So they are actually meeting today.
View: https://twitter.com/byjameswagner/status/1499390849913958401?s=21
View: https://twitter.com/byjameswagner/status/1499390849913958401?s=21
The Mainboard MLB Lockout Thread
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I was responding to a question of whether in any other industry striking workers were criticized for not thinking of the customers. I pointed out two examples. I get that at this time we're probably on an cultural upswing as the way society views unions but that's because of several things, including the fact that most unions have been broken and the fact that the US has what I understand to be some pretty severe anti-striking laws so widespread strikes are super uncommon.
Still, my overall point is this. While I think I get that anger/outrage is a common reaction to having something taken away, and it makes way more sense to side with the millionaire players versus the billionaire owners, I guess my feeling is that baseball isn't worth any of my emotional investment. I mean to me, this is not really any different than major industry negotiations, whether it be a CBA, the financing of a stadium, the financing of a real estate development, etc. I mean Amazon basically went out and pitted every community in the nation against each other to get a few million more dollars and no one's using Amazon any less because of this.
Frankly, from where I sit, if people are really outraged, the best thing they could do is organize a mass effort to stop spending any money whatsoever on baseball-related items. I know people try to organize this every time there is a work stoppage and it never really happens but if someone could get a lot of people just to stop buying merchandise (including memorabilia) while the lockout keeps happening, that actually might get the attention of the powers-to-be. I mean participating in a large-scale boycott of MLB and any MLB sponsor would be a much better way to trying to get something done than being outraged at one or another person IMO.
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Organize and use their wallets. People can organize get companies to do things when there is so much outrage about the lockout.
Unless you get invested every year in the performance of McDonalds vs. Burger King, or spend hours of time enjoying yourself basking in the aisle of Home Depot, MLB is qualitatively different than Amazon and other corporations.
Just remove a zero from the numbers, and ask if $61,500 is a reasonable salary for the top expert in any particular field. It's weird because minimum salary isn't entry level, as MLB is the absolute best in their field. A master electrician might earn $61,500 with a company, but could earn double or triple as a consultant or on their own, depending on how good they are and what the market will pay. The consultant/self employed is arguably the free agent ballplayer.
Doctors might be a better example. Doctors have super low salaries before they finish schooling and specialization and actually become unrestricted free agent doctors for hire. They end up with huge salaries, but generally are dragging hundreds of thousands of dollars in school debt and 6-8 years of low pay before reaching that high salaried life, which for the first several years might be spent just digging out of debt. Not all, obviously, but generally they are not living it up for quite a while. Ballplayers are like doctors, but their careers are finite, where they may never even finish 'school', so the minimum salary of being among the greatest at the moment, might be the only big payday before they find a different career.
It's weird to decide what's enough for an individual to be paid for their services.
I would argue his point is exactly right. It's an internal business dispute. I am a customer at a restaurant the same way I am a customer for MLB. Whether I like the Big Mac or the Filet o Fish, or the Red Sox or the Yankees, isn't really relevant to this.
You're comparing the wrong teams. It's whether you root for players or owners
Reading this thread, I guess that's right...You're comparing the wrong teams. It's whether you root for players or owners
A few people are talking in the last few pages of the thread about the small market teams living off the CBT taxes, but that's really not the issue. It's a pretty tiny amount of money, because almost all teams have decided to treat the threshold as a de facto cap, or exceed only occasionally or mildly. Even the Dodgers only put a few million into that system.
The larger *revenue sharing* system is much more important in terms of influencing the behavior of the Pirates, Royals, Reds, Marlins, etc. We know each team gets ~$110m/year, but of course what matters is the net relative to their contributions. A team like the Red Sox likely pays in twice that sum, while the Royals or Pirates might contribute $20 or $30m and get $110m. And it really does seem that the carrot of eligibility of revenue sharing rebates was a big part of what got the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees to dip under the cap in recent years.
The point here is that the CBT does almost nothing for competitive balance, because it doesn't actually redistribute very much money. Like, if the Dodgers spend $280m, and drop $30m into the CBT bucket, and each small market team collects $2m from that... how exactly is that important to competitive balance? Revenue sharing, which is not so directly linked to player payrolls, is actually and obviously the main mechanism for keeping the small market teams afloat, but we talk a lot about the CBT stuff because we actually know the payroll numbers in detail. Let's imagine that Boston developed an unprecedented wave of young talent all at once and the payroll fell to — I don't know — $70m while its roster was full of young players. It would have a payroll in the bottom half of teams, but would still contribute the same amount to revenue sharing.
I interpret all of this to mean that the players are right about the CBT. Its competitive balance functions are a fig leaf; it has really become the mechanism of an anti-competitive gentlemen's agreement among the owners. What it actually ends up doing, in tandem with revenue sharing, is suppressing salaries in a way that allows small market teams to just live off their revenue sharing receipts in a way that relieves them of any pressure to try to be good.
The larger *revenue sharing* system is much more important in terms of influencing the behavior of the Pirates, Royals, Reds, Marlins, etc. We know each team gets ~$110m/year, but of course what matters is the net relative to their contributions. A team like the Red Sox likely pays in twice that sum, while the Royals or Pirates might contribute $20 or $30m and get $110m. And it really does seem that the carrot of eligibility of revenue sharing rebates was a big part of what got the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees to dip under the cap in recent years.
The point here is that the CBT does almost nothing for competitive balance, because it doesn't actually redistribute very much money. Like, if the Dodgers spend $280m, and drop $30m into the CBT bucket, and each small market team collects $2m from that... how exactly is that important to competitive balance? Revenue sharing, which is not so directly linked to player payrolls, is actually and obviously the main mechanism for keeping the small market teams afloat, but we talk a lot about the CBT stuff because we actually know the payroll numbers in detail. Let's imagine that Boston developed an unprecedented wave of young talent all at once and the payroll fell to — I don't know — $70m while its roster was full of young players. It would have a payroll in the bottom half of teams, but would still contribute the same amount to revenue sharing.
I interpret all of this to mean that the players are right about the CBT. Its competitive balance functions are a fig leaf; it has really become the mechanism of an anti-competitive gentlemen's agreement among the owners. What it actually ends up doing, in tandem with revenue sharing, is suppressing salaries in a way that allows small market teams to just live off their revenue sharing receipts in a way that relieves them of any pressure to try to be good.
There is no fact based argument that the CBT is for competitive purposes other than stopping teams from going above it - its never been intended to re-distribute money to lower spending teams - its always been intended to stop teams from going over it (which does have some competitive leveling benefits). Its labeled that purely as messaging from owners to fans to help support its true function - to impose a significant restraint to player salaries. The fact that owners want to make the taxes more punitive makes it even more clear what they view the purpose of it - keep payrolls below it.
The players bought the play because its not a hard cap, but its been a strategic disaster for them as compared to a hard cap/hard floor system that was another option on the table at the time.
Yep, if the team salary structure requirements were truly about competitive parity there would be a salary FLOOR as well as a cap (whether hard or soft).
"On Tuesday, before Major League Baseball chief negotiator Dan Halem presented to the Players Association the league’s “best and final offer” before canceling regular season games, all 30 team owners gathered on a Zoom call.
On the call, which was previously unreported, MLB polled each owner to make sure it had the 23 votes required to support the proposal.
The tone of the Zoom call, according to three sources, made it clear that even more owners would land in the “no” camp if the first CBT threshold rose above $220 million, the number they were about to propose.
The problem with that? The Players Association has made it abundantly clear that it will not accept a CBT threshold below $230 million.
This divide underscores how long this work stoppage has the potential to be. It’s difficult to see either side compromising on this key point — and the CBT is hardly the only area where significant differences remain."
View: https://twitter.com/martinonyc/status/1499497290972684291
On the call, which was previously unreported, MLB polled each owner to make sure it had the 23 votes required to support the proposal.
The tone of the Zoom call, according to three sources, made it clear that even more owners would land in the “no” camp if the first CBT threshold rose above $220 million, the number they were about to propose.
The problem with that? The Players Association has made it abundantly clear that it will not accept a CBT threshold below $230 million.
This divide underscores how long this work stoppage has the potential to be. It’s difficult to see either side compromising on this key point — and the CBT is hardly the only area where significant differences remain."
View: https://twitter.com/martinonyc/status/1499497290972684291
Although it is certainly not the only issue, I am nowhere near as pessimistic
Players won't accept anything below 230
Owners won't approve anything over 220
Sold at 225
Solve the other issues and this gap is easily bridged.
Certainly, 4 owners are unreasonable and should cash out and just sell their teams.
Players won't accept anything below 230
Owners won't approve anything over 220
Sold at 225
Solve the other issues and this gap is easily bridged.
Certainly, 4 owners are unreasonable and should cash out and just sell their teams.
I guess the tax revenue is a big deal to some teams.
Let me guess, Marlins Pirates Rays and A's?
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He was on that late night cable sports show that Felger and Holley hosts and I am pretty sure that is what he said and Felger was stunned.
Is this true do you know?
Or can anyone back that claim?
I'm pretty sure Lou Merloni said 65% of MLB players make 1 million a year or less?
He was on that late night cable sports show that Felger and Holley hosts and I am pretty sure that is what he said and Felger was stunned.
Is this true do you know?
Or can anyone back that claim?
"According to an Associated Press report published Tuesday, payrolls — or the amount of money that teams committed to player salaries — in 2021 dropped 4 percent since 2019 to the lowest levels since 2015. Similarly, a study published earlier this year found the average major league salary fell in 2021, dropping about 5 percent from 2019, MLB’s previous full season. The AP reported that about 60 percent of the players on Opening Day rosters were making less than $1 million. Of that group, 35 percent made less than $600,000."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/12/21/mlb-lockout-baseball-economics/
I have avoided posting in this debate until now, but I'm hoping that maybe now I'll have something useful to add. For me, I think that the argument that you are making here places the greater (by far) onus on the owners.
The players themselves are instrumental to our enjoyment of baseball. We want to see the best play, and for many of us (I won't say all), watching a lesser level of play is significantly less enjoyable. Their role in making the game great is to work hard at their craft and perform on the field. This is the reason why I don't begrudge players who sign the contract with the best bottom line, and why I was so pissed off about the whole "Chicken and Beer" thing.
The only value that the owners have is in crafting the overall experience that gets put on the field. There is nothing intrinsic about any owner that adds value to the overall experience of baseball except insofar as they are willing to invest in the product to make it better. It's their responsibility to provide the means by which we can enjoy playing baseball. Right now, they are failing to meet that responsibility.
If the players were making demands that were obviously unreasonable or crippling to ownership then I might feel differently, but that's absolutely not the case. The player demands are, if anything, quite modest. This article on Fangraphs does a good job of demonstrating just how small their demands are in the grand scheme of baseball finances.
As it is though I see the owners as being clearly derelict in their responsibility to the fans while the players really aren't.
The big market teams may make more in raw numbers, but it would be interesting to see the ROI (return on investment) for small market small payroll teams vs. the big spenders.
Don’t need contraction. A forced sale/contraction is good enough.
Miami to Raleigh
Oakland to Vegas
Pittsburgh can stay or to Portland OR
Tampa Bay to Orlando
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There are a few minor league markets in Florida doing well and are fun to attend.
In my view, this is an ownership issue for both teams. Miami (even with it's titles) needs to implode after the stadium building sham, and go away, Tampa, the better franchise,, is an MLB competitive franchise and a talent developing machine, unfortunately it plays in a concrete toilet that is still 1000% more fan friendly in terms of comfort than Fenway. Yet, fans in Tampa are too lazy to drive to.
How much money are they even really fighting about here? Is there a way to figure out how much more money would actually be paid to players at different CBT levels? Most teams don’t even reach the CBT, right? So the difference between $220 and $225 in any given year is actually going to result in what? $30 million more in player salaries for a given year? It has to be more complicated than that because otherwise it seems like a fight over a relatively small amount.
I think if you asked the union, they'd say that this matters more than it might appear because the top of the market contracts set precedents that ripple through the arb system to help other players. So while few teams are directly affected by the CBT, the CBT has a lot of impact on what the Trout- and Betts-type players earn, and those are the guys who (at least used to) influence the market for subsequent players' arb comps.
Yeah, it's not getting better anytime soon.
The Angels? They giving up on trying to get a real foothold in LA?
The Angels? They giving up on trying to get a real foothold in LA?
Shouldn't the Angels want an increase if they want to keep both Ohtani and Trout in the future?
And I guess this confirms they're not resigning Upton after 2022 LOL
And I guess this confirms they're not resigning Upton after 2022 LOL
This would be an interesting idea. What if you had a cap of 100 million dollars on anyone outside your organization but limitless on anyone you drafted or signed as an IFA or UFA. Maybe make the 100 a 125, I don’t know.
Which side says no to that?
I know it’s probably neve going to happen but whatever.
My guess is both sides say no to that. That would effectively work to limit top end salaries since the dollars bidding on free agents would be limited. At the same time, that would allow big market teams to essentially keep all their homegrown players with no tax considerations. Owners opposed to increasing the tax level aren’t worried about paying the tax themselves, they just don’t want to have to spend more to compete.
Second order effects would be interesting too - I’m guessing higher spending teams would be more reluctant to trade prospects given the huge tax advantages to homegrown players. So when teams trade star players they won’t be able to re-sign, there isn’t the level of return they get currently.
Given recent history for the teams on that list, it almost reads like they want the CBA to stop them where they can't stop themselves. Most of those teams have thrown around big money in questionable deals in recent history. The only exception is the Reds, who fit the more typical small market, "make everyone else spend less so we can keep up" mold.
Reds ownership probably calls it the “Homer Bailey Principle” in internal discussions.
I’ve kind of been in shut up and listen mode because I’m not that informed but the one point that has been driving me crazy is this point. The perceived need for a CBT is entirely within the control of the clubs and it is the owners’ problem, but they are making it the players’ problem.
To me, the fact that they got the players to agree to a CBT at all is a massive win for the owners, and they should be pretty delighted that the issue comes down to fighting over $5 or $10 million. Somehow the owners won the trenches when they got buy in on the idea that protecting them from themselves is a shared responsibility. And now that is taken as a given to the point where they are trying to use it as a bludgeon.
The bolded is absolutely true. Owners in all professional sports are looking for a salary cap to (i) insulate them from their own decisions - and also pressure from the fan base - to spend to win, and (ii) prevent the rogue owner from going all-in.
If I were the players and knew that some owners were dead set against raising the CBT, I would have traded that for the introduction of a salary floor. Even if it started somewhere nominal like $50M - get the concept in, add a concept that teams that don't make the salary floor have to give the balance to players making under some number ($2M?), and then work to increase the floor on an ongoing basis would seem to be super beneficial for players as well as adding to the minimum salary for some players as well as increasing parity.
But what do I know?
I agree in theory about a salary floor but it would have to start out at a meaningful level. I see no reason to believe the owners would agree to raise it in the future, given how they are currently behaving.
Seems to me an obvious solution to many of these issues is a player/owners revenue split. But of course that’s not going to happen because, aside from wanting to pocket as much money as possible, the owners are loath to yield any more of their “sovereignty” to the players.
The Angels being one of the four teams is absolutely infuriating and another example of the cruel twist of fate that landed Trout and Ohtani on that misbegotten franchise.
Is that really true, though? The fact that the median and average salaries have trended so differently in the recent past suggest it’s not (and I don’t believe FA contracts can be used as arb comps at all). I suspect that many if not most of the teams that are not spending to the cap are doing it at least in part because spending a ton of money on FA’s generally isn’t a smart thing to do.
Not quite. Higher CBT drives higher salaries which makes it more expensive for teams to pay for talent. If the Dodgers start paying $45m for talent because they have more headspace, the A's (though they wouldn't) also have to pay $45m to compete for that player. Also, we're not adding more players to the pool. Same # of players, bigger spending capability.
But nobody is making the Dodgers do anything. It is a spending capability not a requirement.
I get that teams will want to do what they need to win but this is still the owners’ problem because of their choices, and they have been wildly successful at convincing everyone that the players are somehow obligated to protect the owners from their own lack of self control.
Again, it's not really about choice because they're operating in a market and what the Yankees do impacts the Dodgers and Red Sox and so on. As an example, Hal might have no problem going to $240m, so if the Sox or Mets set an artificial cap for spending at say $220m, you're giving your organization a disadvantage by ~10%. I'm guessing the majority of owners don't want to give major markets the capability to vastly outspend them and drive salaries up. The CBT, whatever the number, puts teams on equal footing but if you put it at $275m, there is just literally no way a team like the Rays can continue to compete successfully spending $50m when the Yankees can add more marquee free agents with little risk. At some point, analytics and player development will struggle to keep up when fat payrolls can cover up their mistakes.
I'm not sure I'm articulating this well, so sorry if I'm a bit jumbled. I'm not making an argument for any specific number, by the way, but I guess the general point here is that little teams want to pay little money and the higher the ceiling, the harder it is for them to actually be successful unless they spend some money.
I’m honestly not sure this is true, spending money on players reduces roster flexibility for one. A couple of examples for NY were AJ Burnett and Sonny Gray, both clearly trainwrecks for NY (and then instantly good when they went elsewhere) but NY had no choice but to keep them in the rotation or put them on the IL with a phantom injury. Almost everyone on TB has minor league options left, so if they don’t perform, they can be sent down.
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