Major League Baseball could be barreling toward a horrible year in 2027, when games could be canceled amid a labor dispute. But opening proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement were exchanged only about a month ago, and fans would be wise to stay patient at this stage, experts say.
“I would say, don’t over-read it, because there’s a lot of discussions to happen,” said Alexander Colvin, dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, one of the top academic centers for management-employee relations.
The most intriguing piece of this process might revolve around the owners’ strategy to convince players of the merits of a salary cap: how and when the league decides to sweeten its offers in a lengthy back-and-forth. So far, the league appears to be taking a slower path, rather than trying to bowl over players at the outset.
Thursday will provide new data points. The sides have a scheduled meeting today in New York in which the league plans to make its first proposals on some key economic pieces it has yet to address, including what’s known as the “reserve system,” people briefed on the negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly said.
MLB will likely dangle increases to the minimum salary, which this year is $780,000. It could also offer to grant players earlier access to salary arbitration, which currently takes three years for most players, or to free agency, which takes six.
The union, which has made proposals on those topics already, plans to make proposals on other matters Thursday.
Ultimately, MLB might still well be conservative in what it offers. The early days in labor negotiations often are geared toward communicating one’s own goals, rather than trying to please the other side.
“Typically what you’d do is put out your priorities: these are the areas we want to change the system,” Colvin said. “Then you’re listening for what the other side is prioritizing. And then you can make the trade-offs later.
“It’s generally better you don’t make the trade-offs in advance: you wait ‘til each side’s laid out what its interests are, and you try and figure that out first.”
But even inside that framework, MLB, which is faced with a steep task, has seemed inclined to build its case slowly. When it comes to a cap, the league is trying to soften the opposition players have held for decades. In service of that, MLB could have a month ago offered an improvement in just one of those areas: say, the minimum salary.
The league’s overall strategy is not yet clear, but high-level planning is involved: a leading management-side law firm, Proskauer Rose, advises the owners as outside counsel.
“One possibility would be to ask for the moon and the stars, and then maybe you’re willing to settle for half the moon at the end,” said Al Latham, who teaches law at the University of Southern California and was previously a partner at the firm Paul Hastings. “On the other hand, there are cases where you know from the start what you’re going to have to do in order to make a deal.
“And maybe you’re willing to at least signal, if not in a formal proposal, that you’re willing to consider a major give on the other side in return for what you’re asking.”
The owners could be banking that if their cap proposal looks better and better over time, players might think twice about choosing to miss games when crunch time arrives.
Players and owners would likely need to agree to a new deal by mid-March to preserve a full 162-game schedule next year.
Earlier this month at MLB headquarters in New York, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred — a graduate of Cornell’s ILR school — suggested the league has waited to make proposals in these areas for more practical reasons.
“The (first) proposal that we slid across the table is literally this thick,” Manfred said, gesturing with his fingers to show the league’s initial cap offer was not a tiny document. “Always in collective bargaining, you take topics in chunks, get them out there. Everybody tries to, over a period of time, complete all of the issues that they want to address.”
Experts whom The Athletic approached for their perspective on the early days of baseball’s negotiations offered a couple disclaimers. One, it’s difficult to assess such a process from afar.
“It depends so much on the specific facts,” Latham said.
Two, sports negotiations differ in some ways from negotiations in other spaces.
“The big thing is it’s the whole industry in a way negotiating as one,” Colvin said. “The league, the collection of clubs, are negotiating together with all the players. They’re setting the rules for their industry, which is unusual.”
In all areas of labor relations, negotiations often take until the last minute. But sports offer something unique in this regard: periods with games and those without.
MLB is expected to lock out the players in December, once the current contract expires, shutting down the industry’s offseason until a new deal is reached. There would be no trades or signings involving big leaguers once a lockout begins.
But a lockout would take on a whole new meaning were it to last into April and infringe on the regular season.
“Sports is definitely an area where timing can be really critical, because of the nature of the season,” Colvin continued. “If you can reach an agreement earlier, that actually can often be better, (it) shows signs of relatively good labor relations. But the reality is the time pressure creates an incentive to reach a deal.”
The long game?
Players might never accept a cap system — but they almost certainly won’t accept one quickly. To pursue a cap, then, owners likely will have to keep proposing that setup throughout these negotiations, but with modifications.
The owners likely would be unwise to roll out identical offers over and over. Federal law requires both sides to bargain in good faith, which typically means the parties need to show movement.
“The statute says that while you have to bargain in good faith, you’re not required to make any particular concession or agree to any particular proposal,” Latham said. “On the other hand … you really do want to have a record of some concessions as a practical matter.
“Nonetheless, if there’s something that’s really, really important to you, you don’t have to give it up if it is a mandatory subject of bargaining, which is what we’re talking about here: wages, hours and terms and conditions of employment.”
There is something technical that could happen in a labor negotiation called “impasse,” a stalemate which would allow the owners to implement their last proposal on mandatory subjects of bargaining. But that wouldn’t necessarily be an outright win for owners.
“As a practical matter, the ability of the employer to jam down its proposal upon impasse may not be of any value at all to them if they’re facing a strike and they don’t want to lose the season again,” Latham said.
The union has argued that any gains in the areas to be discussed Thursday, such as the minimum salary or time to free agency, would be much less meaningful for players in a cap system than they would be in the present setup.
That’s because under a cap, player earnings become a zero-sum game. Players and owners would decide in advance what percentage of the league’s overall revenues each side would receive for a given year.
An increased minimum salary, then, would not represent additional money going to players overall — not on its own. It would be just one way of distributing the fixed percentage of revenues owed to players.
That leads to one other card that the league could eventually play: a cap proposal that would give players a higher overall revenue split than they have now. The league has so far proposed a 50-50 split, which the union says amounts to a pay cut for players from the status quo. This year, the union projects the split will be roughly 55-45 in the players’ favor.
It’s notable that a higher revenue split — say, 56 percent — wouldn’t automatically convince the union to jump on board the cap train. The union believes that over time in subsequent negotiations, the percentage would dip.
But regardless of those arguments, the bottom line is that the league has held its most eye-catching proposals in reserve. A higher minimum salary could hold appeal for some of the game’s younger players, even if it comes attached to other elements players or union officials dislike.
“It strikes me that the interests of the players diverge, depending on whether you’re somebody who is dependent on a minimum, and maybe that’s the best you’re going to do in Major League Baseball,” Latham said.
The league might have waited on these topics for a simple reason: the side that wants a change often has to propose that change first.
“In collective bargaining, usually the unions on economic stuff will be the ones wanting more,” Colvin said. “It’s not unusual for management to be more like, ‘We’re fine with the status quo.’ So it’s often the union that’s initiating.”
The previous negotiation might play into the league’s strategy.
In March 2022, players voted 26-12 to accept the 2022-26 CBA. Eight of the 12 “no” votes were on the union’s executive subcommittee, a group that works closely with union officials.
The league could be hoping that next spring, rank-and-file players will once again vote to play, rather than miss games, even if that choice goes against the advice of some in their leadership.
But this negotiation is not an apples-to-apples comparison to the last. Much more would be at stake for both sides if a cap proposal remains on the table come March.
By then, both sides’ strategies might look different anyway.
“You’re testing each other out,” Colvin said of these initial discussions. “There’s a lot of jockeying back and forth, trying to explore what’s going on, and trying to figure out, how opposed is the other side? Are there trade-offs that could happen to get a deal, or is this one of those, fight-it-out conflicts?
“If you’re just in the status quo, tinkering here and there, it’s easier to get an agreement. If one side feels they need to have a big change, that does have the potential for more conflict.”