Work in progress
MLB, union make headway, but still have ways to go to end lockout
Baseball’s owners and players on Tuesday collectively placed another brick atop the foundation that will get them out of lockout hell. The movement elevates the foundation, speaking metaphorically, up to roughly the ankles of 6-foot-8 players’ head Tony Clark.
There’s a long way to go, with a short time before the start of spring training (in mid-February) is impacted, to get to a new collective bargaining agreement. The first few days of next month will serve as an informal, common-sense deadline. While the players remain frustrated, in particular by the lack of movement on the luxury-tax thresholds, there’s no denying that back-toback days of negotiating advanced the sides closer to the end zone.
At a bargaining session that lasted about an hour, held at the Major League Baseball Players Association, MLB offered concessions on a few different fronts:
It withdrew its proposal that would take away arbitration for all players with between two and three years service (with additional money going to that class on the basis of performance) and signed on to the union’s idea that pre-arbitration players could earn bonuses for winning major awards or ranking high in the wins-above-replacement ratings. These bonuses would come from baseball’s central revenues rather than the teams’ budgets, a philosophical win for the players. Alas, the players would like this bonus pool to total $105 million, while the owners offered $10 million. On the positive side, they have a framework from which to negotiate.
The minimum salary for rookies would be raised to $615,000. The jump from the previous offer of $600,000 takes the figure over the $609,500 neighborhood, which is calculated as the cost-of-living increase from the 2021 bonus of $570,000.
The minimums for second-year players ($650,000) and third-year players ($700,000) didn’t change from the previous package, and interestingly, under the clubs’ proposal, those figures would be fixed. A team couldn’t reward a beloved player with a higher salary — as say, the Mets did with Pete Alonso in 2020, although Alonso would have received a bonus for winning National League Rookie of the Year in 2019.
In a tweak to its recent proffer that teams would receive extra draft picks by promoting top prospects who then succeed, MLB expanded that field to players who got promoted the previous year and retained their rookie status. Going back to Alonso again, whereas he ripped the Mets for not calling him up to the big leagues in September 2018, doing so now could carry an extra benefit for the team.
Players remain thoroughly unenthusiastic over the notion of dangling extra draft picks as an incentive for clubs to not manipulate their service time. They feel better about the first two shifts. Meanwhile, they’d like to see the teams bend on the luxury-tax threshold, which stood at $210 million last season and would increase to only $220 million over a five-year span, with increased penalties for exceeding that ceiling; the players want a big jump to $245 million, with lesser penalties, next year.
With many player representatives sitting in via Zoom, the session didn’t get as heated as the one Monday. The two sides intend to meet later this week in smaller groups to discuss noncore economic issues (such as international play and the drugtesting policy), before likely taking more bites at the larger matters next week.