Arbitration shouldn’t go anywhere

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The greatest evidence that exists in favor of arbitration is that Major League Baseball wants to do away with it. It’s not a perfect system, no, given the arbitrators themselves are inconsistent, and MLB spends an awful lot of time coaching up its teams on specific talking points so that they can defend their positions, but in aggregate, there is a reason that the Players Association is in favor of keeping an arbitration system in place, while the league would love very much to be done with it.

Even in an offseason like this one, where the players were trounced in arbitration itself, the system still allows for teams to negotiate with players — for players to ask for more than they could without the threat of an arbitration hearing in place — and end up with a higher salary than they would have with no such event looming in the distance. As I wrote back in 2019 for Deadspin:

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Diamond is probably going away, but broadcasting should remain

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There sure seems to be trouble in regional sports network land, and the question of the day is how it will end up impacting Major League Baseball and the payments owed to them by various RSNs. There’s the well-publicized issue of what’s going on with Diamond Sports Group, which runs Bally Sports, as they announced they’re skipping a $140 million interest payment, which now gives them a 30-day grace period to figure out if they’re going to make said payment or file for bankruptcy instead. Alongside that, though, is AT&T Sports, which is run by Warner Media, and has possibly already missed out on its first slate of payments for broadcasting games. Possibly, because there have already been denials from AT&T Sports, on the matter, but we can at least treat that as a potential where there’s smoke there’s fire situation until things are known for sure one way or the other. [2/20/2023 note: This article originally linked to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story here, but the Post-Gazette staff is on strike. Apologies for the oversight; the link has been removed.]

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The A’s have been busy, but only relatively speaking

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The A’s keep on making moves this offseason, with the latest of them a trade of reliever-turning-starter A.J. Puk to the Marlins for sophomore outfielder JJ Bleday. It’s something of a challenge trade, since Puk converted to the bullpen in the minors and hasn’t made a start in the bigs, while Bleday’s rookie season didn’t approach his Triple-A production, but the thing I mostly want to note is that the A’s have been busy, but they haven’t exactly been putting in full effort. Again.

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A reminder the ‘Steve Cohen tax’ hasn’t really hit yet

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Shohei Ohtani won’t be a free agent until next winter, but he’s also literally Shohei Ohtani, so discussions about what his free agency will look like are already happening. A notable one occurred last week, when a “high-ranking exec” predicted to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman “a reckoning” when the current collective bargaining agreement expires to attempt to keep the spending of Mets’ owner Steve Cohen in check:

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Hey, I was nominated for a SABR Research award (and you can vote for me! If you want to.)

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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.

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Dick Monfort is good for a laugh, at least

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The owners of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams are quite the bunch, in the sense that the vast majority of them are capable of doing or saying something that will either raise my blood pressure or get me to start giggling at how much of a dingus they are. Rockies’ owner Dick Monfort could very well be king dingus in this group: a man who has won nothing ever, and yet is so publicly sure that the way he’s doing things is the right way. And to the point where he’s now openly criticizing the spending of fellow NL West club the Padres, as well as any of the Rockies’ fans who believe that the way San Diego is operating is the right way to go about building a successful team.

From Saturday’s Denver Post:

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John Henry lies about ticket prices, is booed

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It’s not exactly new information that there is no correlation between MLB ticket prices and player salaries. Baseball Prospectus ran an article on the subject in April of 2003, nearly 20 years ago now. Early 2003 is so long ago in analysis terms that it was two years before I made my own debut at Baseball Prospectus, and three years since I became a regular there. It’s so long ago that the author of that piece, Nate Silver, was years away from being a divisive figure. It’s been known for some time that ticket prices and salaries don’t align like that, is the point. Here’s Silver on the subject:

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MLB spending is up, and yet

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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:

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MLB sets revenue record once again, despite exec fears from 2020

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Major League Baseball is back from the pandemic, and by that I mean MLB’s revenues are once again setting records. After a brief pandemic-related break in what had been 17 consecutive seasons of record revenues — first the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign and then 2021’s lower than usual attendance due to the coronavirus pandemic still, you know, existing — the league pulled in at least $10.8 billion in 2022, according to Forbes’ Maury Brown. That’s ahead of the previous record, set in 2019, of $10.7 billion in revenue.

Brown mentions that, “the business of baseball rebounded out of the pandemic faster than a ball off the Green Monster at Fenway Park,” and I want to focus on that for a moment. The reason being that MLB executives anonymously whined about how long it was going to take them to be able to recover from having to pay players what they eventually ended up paying them during the shortened 2020 campaign. Let’s rewind for a moment, to May of 2020:

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Steve Cohen probably doesn’t care about a possible grievance

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Don’t confuse the headline for the idea that Carlos Correa, his agent Scott Boras, and the MLB Players Association shouldn’t bother filing a grievance against Mets’ owner Steve Cohen for publicly commenting on an unfinished free agent contract that ended up never being consummated. If they feel that the public, on-the-record comments — which are not supposed to exist until a deal is done, which is why you see general managers and owners playing coy all the time while we wait for press conference time to roll around — harmed Correa’s market in any way, they not only have a right to file a grievance, but a case they could win.

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