MLB is due for a ‘major league dispute’

The owners of major league baseball and the players’ union have so many serious issues to deal with that one can seriously wonder how they will manage to sign a new collective agreement before the start of the next season, next spring.

A few years ago, the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA) was considered the most successful union in the United States of all industries. In eight labor disputes between 1972 and 1994, MLB players consistently managed to make gains, which ultimately created an unprecedented balance of power in professional North American sport.

To this day, moreover, the MLB remains the only major North American championship where the owners have been unable to impose the establishment of a salary cap.

However, the players let their guard down when they negotiated their last employment contract in 2016. The result: they were the only ones to see their overall compensation decline. Even though MLB revenues reached all-time highs (surpassing $ 10 billion) during this period, the market reality has ceased to operate and the average player salary has fallen by more than 6% since 2017.

In addition, the median salary of players has plummeted by 30% since 2015. The median salary is obtained by making a list of all salaries paid in a given season and identifying the one that is exactly in the middle of the season. listing. This 30% drop in median salary therefore means that more and more players are found at the bottom of the salary scale.

When one of the two parties takes major setbacks in a negotiation, it is extremely difficult for them to regain the ground lost afterwards. Unless you engage in a long and difficult conflict, such an exercise is like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

It’s always the lucrative contracts of baseball superstars that make the headlines. However, last season’s increasingly unfair share of the prize pool meant that 35% of MLB players made less than $ 600,000 and 62% made less than $ 1 million.

For example, in the National Hockey League (NHL), where income is 50% lower, the minimum wage is $ 750,000.

For MLBPA, such a critical mass of low wage earners risk of becoming a real problem. We only have to remember that in the spring of 2020, the owners of the NFL had skillfully managed to sow division among the players by improving the working conditions of the weakest employees, who made up 60% of the workforce.

This maneuver had notably allowed the owners of the NFL to extend the regular schedule (which went from 16 to 17 games) and to make historic gains.

Over the years, players have made concessions to homeowners that seemed reasonable but turned out to be bad. Among others:

• The introduction of a luxury tax on the payrolls of the most spending teams was supposed to enhance the competitiveness of the poorest organizations. With the money raised from the wealthier to be redistributed to the less well-off organizations, the MLBPA believed that more teams would spend more on acquiring talent.

• Also, by allowing owners to set a cap on the signing bonuses offered to players selected in the draft, the MLBPA thought that the money saved by the owners was going to be spent to better pay players holding positions in the majors.

Instead, the MLB has become a madhouse in which owners who purposely sink their teams in the standings are rewarded. They get the best prospects in the draft, who they can get contracts to sign at a modest and predictable cost.

Using advanced stats for economic purposes also means that teams are spending less and less money on hiring free agents or keeping good veterans.

To build a winning organization, as the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros have demonstrated, it’s easier and cheaper to stick a few miserable seasons and stock up on draft picks or young prospects.

Not to mention the fact that when organizations tap into exceptional young talent, they manipulate their uptime to keep them longer. Autonomy is acquired after 6 complete service seasons (172 days) in the MLB.

However, by dismissing a future super-star in the minor leagues for a few weeks at the start of his career, we easily extend his association with the team to seven seasons.

In the past week, MLB’s most influential agent Scott Boras has barged into the annual general meeting of general managers. And for almost an hour, he denounced the cancer that eats away at America’s favorite pastime and that makes a lot of owners no longer even bother to present a competitive team to their fans.

To make his point clear, Boras gave the example of World Series champions, the Atlanta Braves. The latter had a record of less than .500 before the trade deadline at the end of July.

But they were able to make six meaningful exchanges that transformed their training. We know the rest: the Braves narrowly qualified for the playoffs and they were crowned champions.

The Braves (and their Montreal general manager Alex Anthopoulos) were able to close all these exchanges because a large number of rival organizations simply decided to scuttle themselves and let go of very good players to fill up with youngsters. hopes.

Of the 30 teams in the MLB, I would say there aren’t more than 17 that are actually trying to win. There is something fundamentally wrong about it, denounced Boras.

baseball qui est en jeu ","text":"Quelques modifications apportées lors des négociations précédentes font en sorte qu’il n’est plus nécessaire de présenter la meilleure équipe possible à tous les matchs sur le terrain. C’est l’intégrité du baseball qui est en jeu "}}">A few changes made in previous negotiations mean that it is no longer necessary to present the best possible team at every game on the pitch. The integrity of baseball is at stake , he argued.

Boras is right.

In the world of professional sport, we sell hope. The more fans who believe in their club’s chances, the better the business.

Yet while parity has proven to be a religion in the NFL, NBA, and NHL, the disparity has never been greater in MLB.

In 2019, for the first time in history, we saw four teams win 100 or more games in a season and at the same time, also for the first time, four other teams had conceded 100 or more defeats. The 2021 season was similar, with three teams notching 100 or more wins and four teams having suffered 100 or more losses.

Player’s agent Scott Boras attends a game between the Nationals and the Cardinals last October.

Photo : AP / Marcio Jose Sanchez

This season, there was also a 260 million difference between the payroll of the Los Angeles Dodgers (the biggest spending team, at 282.7 million) and that of the Cleveland Indians (the organization administering with the most small budget, i.e. 60.2 million).

So let’s put it bluntly: even though the revenues are forthcoming, Major League Baseball is a deeply sick industry. In addition to finding themselves in the midst of a vicious economic war, its main players are dangerously distancing themselves from the sporting aspect of their mission.

The labor dispute that will soon shake the MLB promises to be long and difficult. Nevertheless, for all these reasons, it will be absolutely necessary.