Tag: lockout

MLB is ready to cancel games over labor dispute, unless they’re not

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MLB and the MLBPA met on consecutive days this week, which sounds like it’ll be the norm for a bit as the two try to work through bargaining issues without putting entire weeks in between sessions again. Reports on the meetings ranged from the discovery that Dick Monfort put his foot in his mouth so hard on day one that he wasn’t medically cleared to attend day two, to the players being angry at not just Monfort’s crying poor, but MLB’s clear plan of pretending their awful offers were magnanimous instead of making bad situations worse, and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman tweeting that “it’s good they’re talking” as he “reported” on salary numbers I covered in this space nearly two weeks ago.

There’s quite a bit to cover from these two days of meetings, and I will certainly be doing so between now and whenever the next sessions end up being. First, though, let’s take a look at a specific report, courtesy of The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, the meaning of which MLB is already saying we’re all misinterpreting.

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Please stop blaming MLB’s players for the owners locking them out

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The Players Association and Major League Baseball are meeting on Monday for the second time post-lockout, with the former being the one to call this bargaining session in order to make a counter proposal to MLB’s from earlier in January. The first meeting of the new year and the lockout gave us an idea of where MLB is at this point — they are pretty clearly waiting around for the players to get antsy and cave as spring training and the regular season approach, hence their lack of movement and seemingly purposeful wasting of everyone else’s time with their last set of proposals — so now we get a chance to see if the players are even a little bit in the mood the league is hoping for, or if they’re also willing to stand by their previous proposals. Or at least the spirit of them, which was about furthering player choice while tweaking the models that already exist to remove loopholes, cut down on exploitation, etc.

We’ve got a real “both sides” thing going on here, as was discussed here on Friday in relation to Jomboy and Jomboy Media’s whole deal on Twitter, but the independent outlet and namesake is far from the only one working on this sort of thing. Bernie Pleskoff, who writes for Forbes and used to be a scout for the Mariners and the Astros, took some time this weekend to very publicly misunderstand everything going on in bargaining in order to throw down his own “both sides” complaint.

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It is unreasonable to say the MLBPA’s proposals are unreasonable

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I have seen this odd reaction of late — in my Twitter mentions, in the comments to some of my work, in other peoples’ tweets I do not feel like engaging with — that the Players Association’s economic proposals are unreasonable. This, of course, lends credence to the idea that the players are in some part responsible for the owners locking them out, which they are not. It’s worth breaking down this idea of unreasonableness, though, if for no other reason than it will give me something to link to whenever this idea pops up.

Jomboy Media tweeted out a video the other day both sidesing the current lockout, and said tweet included the text, “It’s possible we lose a full month of the MLB season because of the lockout, and it’s incredibly dumb that the league and players allowed this to happen while the sport’s popularity was growing at such a good pace”. Now, Jomboy Media is relatively new, but they are growing, and have an audience: the main account I linked to there has over 125,000 Twitter followers, which isn’t nothing, and the personal account of Jomboy himself has over 400,000 followers — more than SB Nation’s general Twitter account, if you need some context. He used that space to spread misinformation about how player representation even works in bargaining and within the union, and considering his outreach… that’s a problem!

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MLB’s ‘proposal’ proposal was even worse than we knew

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That MLB’s final pre-lockout bargaining session was something of a joke where they didn’t even attempt to talk with the Players Association was already known: the New York Times reported on it in the moment, and the union rep for the Cubs, Ian Happ, referenced as much in a radio interview last month as well. Now, though, we know the depths of the humor in said joke, thanks to the reporting of ESPN’s Jeff Passan.

You need a subscription to read the whole thing, so I’m just going to quote this relevant passage from the larger story on the state of the lockout:

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Don’t expect a quick resolution to the MLB lockout

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“When will the lockout end?” is kind of an open question at this point. There was very little reason for it to end quickly after MLB’s owners enacted it, no matter how much optimism commissioner Rob Manfred might have publicly displayed in a lockout being a path to a quick resolution of the issues between the clubs and the players. Considering the MLBPA’s reaction to the lockout was basically “this is only going to make us angrier with you, you know” and a bunch of rolled eyes at Manfred’s letter, well, there is even less reason to believe that things are going to be smoothed out in a hurry.

Which is fine, of course, these things should take all the time they need to take in order to sort themselves out, but it is worth noting that we’re in for a long winter. The chances of this being resolved by springtime aren’t necessarily high, and I’m talking the seasonal date there, not the spring training one.

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If forced to choose between arbitration and free agency proposals, MLBPA should pick arb

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I’ve been thinking and writing about the kinds of demands the MLB Players Association should be making of Major League Baseball in this round of collective bargaining for a few years now, so it should not be a surprise that I have some thoughts on the specific proposals we do have word of from the union’s side. There is a lockout because MLB seemingly wants no change unless it’s the kind that will further benefit the owners’ pockets, while the union is pushing to close off some of the loopholes exploited by those same owners over the duration of the previous CBA. Given this, there is the chance that, even if the PA holds strong and MLB lifts the lockout more because they blinked than because they crushed the union as they hope to, the union won’t get everything it wants — some proposals will need to be dropped, others prioritized.

Two that have received a bit of attention in these early days have been the desire to cut the time it takes to get to free agency from six years to five (with an age threshold component thrown in for players who debut much later and have already toiled within their initial contract for a long time) and cutting the amount of time it takes to reach arbitration eligibility. I don’t think it’s impossible that the PA gets both of these asks, in some form, but if you asked me to bet on it, I’d say MLB moves on one but not the other in order to try to limit the “damage.”. So let’s figure out which of them the union absolutely should not give up on, and why it’s the arbitration proposal.

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You still can’t trust MLB, because they still don’t deserve trust

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It turns out that MLB used two different baseballs during the 2021 season, and didn’t tell, well, anyone about that decision. You can and should read the entire piece on the issue written by Bradford William Davis, but I don’t want to simply reiterate what was said within here. No, instead, this thing everyone is talking about is going to be used as a hook to discuss something else everyone is talking about. I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the curtain of the writing process.

The point we need to take from Davis’ piece, for our purposes here, anyway, is that MLB remains completely untrustworthy, and undeserving of trust, as well. That’s not a new concept, of course, but the timing of a reminder could not be better, considering we’re mere hours away from the start of a lockout of the players that doesn’t need to even happen once the current collective bargaining agreement expires, but will happen just the same. How are you supposed to believe MLB is competent, or acting in good faith, or any other positive you can ascribe to them in bargaining when they seemingly go out of their way to act in the worst possible ways? Or, if they aren’t purposefully lying and hiding the truth of things and so on, are so incompetent about how they go about their business that you can’t tell the difference in the results, anyway?

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MLB and the MLBPA are planning as if a lockout is a real possibility

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It certainly feels as if MLB’s owners are going to lock the players out when the current collective bargaining agreement expires on December 2. Feeling something doesn’t necessarily make it true, though, but all the same, the reason it feels like a lockout is imminent is because of what we’re seeing in the news relating to collective bargaining over the past couple of weeks.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently went out of his way to try to make a distinction between an offseason lockout and a work stoppage that interferes with games. There is no reason to lay down that kind of foundation unless you’re expecting to have to build on it. That MLB’s economic proposals are so far off the mark from what the players have reportedly been proposing, too — and submitted so close to the deadline, too — certainly makes it feel as if MLB’s goal here is to enact a lockout in the hopes they can weaken the unity and stance of the Players Association.

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In CBA talks, all that matters is what’s said behind closed doors

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My latest for Baseball Prospectus took a look at the growing whispers around the ongoing collective bargaining occurring between Major League Baseball and the Players Association. It’s behind BP’s paywall for subscribers, but I can give you the gist of it and a quote before we dive in a little further:

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