In a world where young players are the most productive and teams have responded to that by prioritizing collecting young talent over free agents and putting a competitive product on the field, those are very reasonable proposals. Teams are being run much differently today than they were even 5 years ago. Using the CBA from 5 years ago with a little fiddling around the edges isn't reasonable.
One thing about negotiations - parties don't always negotiate in their best interest. Arbitration is a gereat example of this. IIRC (and I"m pretty sure I'm right about this) the owners were warned that arbitration was the biggest give-away they could make. It's basically guaranteed raises for players who may not have "earned" the raise. The owners gave it away and they absolutely regret it.
I'm sure the owners would be willing to do that if all players were employees at will every year and there was no guaranteed money. This is the Charley Finley proposal from way back.
To be clear, young players are not the most productive, they are the most productive once you factor in what they get paid compared to veterans. This is why younger players need to get paid more, their relatively low salaries mess up the whole system (except for the superstars, who get paid huge bucks under any system).
My cynical brain immediately kicked in and thought "Sure but both of these chiefly benefit younger players with less clout, so they'll be the first things to get dropped."
I used to work as a salaried exempt employee for a large corporation and have a friend who worked at the same place. Even though he is slightly older and had worked there slightly longer we were very much peers as far as job function and salary went. We were in the same job code. We both worked at that corporation for over thirty-five years each, had yearly performance reviews and merit increases, both received multiple promotions and were well penetrated into our salary range but not at the top of it. Long story short we had earned being where we were. About two years ago there was a change in our management, and he told me that he learned the new director had said that my friend was overpaid for what he did and that I was probably in the same boat. There was then an early retirement package offered that he took. Financially I could have taken the package, but I wasn't quite mentally ready to retire at that moment, so I passed on it. Two months later I got laid off. It turns out that in my job code there were 120 people and twelve were laid off. Eleven of the twelve were over fifty-five and ten of the twelve were over sixty. I was one of the ten. Luckily for me I had been planning for retirement right along, and between the severance, unused vacation and unemployment I was nicely bridged to age 62 and I ended up landing on my feet, but I'll go to my grave wishing I had a union and cursing the director who took it upon himself to decide that I made too much money. I'm hoping the MLBPA gets everything it's after.
Yes. A lot of posts are only considering one side of the equation. That is not saying the sides are equal---only that the past negotiations (however imperfect) represented a bunch of benefits and concessions for both sides. So, a few 'wins' for players: they have a very high minimum salary relative to any regulation in place; they have lots of guaranteed money that doesn't exist in other industries; they have strong healthcare and pension programs; they benefit (within the economics of baseball) from arbitration as an accelorator, etc. Do the players deserve all this for the value they create? Of course they do, and on average more as well. But it's a more credible discussion if we note the trade-offs and such rather than simply talk about the good guys and the bad guys, imo.
Wait, has this ever been demonstrated to be true? “Windfall” compared to the reserve clause era, but certainly not compared to FA costs, right? Some players shouldn’t get a raise. Some should get much bigger raises. How does it average out? Pretty sure the owners still experience a net profit here.
Here's an article from 1990 that discusses why owners hate arbitration: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1990/02/26/baseballs-battle-line-is-defined/46a56be5-e5ca-4c03-b7fc-7e775530f57a/.
That stuff doesn’t address the question. What’s a player worth? If teams will pay $8M on the FA market for a win, why are arbitration awards that go from $500k to $1M for players worth, say, 1 WAR on average, a “windfall” for the players? Seems like a gross windfall for the owners. And I’m sure that if we made it all free market, those younger players, as a group, would see their salaries rise, while vets would see theirs slightly dip. Overall, left without safety rails, owners would likely drive prices up themselves, across the board, in a true free market. Happens everywhere else. That’s why players would gladly trade enhanced arb for true FA.
this seems to not bode well for the negotiations tomorrow.
No one is suggesting that players are getting paid what they are worth; I'm only suggesting that the owners don't like arbitration as they believe it contributes to salary inflation so expanding it is likely a non-starter in the negotiations.
If you want to argue that one of other sports has a better CBA than baseball, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. If there is indeed a way to have the players do better under another, that's a direction that the players should go. But I don't think they will as the players prefer the current system (and the owners would be thrilled to have a hard cap).
Thats article misses the broader point by closing the years and it even explicitly acknowledges that player's shares were higher in the 90s and 2000s (even after the luxury tax was initially implemented) when they trended at 60% of revenue. It wasnt until the 2010s that the share fell to the low 50s.
I think the owners would be happy to sign a NBA-type deal with the split being somewhere around 50% (depending on the definition of "Baseball-Related Revenues". I don't think the players would though. And that's exactly my point. If the players think the owners would sign a NBA-type deal - just for example - and the players could do as well or even better if they can define "Baseball-Related Revenues" and take 52% of it, that's the kind of proposal that could "get to yes" (as PKB put it) with fewer games missed.
Yes, thats the issue. Why would the owners ever sign an NBA style deal? Their long term planning on the move towards a hard cap has worked incredibly well.
Sounds like you see things differently, but to me, the owners proposal was closer to a NBA-type deal - tax with more stringent penalties and a salary floor to guarantee. I also disagree that the owners proposal would be in the mid-30s as they proposed 50% during the pandemic so mid-30s would be a slap in the face.
I agree that this is the real issue. People talk about service time manipulation in terms of the Kris Bryant-type stars, but I think it's probably more important to more or less fungible relief pitchers, who accrue service time the slowest (because they are so frequently optioned) and are also (as pitchers) some of the players at the highest risk of career-ending injury. (The Cubs may have stolen some money from Bryant by calling him up late, but he's already earned tens of millions of dollars and is likely to ink a nine-figure deal in a few weeks. He's fine.) When we think about players who wash out with just a few years' service time spread over years of their twenties, a lot of those players are relief pitchers.
Yup.
Hey, listen, if the owners are willing to make concessions the players need to follow suit. All that matters is that there is baseball!!
Ah, well, yes, agree with that. I was puzzled by the concept of “windfall” here, since that suggested payment above value. But there is inflation everywhere, so we should expect the owners to move somewhat here, no (even if they don’t really want to)? They can still somewhat rely on relatively low CBT thresholds to keep overall costs/inflation down, couldn’t they?
Yah. Owners have their heads up their behind as they are apparently shocked at the reaction the players had to todays offer
Is that bad faith?
Although I could see teams investing in elite starting pitching hoping that tilts a short series their way
That's not the way the game is played anymore. Seeing a starter go long enough to qualify for a win was shocking in last year's playoffs. The devaluation of starting pitching also suppresses salaries.
I don't believe that is at all true logically or empirically. Do you think the trend in salaries since playoffs did actually expand is consistent with that---I see the opposite in the data. I also think it misunderstands the buy-side market---expanded playoffs energizes more teams to invest and compete to make the playoffs, which is what we've seen from MLB and more recently in the NBA since the play-in was introduced. So, salaries going up and more teams competing is what we've seen---those are good things for players.
