Marc Normandin, Author at Marc Normandin is creating baseball coverage, featuring leftism

The MLBPA’s recent firing shouldn’t be controversial, and yet

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The Major League Baseball Players Association recently fired a long-term attorney, Rick Shapiro, and as Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich report, it’s causing waves both internally and externally. Per that report, Shapiro was dismissed by the MLBPA as a way of shoring up solidarity. Agents, though, are concerned that this is the influence of Scott Boras, and that there will be downsides to getting rid of someone with Shapiro’s experience.

That’s the short of it, but something like this requires more than just a quick explanation. The Players Association and MLB are currently doing some early bargaining over economic issues, more than two years prior to the expiration of the current CBA, so the MLBPA getting a look at what is working and what isn’t with regard to their strategies and strategists comes with that territory. The MLBPA has a new lead negotiator, Bruce Meyer, and Shapiro was around and working on the previous two CBAs from 2012 and 2016, both of which have been derided — by myself and others in media, and some vocal players, too. Combine the unhappiness with those CBAs with the introduction of Meyer, and this bit from the report at The Athletic…

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Trying to win is for losers

Here’s how a $15 minimum wage would impact minor-league pay

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Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $15. Leaving aside that the bill in question wouldn’t actually raise the minimum to $15 until 2025, or that this won’t pass the Senate and become the law of the land, it’s worth exploring how this kind of change would impact baseball in the United States.

While a higher minimum wage wouldn’t impact MLB players, given the league minimum is $550,000 right now, it would change the salaries of minor-league players as well as those in independent ball. It might even succeed in killing indie baseball, but as I’ve written about before, that’s not the worst outcome, at least when we’re talking about the current format of independent ball. Give me municipal baseball teams and give them to me now, thanks.

A jump to a $15 minimum wage would be massive for MLB’s minor-league players, who currently, at the lowest levels, pull in $1,160 per month, and only for the months of the regular season. Despite working about 70 hours per week, none of them are receiving overtime, and won’t, either, thanks to MLB’s years of lobbying Congress to make sure that didn’t happen, which resulted in minor-league players being singled out in last spring’s $1.3 trillion spending bill. They have to get offseason jobs, split roach-infested, filthy, broken apartments with five other teammates, eat mac and cheese and ramen and Dollar Menu meals all the time because of the low pay and road-only $25 per diem, purchase their own equipment… you see what I’m saying. More than doubling the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 would be huge for these sub-poverty-level workers.

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Manny Machado pointed out some of MLB’s structural racism

MLB’s international events, lack of WWE union, and [robot] sports cops

MLB’s early collective bargaining sessions might just be theater

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If what Evan Drellich has reported at The Athletic is any indication, we should be expecting little to no progress from Major League Baseball and the Players Associations two-years-early collective bargaining sessions. The short of it is that MLB claims they’re still awaiting any meaningful proposal from the MLBPA, while the players’ side doesn’t seem to believe MLB is here to do anything but tell people that they tried to start a dialogue.

From Drellich:

In his opening statement Tuesday in an annual media session before the All-Star Game, Clark listed off the primary talking points for the players: A desire for greater competitiveness amongst teams, improvements to free agency, and so on.

Then Clark quickly suggested that the league will not engage substantively on any of these fronts at this point, because the league doesn’t want to change its economics. A charge, in essence, that the league is willing to listen, but not act meaningfully.

If you’ve ever been involved in collective bargaining or even as part of a union listening to what your bargaining committee is reporting back, then you know this feeling all too well. MLB could very well be presenting a sympathetic face to the media and fans, so that if things come crashing down in the future, they can always point back to this moment and say they tried. If it weren’t for those pesky players, you know?

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The media still isn’t helping

The USWNT’s fight for equal pay takes center stage

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The United States Women’s National Team are your 2019 World Cup champions, just like they were in 2015. This time around, though, there is a discussion going on outside of just how awesome this roster and its players are (incredibly awesome, for the record): it’s beyond time for the women of America’s national team to be paid on par with the men of America’s national team.

It’s not just fans or media who think so, or anything like that: the team itself believes as much, and in fact sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination back in March of this year:

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A look at the NHL and NBA offseasons (and what we can learn about MLB’s from them)

MLB needs to change their domestic violence culture if there’s any hope

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It’s July 1, which means it’s the day that San Francisco Giants’ president and CEO Larry Baer is returning to work. Baer was suspended through the end of June for attacking his wife in public, on camera, and while charges weren’t pressed against him, MLB has the power to hand out suspensions all the same, which tends to be useful in situations like this one.

There were and are more significant questions with regard to MLB and domestic abuse, and Baer’s abuse of his wife, than whether or not this suspension was long enough. As Hannah Keyser asked back in late-March when the suspension was first handed to Baer, who called the attack “a mistake”:

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