Category: Labor

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There’s a large part of me that is very much, “well, we’ll see what happens” when it comes to awards voting — no inherent desire to make a lot of noise about voting for me when there is a time to do so, for instance. I’m going to make an exception on this occasion, though, at least as far as sending a single newsletter notification on the subject goes, as I was nominated for a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award, in the category of Historical Baseball Analysis/Commentary.

The reason for the exception is that there is no nomination for an award, nor is there even the article that was nominated for one, without this labor newsletter. Sure, it’s now entering its fourth year of existence and I haven’t bothered to name it yet — and I promise you I never will — but it’s vital to the work that I do. The way I write and research and react here allows me to form my thoughts, gain some coherence, connect dots, and then end up writing pieces that are longer than what I send out here a couple times per week, for outlets like Baseball Prospectus, Defector, Fair, and more. Blogging isn’t dead, even if it feels like it, and the way I operate here is very much in the blogging style, which keeps myself and the audience (hey, that’s you) up to speed on what’s happening and what it means, and lets me build towards putting all of the what’s happening and what it means together for a larger audience later down the road.

The nominated article, titled “1994 Explains What ‘Labor Peace’ Never Could,” ran at Baseball Prospectus at the end of February of last year, amid the unnecessary lockout. I knew quite a bit about how 1994 went down and what it meant then and its repercussions for the future, but the level of detail I was able to put into this piece existed because of work I had done in this space in the three years prior. I’ve joked that this newsletter and the site it’s hosted on are like a little baseball labor wiki, given how much linking to previous work and sourcing there is contained within, but the process of putting all of said sourcing and such together is what gets me to the place where I can write, ahem, an award-nominated feature (on Rob Manfred’s bullshit).

So! Thank you for reading; having an audience makes sure this is more than just a preparatory journal for the freelance work that also helps pay the bills. If you want to vote for the piece I wrote, you can do so here, at Baseball Prospectus, which is hosting the voting mechanism along with a few other SABR-approved locations.

There’s some truly excellent work that’s been nominated, and I’m not just being polite when I say it’s an honor to be in the company that I’m in this year. Thanks for reading, for sharing my work, for the mailbag questions, for your fellow distrust in what MLB’s lords are saying and doing. It helps keep all of this and the labor-related bees in my head going.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

We’re one season into MLB’s most recent collective bargaining agreement, and spending seems to be up. That’s good! It’s up in a couple of ways, too: as Maury Brown pointed out (by way of the Associated Press) at Forbes, the collected spending of the luxury tax clubs exceeded $5 billion for the first time, and that’s over $600 million more than they spent in 2021. A whole lot of cash goes into those figures, though, beyond just player salaries:

Continue reading “MLB spending is up, and yet”