Category: Labor

On no-trade clauses and ‘losers’

Eduardo Rodriguez is stuck with a losing team for a couple more months, but it’s in a city his family doesn’t mind being in.

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On Thursday, Ken Rosenthal wrote about the failed trade of Eduardo Rodriguez to the Dodgers for The Athletic. It broke down the trade that failed to materialize thanks to Rodriguez’s invocation of his no-trade clause, which came out of a desire to stay in Detroit, where his Miami-based family didn’t mind spending their summers. In the piece, Rosenthal says there are no winners here, that both the Tigers and Dodgers failed in different ways. That, there should be no problems with: the Tigers could have used some pieces to help a rebuild along, the Dodgers needed a starter like Rodriguez (who has a 2.96 ERA right now and who has been pretty damn good outside of his last year in Boston, which was just average) right now. Neither got what they wanted, and since Rodriguez can opt out of his Tigers’ deal at year’s end, and very well might do so given his performance so far this season, well. There won’t be another chance to collect on him.

What I take issue with is this line of thinking that followed:

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Rob Manfred will be re-elected as commissioner (and that’s okay)

Rob Manfred is good at the things the owner wants him to be good at and bad at the things I want a commissioner to be bad at.

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Per The Athletic, current MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is expected to be re-elected for a third term at some point this week. While I understand the grumbling and gnashing of teeth and all that over the imminent re-election of a man who has to be constantly given column space to assure us that no, he actually does like baseball, the reality of things is that this is good news. No, really!

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On AQI, solidarity, and scabs

Something has to be done that treats dangerous AQI with the gravity it deserves.

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When will Major League Baseball games set to be played in dangerous air quality conditions be regularly canceled instead of becoming a debate every time out? Maybe it’s best not to ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to. What we do know, however, is that Thursday’s contest between the Pirates and Padres in Pittsburgh was delayed due to the poor Air Quality Index, and then eventually played.

We’re going to have two stories converge into one here, so just bear with me. Jason Mackey, the Pirates’ beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, published a story on the delay and the game on Thursday. That story won’t be linked to here, because the Post-Gazette is on strike, and has been for months — so yes, McKay continuing to write for the Post-Gazette (along with other portions of the sports desk there) is scab behavior and should be treated as such. What I can link to, though, is McKay’s tweet on a quote that didn’t make it into his story.

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Dodgers’ stadium workers protest, threaten strike

Dodgers’ stadium workers — not the concessioners from last year — are threatening a strike while working under an expired contract.

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Back in April, stadium workers at the Pirates’ PNC Park threatened to go on strike if their demands weren’t met. The Pirates had stopped negotiating with these employees, so this was the last recourse available to the ushers, ticket takers, and ticket sellers: the team averted the strike by reaching a tentative deal before it was set to occur, and while I didn’t love said deal, the threat at least got the team to respond.

Now, Dodgers’ stadium workers will try their luck with a similar tactic, which also follows Dodger Stadium concession workers successfully negotiating a new deal in 2022. Those workers, part of UNITE HERE, threatened to strike the All-Star Game, which would have been a serious issue for the Dodgers as hosts, given the magnitude of the midsummer classic on the schedule. The strike threat convinced someone on the management side to get back to the table, whether it was Compass/Levy, the concessioners that employ the union members, or someone from the Dodgers screaming in someone from Compass/Levy’s ear about it since it was going to impact them — either way, it worked.

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No ‘information bank’ for free agents, says MLB’s deputy commissioner

That doesn’t mean teams will stop operating in bad faith, but it’s still nice to see the union extract this kind of thing in writing.

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The 2022-2026 MLB collective bargaining agreement has been active for over a year now, but the official, finalized version of it only recently became thus — once everything was translated into acceptable legalese. And, there are other reasons to discuss it at this point in time as well. For instance, MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem sent a letter to the executive director of the Players Association, Tony Clark, stating that there would be no “information bank” kept by the league for free agents. It’s not just a letter, either, as it’s an attachment in the current CBA, which was recently made available to read online once it was all official.

There’s not much to it, either, as this is the entirety of said letter, found on page 207 of the CBA:

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Notes: Kumar Rocker injury, Writers’ Strike

Kumar Rocker is a pitcher, and pitchers get hurt.

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Kumar Rocker will reportedly undergo Tommy John surgery, ending his 2023 and impacting his 2024 as well. The Rangers’ pitching prospect famously wasn’t signed by the Mets after they drafted him due to concerns with his physical and his long-term health, which kicked off a series of events that led to owner Steve Cohen tweeting a little too much about it and having those tweets used against the defense in Senne v. MLB (a class action suit that MLB lost).

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Jerry Reinsdorf cares about winning, not money, says Jerry Reinsdorf

lol

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Jerry Reinsdorf purchased the White Sox in 1981. From 1981 through 2022, the White Sox have posted a record of 3,313 wins and 3,262 losses, for a win percentage of .504. They’ve made the postseason just seven times in that stretch, and in all but one of those appearances, they lost in the first round, whether said first round was an ALCS, ALDS, or Wild Card round. In 2005, they won the World Series, the franchise’s first even appearance in the Fall Classic since 1959, and the organization’s first championship since 1917 — two years before the Black Sox betting scandal.

Payroll data isn’t widely available or consistent past a certain point, but we can pretty easily look back to at least 2000 thanks to Cot’s Contracts, and get a look at where Reinsdorf’s White Sox tend to rank in that arena in the aftermath of two waves of expansion as well as the 1994 strike and its fallout, which eventually included a luxury tax and revenue-sharing. The number in parentheses is the team’s rank in a given measurement:

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Notes: A’s and Vegas, Nashville, and front office unionization

More on the A’s and Las Vegas, the next step in expansion, and a look at the why and what of front office unionization.

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The A’s are likely going to play baseball in Las Vegas as soon as their lease with the city of Oakland is up following the 2024 season, but then again, maybe they won’t. All of that is pretty unsettled at the moment, with all kinds of negotiations for public subsidies and tax dollars still occurring, which will happen for at least another month until Vegas’ current legislative session ends. “The A’s move to Las Vegas” is probably the most-likely scenario, but there’s also “the A’s stay in Oakland, sell, and current owner John Fisher takes over an expansion team that will go to Vegas instead” as well as “the A’s and Las Vegas don’t agree on anything in time but Oakland won’t renew the lease, leaving the A’s to play their games in a Triple-A stadium while they argue over public funding for years, again.”

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MLB’s owners want to put a cap on contract length

There’s little chance such a cap would exist, but we can still explore why the league would want it.

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Late last month at Global Sport Matters, I wrote about how the Padres and Mets were “paving the way for the next era of MLB labor relations.” The idea was that the union was able to keep MLB from accomplishing all of its lockout-related goals in the new collective bargaining agreement, and now, on top of the league’s failure to squash the union and its power, they had this terrifying new era where minor leaguers were unionized, the regional sports network model was faltering, and clubs like the Padres and Mets were not following the unwritten rules of spending like they’re supposed to.

I concluded the piece with these thoughts:

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PNC employees avert strike before Tuesday’s Pirates’ game

The deal hasn’t been ratified, and it has its issues, but a strike was at least temporarily averted.

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A strike was authorized in Major League Baseball, but you might have missed that news, since it wasn’t one that involved the players. Employees at PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, authorized a strike and planned to picket outside of Tuesday’s game between the Pirates and Reds, but the strike ended up being averted due to a tentative deal reached with the club before any action beyond authorization could be taken. Strikes don’t have to happen to be effective, they just have to be a credible threat to be taken seriously.

And there wasn’t much the Pirates were going to be able to do on short notice when the ushers, ticket takers, and ticket sellers were showing up to picket outside of the stadium and explain to anyone trying to come to the game why they weren’t in their usual stations, ready to sell tickets or help visitors to their seats. So, a tentative agreement was reached, the strike was averted, and these employees will now vote on a deal that would go through 2025 and include retroactive pay for the 2022 season.

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