Thanks to both of you for your responses.
MLBPA's lawyers post-Miller have a track record of being really ineffective at this.
My general understanding is that Don Fehr was quite a good leader of the MLBPA from 1985 to 2009. Not only did the union under his leadership strike a number of good deals, but Fehr also led the drive for the collusion investigations that resulted in millions going to players. He was followed by longtime Fehr deputy Michael Weiner, who served a tenure of four years notable mostly for its quiet competence before he died at age 51 of complications from a brain tumor. It was after Weiner's death that Clark stepped into the role. That was in 2013, a time of great technological change/disruption that was fundamentally altering the revenue landscape of professional sports--and a moment when the union found itself for the first time without leadership from a direct descendant of Marvin Miller. Without question, Clark and the union fumbled the negotiations that led to the 2016 CBA. There is no excusing that. What is less clear, from my reading, is that the union and its leadership have not learned from that experience. More to the point, I think it is a complete mischaracterization to assert that the MLBA has a track record since Miller retired of ineffectiveness, and that the current negotiations should somehow be viewed through such a lens. 2016 was a costly, costly blunder for the players, but it's unclear to me that Clark and his deputies have ignored the lessons of those negotiations.
For example, they claim now that when the luxury tax was first put in place there was an "implicit agreement" that the ceiling would rise as revenues rose. That is from Rosenthal's piece today in the Athletic. Saying such a major term is "implicit" is a massive failure by them
Fair enough. Again, clear mistakes were made in the past. I would also point out that this anecdote--if the players are accurate in their allegations--points to the lack of trustworthiness of MLB owners as negotiating partners.
To be clear, I don't think MLBPA's team is dumb---I think, and believe I said above, that they have a really fractured set of players and so they are managing that
What I find interesting about this assessment, which is likely true, is that it ignores that the owners appear to be just as fractured as the players, if not more so. Buster Olney has reported that a segment of the ownership groups--and we can probably figure out who they are--do not favor the current approach being taken by their peers. My rough reading of the situation is that one group of owners continues to view players as labor, from which every concession must be extracted, while another groups sees players as business partners. Olney has written that he wonders whether any of these owners will eventually break with their colleagues, as Peter Angelos did in 1994.
MLBPA has consistently opposed a more NBA-style share of total revenue in exchange for a cap option
It is true that MLB opposes the cap. I say this without challenge and with the genuine hope of learning more: Has there been anything authoritative (quoting economists, etc.) written arguing that a salary cap would, in fact, be better for players? And has there been anything written that owners--who right now have a mechanism in the CBT that is very much functioning for them as a de facto cap--are open to the kinds of concessions that the players would want in exchange for a hard cap? If these kinds of articles/papers are out there--that the players would be better off with a hard cap, and that the owners are open to making concessions for a hard cap that the won't for other union asks--then they would clearly point to incompetence on the part of union leadership.
You, of course, may choose to believe that they know best. But when you cite things like average salary not changing remember that MLBPA under essentially the current leadership is the one who struck this deal.
I am not pointing to the average salary not changing. I am pointing to the median salary going down. I am confident that you know the difference, but just to get it out there: The average salary is a misleading way to evaluate player salaries, because if you have one guy signing a mega contract it pulls the average up for everybody. The median salary, of course, is the one at which half the individual salaries are higher and half are lower. The median player salary is lower today than it was in 2015 despite a large increase in revenues. Players are making less money today--in 2022 dollars--than they were in 2015. You are correct that the players agreed to this deal, as I acknowledged above.
So it is, at a minimum, a valid question to ask whether that is because the evil bogeyman owners did it or whether MLBPA is fighting the wrong conceptual fights.
I'm continuing to argue that they are fighting evil bogeymen, as WBCD, in a way, argues below. I am open to seeing evidence that the MLBPA is right now fighting the wrong conceptual fights, but from my reading, this thread has yet to surface any of it.
also agree that the players have the deck stacked against them to a degree. You know why? Because the owners are the ones that own the franchises. They are the ones getting the 9- and 10-figure stadiums built and negotiating the billion dollar TV contracts and creating the entire infrastructure giving us the game of baseball.
I don't understand how any of these responsibilities, efforts, and obligations explains why the players have the deck stacked against them, or makes it acceptable that they do. But even if they did explain it, these are the things that ownership contributes to the fan experience, that's true. Players are the ones who spend their lives working toward a career in professional baseball, toiling in the minor leagues, enduring repeated failure under difficult circumstances, and, eventually, turning in thrilling performances in a stadium supplied by an owner. Is that any less crucial to giving us the game of baseball? Is it at least equal to what the owners contribute to the universe of reasons that you sit down to watch a Red Sox game?
The owners are greedy. You know why? Because they are billionaires. If they were happy being millionaires, they wouldn't be billionaires. Maybe if you or I won a team due to a lottery or something like that, maybe we'd be okay limiting our profits and giving away part of our money to the players. But every other owner - at this point, for whatever reason, they're just trying to maximize profits. Isn't this the American way?
As I hope our past interactions have demonstrated, I am someone who respects your thinking and your contributions here. This right here is basically what I, and others in this thread, have been saying to you all along. We have said that we want baseball, and something is keeping us from having baseball. We have said that that something is primarily the fact that owners are not negotiating in good faith and are not proposing a financial deal that is fair and acceptable to players. And the reason for that, we have said, is that the owners are greedy and are just trying to maximize profits. You have dismissed this as rooting for the players and the stuff of talk radio.
My interest in all of this is that I want to watch the fucking Boston Red Sox play baseball. I'm on the side of whatever makes that happen. And my reading of the situation to this point is that the reason there might be no baseball is that the owners don't want to pay the players what they deserve. So far, I have yet to see evidence that there is some deal out there that is good for the players but that they simply are too incompetent, stubborn, or uninformed to pursue. That is essentially what you have been arguing. If you can present evidence of this, then I am more than willing to reassess my opinion--I have acknowledged that I am no expert in the business of baseball. But for right now, it looks to me as though, yes, it is the evil bogeymen owners that are preventing me from watching baseball.
