Tag: mlbpa

Notes: 2028 and beyond, Rays get their bonds, holiday sign-off

My latest at Baseball Prospectus (and reasons to subscribe to BP), the Rays get their way in the end, and saying goodbye to 2024.

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.

I said I’d get my thoughts organized here for use in a feature down the road, and that’s just what I did. My latest for Baseball Prospectus — titled “Baseball in the Future, Tense” by the wonderfully witty editors I work with over there — published on Thursday.

Within, I give some background on how things stood in the league, regarding spending in relation to the luxury tax threshold, back before the 2019 season, and where it stands now. Which is all a build up to show that there’s a growing divide between the teams willing to spend — which barely existed six years ago, in the runup to what MLB and its owners knew would be a defining labor battle with the Players Association over the new CBA — and those who are not. One that’s only going to worsen for sure as the new broadcasting arrangement comes into play in 2028 and requires a heavier revenue-sharing load for the “big” market teams to carry in order to subsidize the “small” market ones, and might worsen further depending on the ability — or lack thereof — of Rob Manfred’s successor as commissioner to keep everyone unified despite said growing divide.

Continue reading “Notes: 2028 and beyond, Rays get their bonds, holiday sign-off”

The A’s have to spend now, or else

The A’s have to spend, due to increased revenue-sharing, and oh, they also aren’t projected to spend more than they did in 2024, so maybe relax the “dawn of a new era” reactions.

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.

The A’s publicly said, quite awhile ago, that they planned on increasing their payroll in the future. They also stated that the expectation was that this would begin in the 2024-2025 offseason — it was clear that signing players might be difficult for them, given convincing anyone to intentionally play for them in a minor-league stadium in Sacramento for a few years was going to be a tough sell, but trades were always an option, too.

They’ve recently added a couple of expensive — for them — players onto the roster, which of course implies that it truly was Oakland holding them back, or that their ways have changed, or whatever positive interpretation they hope you take away from this for their benefit; MLB’s own website is of course happy to promote a “new direction” for the franchise. The truth of the matter is much simpler, however: the A’s have to spend, or else a grievance will be filed against them.

Continue reading “The A’s have to spend now, or else”

Notes: Diamond, the catcher market, Rays’ stadium deal dead or dying

Catching up on the week of holiday news, before the winter meetings shift.

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.

My latest at Baseball Prospectus (subscription required) published a week ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to share it in this space until now. It’s meant to, now that we’ve got clarity on the Diamond bankruptcy situation, point out how we could see this moment in time coming a few years ago as the players were locked out by the owners during collective bargaining, and that we’re not going to see the full effects of the league’s transition from primarily cable broadcast to primarily streaming happen without another CBA battle.

Continue reading “Notes: Diamond, the catcher market, Rays’ stadium deal dead or dying”

The Fair Ball Act would close an exploitable loophole

A collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its minor leaguers only goes as far as federal and state exemptions allow it to.

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.

Minor league baseball players might have unionized in the fall of 2022, leading to their first-ever collective bargaining agreement early the next year, but that alone isn’t enough. This was obvious at the time, as, even while MLB was at the bargaining table with the Players Association, the former was trying to support an exemption that would allow them to a CBA workaround in Florida — one that would have let them avoid adhering to the state’s minimum wage laws.

Here’s what I said at the time about that, in March of 2023:

Continue reading “The Fair Ball Act would close an exploitable loophole”

Dick Moss, MLBPA legend, passes away at 93

One of the union pillars that helped banish MLB’s reserve clause passed away over the weekend.

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.

The names you so often hear associated with the end of Major League Baseball’s reserve clause are players Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, as well as MLB Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, for encouraging this challenge to be made in the first place. Those players didn’t argue their own case in front of an arbitrator, however: that job went to Dick Moss, who had been hired by Miller as the union’s general counsel in 1967, and won his most famous and vital case eight years later, representing Messersmith and McNally, but in reality, far more players than just those two. His is a name worth remembering, too.

Continue reading “Dick Moss, MLBPA legend, passes away at 93”

Fanatics claims it owns your kids’ likeness rights, forever

Fanatics has their latest cost-cutting scheme, and it’s trying to get perpetual likeness rights from children and potential future minor leaguers years before they go pro.

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.

Thanks to some excellent reporting from Britt Ghiroli at The Athletic, we now know what the latest chapter in the “everything Fanatics touches is terrible in some way” saga is. Fanatics is partnering together with Perfect Game, the “world’s largest baseball scouting service” which serves as both a showcase for amateur players and a high-level competitive environment for amateur baseball, in order to create memorabilia for these kids. Sounds innocent enough, right? Of course there’s another layer to all of this.

Perfect Game already had kids giving up the rights to their likenesses, as agents have been warning parents for a couple of years now about the practice, but, as Scott Boras told Ghiroli, “They have now gotten into profit-taking on this.” Amateurs can’t have agents, but agents can advise them, and not signing is one thing they’re being advised about now.

Continue reading “Fanatics claims it owns your kids’ likeness rights, forever”

On the salaries of MLB’s ‘disposable pitchers’

A day in the majors isn’t worth what happens to the salary of this new class of churned-through pitcher.

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.

Last week, I shared a Baseball Prospectus story written by Jarrett Seidler and Rob Mains on the rise of the “disposable pitcher.” A trend has emerged, with teams calling up a pitcher — a not-really-a-prospect kind of pitcher — on the 40-man roster up from the minors for a very temporary stay in the majors, and then designating them for assignment after they’re done with them rather than optioning them back to the minors. This allows for them to, effectively, stream a 40-man roster spot for additional call-ups like this down the road, while also allowing them to avoid exposing any genuine prospects to the majors or the need to be optioned before they feel like those players are ready for the show.

As I wrote last Friday:

Continue reading “On the salaries of MLB’s ‘disposable pitchers’”

MLBPA picks up a win, awful uniforms will see changes

And the Players Association would like everyone to know Fanatics wasn’t the issue here.

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.

Not every labor win has to wait for bargaining. Take the recent issue with MLB’s uniforms, for instance: in short, they’re terrible, and now they’ll be fixed. The when of that is a bit more up in the air — according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, it’ll be early 2025 at the latest — but hey. The players won, despite the defense of MLB this spring basically being a gaslighting, “no, we’ve always been able to see your balls.”

It’s not just that the fabric was see through, either. Pants and tops didn’t match. The lettering on the jerseys was small, and looked like it belonged on children’s replica jerseys. The pants would rip at seemingly the drop of a hat. The supposedly breathable fabric of the new-style jerseys resulted in a lot of pictures of players absolutely dripping with sweat from games played during the coldest part of the season. It was all a terrible experiment in… well, in who knows what, really. The kind of innovation companies always looking to make more money or cut costs play around with, that results in messing with what already works in a way that makes it worse? The Google, if you would. Nike didn’t need to do any of what they did here, with the players even warning them they didn’t like the directions they were taking, and yet, here we are.

Continue reading “MLBPA picks up a win, awful uniforms will see changes”

Notes: Other teams unhappy with A’s, gambling, Scott Boras axed

Catching up on a week of news that wouldn’t stop.

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.

Last week, Buster Olney tweeted out something that made the whole internet groan. Not at Olney — not this time — but at pretty much all of MLB. You can probably figure out why just from reading what was said:

Within other organizations, there is a lot of disgust with how the A’s have handled the ballpark situation — especially when there’s no actual ballpark plan settled in Las Vegas. And there is an assumption the A’s will tank in the next few years, because their revenue stream will be down to a trickle. “This makes us all look bad,” said one person.

This was met with a chorus of “why did they approve the A’s move, then?!” which, understandable. A few things I’ve been thinking about, though, that should get a mention. For one, Olney doesn’t clarify whether this is from an owner, or an executive who happens to work for one, who had nothing to do with the move being allowed. It would be helpful if we knew: my guess is that it’s an executive who knows how bad of a look this is, and not one of the owners, who by and large are too removed from humanity to ever consider how something will make them “look” to people at large.

Continue reading “Notes: Other teams unhappy with A’s, gambling, Scott Boras axed”

Notes: MLBPA, Orioles ownership change, A’s boycott

A normal week, a change of hands via loophole, and John Fisher getting embarrassed. A busy Friday, really.

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.

As promised, my latest for Baseball Prospectus is a reaction to the news that there is a whole lot of internal grumbling going on in the Players Association — grumbling that, for a brief time, made it look as if there was going to be major leadership turnover in the form of lead negotiator and deputy director Bruce Meyer and executive director Tony Clark losing their jobs.

That time has passed, however, the worst possible damage from the storm now evaded. However, that storm is not quite finished. Luckily, as I get into, everything left is honestly just normal business: the kind of behaviors that you’d expect from a union that is nearly six times the size now as it was when it signed the 2022 MLB collective bargaining agreement, thanks to the addition of 5,400 minor leaguers as a sub-unit under the PA’s umbrella.

Continue reading “Notes: MLBPA, Orioles ownership change, A’s boycott”