to discuss matters of relatively lesser importance. That’s notable because at the very least discussions took place…”

  • 2. Those ‘core economics’ are complicated
    “…the average player salary has declined in the face of ever-soaring franchise values, the union wants to remake the economic structure of the game. The players’ wish list is too expansive to be addressed in a single CBA negotiation, but you should expect that their energies will be focused on getting young players paid more and paid sooner.

    Younger players in terms of on-field value are, as a group, better than older players, but the antiquated salary structure, which is driven by tenure rather than capability, doesn’t reflect that. Right now, almost all players are entitled to no more than the major-league minimum until they have three years of MLB service time, at which point they become eligible for arbitration. To put a damning point on it, AL MVP finalist Vladimir Guerrero Jr. made just $605,400 this season (compared to the current minimum salary of $570,500), which means he was underpaid relative to his production by tens of millions of dollars.

  • 3. The players may have some leverage for the time being
    Negotiations leading up to the COVID-shortened 2020 season served to galvanize the players, and the mass of signings leading up to the owner lockout means less uncertainty for several high-profile free agents. All of that, in turn, makes it less likely that there will be divisions within the ranks of players. Beyond those factors, veteran players like union rep Max Scherzer sound fully committed to fighting for the rights of younger and less tenured players during these negotiations. That means fewer class schisms that management can exploit.

  • 4. Time will soon be running short
    Should we get into the second week of February or thereabouts without a deal, then the possibility of a compromised spring training becomes a concern. This again plays into the leverage that players may have right now. Spring training games at sites in Arizona and Florida have become a profit center for teams, and they don’t want to lose those games. Players, meantime, don’t start getting checks until the regular season begins. So the prospect of a shortened spring training figures to increase pressure on the league side to get a deal done.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers pulled off a rather unusual signing this weekend

Taking a swing at improving their middle infield, the Dodgers have signed Eddy Alvarez, known as a Miami Marlins Quad-A prospect … but more prominently known as a USA Baseball silver medalist and a decorated speed skater from the 2014 Sochi games.

[snip]

Alvarez also got his most extended big-league run with the Marlins during the 2021 season, too.

In 24 games, split between third and second base, Alvarez hit .188 while cracking his first home run at the MLB level. He doesn’t offer much on the defensive end, grading out as below-average at third, the spot he spent the majority of his reps.

Just getting to the big leagues is nothing to sneeze at, of course. Getting to the big leagues after winning silver on the rink? Now that’s really something.

No need to treat this as some sort of token reward, though. Alvarez mashed at the minor-league level last season, posting an .865 OPS in 31 games at Triple-A (.423 OBP). He earned his keep, and will now be getting a fresh chance in one of baseball’s model organizations.

Dec 18

Open Thread #4, 2021

As the lockout continues, the two parties have only met once, on Thursday, December 16, and apparently achieved nothing of any import. It’s unlikely there will be any further meetings until after the holidays.

CBS Sports quotes The Athletic:

A union source said Wednesday that since the sides met in Texas in the days leading up to the lockout, the union hasn’t heard from the league on any key economic issues. Now, the union hasn’t reached out on those issues either. But the MLBPA’s lead negotiator, Bruce Meyer, made clear when the lockout started the union felt it was incumbent on MLB to issue the next counterproposal.

Delaying any meaningful talks until January means that the two sides will have about a month before spring training is scheduled to begin. That will create pressure on both sides.

In other news, the Mets hired Buck Showalter as their new manager. He’s 1,551-1,517 (.506) with the Yankees, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Orioles in 20 big league seasons. Showalter is 64 years old.

Dec 31

2020 can’t be gone too soon

The Dodgers won their first World Series since 1988.

That’s it. That is the only good thing that occurred in this miserable year in which over 345 thousand Americans lost their lives to a pandemic, nearly 20 million Americans have been infected with the virus, and the amazing speed with which vaccines were designed, tested and rolled out was not matched by actual shots in people’s arms. Only some 3 million Americans have been vaccinated in the two weeks since Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna started shipping vials of the product.

On the baseball front the Padres have been loading up in an effort to catch the Dodgers. In three days in December the team acquired “Blake Snell from Tampa Bay. By Monday morning, they had a four-year agreement with top Korean infielder Ha-seong Kim. Several hours later, they ended a weeks-long pursuit by scoring Yu Darvish and his personal catcher, Victor Caratini, in a trade with the Cubs.”

In labor news MLB showed that it believes profit should always come before people, destroying the minor league baseball structure as it had been for decades because it didn’t want to pay so many employees.

There will be 40 fewer minor leagues farm teams next year than there were in 2019. Those cutbacks hit hardest in the South and Midwest. West Virginia lost all four of its minor-league franchises. The entire Appalachian League got the boot. (It has been reconstituted as a summer league for unpaid college athletes.) The minor leagues—which rely on in-person interactions like concessions and ticket sales—were hit hard when the pandemic forced the cancellation of their 2020 seasons, but that’s not why these franchises got kicked to the curb. Plans to dramatically reduce the number of minor league franchises and players were in the works long before that, because Major League Baseball is filled with insufferable ghouls.

You don’t have to speculate about why big-league clubs decided to reduce their minor-league affiliates by 25 percent. They brag about it. In a 2019 piece at FiveThirtyEight titled “Do We Even Need Minor League Baseball?” baseball insiders argued that the minors were an inefficient way of grooming players to become major leaguers. There were more effective ways to, say, add velocity to a teenager’s fastball or improve a hitter’s launch angle than playing games—this kind of work could be done at closed-door facilities, and any time of year. And there were just so many minor leaguers. Why pay all those prospects, when only 10 percent of them will ever get to Chicago?

[snip]

Paying lots of people to play baseball was a problem, in developmental and financial terms, to be solved by paying substantially fewer people to play less baseball, in substantially fewer places. It’s a testament to the almost religious levels of self-absorption among Major League owners and executives that they didn’t think (or perhaps just did not care) about just how awful it sounds to tell people, publicly, that baseball games are a wasteful byproduct of professional baseball, as opposed to the entire point of professional baseball.

[snip]

What little leverage minor league franchises might have had disappeared with their 2020 seasons, although some, like the Staten Island Yankees, are pursuing their options in court. This month, after the realignment became official, the league offered a tepid helping hand to the franchises it had consigned to the scrap heap. Some of them will be absorbed into MLB-sanctioned summer leagues for college baseball players or “draft leagues” for players looking to showcase their wares for scouts—which is to say, they will be replacing rosters of low-paid workers with unpaid amateur volunteers. Others are abandoning the farm system entirely to try their luck in the independent leagues. Nearly two dozen franchises are still figuring out what, if anything, they’ll do next.

Thanks to WBBsAs for the pointer to the minor league story.

Nov 30

The Hot Stove needs stoking

The uncertainty over the pandemic’s scope and duration is having an impact on baseball’s off-season. There haven’t been very many trades or free-agent signings since the World Series ended the last week of October. While MLB has roughly $2 billion per year in revenue from TV rights (Fox, TBS, ESPN), it derives close to $3 billion from gate receipts (tickets, concessions, parking). A sports industry analysis company called Team Marketing Report created a data set showing truly horrific business results for 2020:

TMR annually produces what it calls the Fan Cost Index, a calculation of the average cost for a fan to attend a game for teams across sports. For the 2020 MLB season, TMR produced a data set looking at how much game-day revenue each club missed out on with the absence of fans. The projection draws from TMR’s 2020 MLB Fan Cost Index and uses what each team saw for attendance across its full 2019 slate of games to approximate the spending that didn’t happen for home games in 2020 because fans weren’t in attendance.

The result: More than $5 billion in lost revenue across the league, according to TMR’s calculations. The New York Yankees topped the list, with an estimated $437 million in game-day revenue lost compared to what the Yankees might have drawn with fans attending a traditional 81-game home schedule. The Miami Marlins were on the other end of the scale, at No 30, with $37 million in game-day revenue lost.

See the projected game-day impact for each of MLB’s 30 teams through the gallery above.

If a COVID-19 vaccine or several vaccines become available to the general public by April the season might conceivably begin with fans in the stands, but there’s no guarantee of that. There’s also no guarantee that enough of the public will actually get vaccinated, a requirement before any form of herd immunity can be assured. Failing that, baseball may start its season with cardboard cutouts in the seats again with a resulting loss of revenue.

No GM is going to commit a lot of money to a free agent pitcher without having some idea of how much money he or she is going to take in during the years of that pitcher’s contract. I wouldn’t expect a big surge in player contract signing or movement before spring training begins, or even until it’s close to ending. The US may have a better feel for how its vaccination program is proceeding by then.

Jun 20

The owners propose, the virus disposes

From the Washington Post:

While MLB and the union haggle over the terms of the season and the money each side receives, the virus ultimately will decide how much — or whether — baseball will be played in 2020.

[snip]

MLB is left to decide whether it wants to impose a mini-season, leaving itself open to a potential $1 billion grievance the union would almost certainly file, or use the spread of the virus across the game’s ranks as a reason to punt on 2020 entirely.

At the same time, the players have the choice between accepting MLB’s latest proposal for a 60-game season — which would come with an expanded postseason and an agreement to waive potential grievances — or rejecting the proposal and accepting whatever imposed schedule, probably in the 50-game range, MLB comes up with.

For the first time I am not hopeful that there’ll be any season worth thinking about. Fifty games is ridiculously short, as is anything short of 81, as far as I’m concerned. A fifty game season would require the mother of all asterisks in the record books. But trying to squeeze 81 games plus playoffs by the end of October is impossible, particularly when you have the most visible and trusted public health doctor in the country suggesting MLB really should wrap up the year by the end of September.

We’ll see, but I feel about a 50-game season the way Juliet felt about falling in love with Romeo so quickly:

“I have no joy of this contract tonight.
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say “It lightens.”