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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say, don\u2019t over-read it, because there\u2019s a lot of discussions to happen,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The most intriguing piece of this process might revolve around the owners\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s known as the \u201creserve system,\u201d people briefed on the negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The union, which has made proposals on those topics already, plans to make proposals on other matters Thursday.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, MLB might still well be conservative in what it offers. The early days in labor negotiations often are geared toward communicating one\u2019s own goals, rather than trying to please the other side.<\/p>\n
\u201cTypically what you\u2019d do is put out your priorities: these are the areas we want to change the system,\u201d Colvin said. \u201cThen you\u2019re listening for what the other side is prioritizing. And then you can make the trade-offs later.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s generally better you don\u2019t make the trade-offs in advance: you wait \u2018til each side\u2019s laid out what its interests are, and you try and figure that out first.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The league\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne possibility would be to ask for the moon and the stars, and then maybe you\u2019re willing to settle for half the moon at the end,\u201d said Al Latham, who teaches law at the University of Southern California and was previously a partner at the firm Paul Hastings. \u201cOn the other hand, there are cases where you know from the start what you\u2019re going to have to do in order to make a deal.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd maybe you\u2019re willing to at least signal, if not in a formal proposal, that you\u2019re willing to consider a major give on the other side in return for what you\u2019re asking.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Players and owners would likely need to agree to a new deal by mid-March to preserve a full 162-game schedule next year.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month at MLB headquarters in New York, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred \u2014 a graduate of Cornell\u2019s ILR school \u2014 suggested the league has waited to make proposals in these areas for more practical reasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe (first) proposal that we slid across the table is literally this thick,\u201d Manfred said, gesturing with his fingers to show the league\u2019s initial cap offer was not a tiny document. \u201cAlways 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experts whom The Athletic approached for their perspective on the early days of baseball\u2019s negotiations offered a couple disclaimers. One, it\u2019s difficult to assess such a process from afar.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt depends so much on the specific facts,\u201d Latham said.<\/p>\n
Two, sports negotiations differ in some ways from negotiations in other spaces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big thing is it\u2019s the whole industry in a way negotiating as one,\u201d Colvin said. \u201cThe league, the collection of clubs, are negotiating together with all the players. They\u2019re setting the rules for their industry, which is unusual.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
MLB is expected to lock out the players in December, once the current contract expires, shutting down the industry\u2019s offseason until a new deal is reached. There would be no trades or signings involving big leaguers once a lockout begins.<\/p>\n
But a lockout would take on a whole new meaning were it to last into April and infringe on the regular season.<\/p>\n
\u201cSports is definitely an area where timing can be really critical, because of the nature of the season,\u201d Colvin continued. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The long game?<\/p>\n
Players might never accept a cap system \u2014 but they almost certainly won\u2019t accept one quickly. To pursue a cap, then, owners likely will have to keep proposing that setup throughout these negotiations, but with modifications.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe statute says that while you have to bargain in good faith, you\u2019re not required to make any particular concession or agree to any particular proposal,\u201d Latham said. \u201cOn the other hand \u2026 you really do want to have a record of some concessions as a practical matter.<\/p>\n
\u201cNonetheless, if there\u2019s something that\u2019s really, really important to you, you don\u2019t have to give it up if it is a mandatory subject of bargaining, which is what we\u2019re talking about here: wages, hours and terms and conditions of employment.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is something technical that could happen in a labor negotiation called \u201cimpasse,\u201d a stalemate which would allow the owners to implement their last proposal on mandatory subjects of bargaining. But that wouldn\u2019t necessarily be an outright win for owners.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs 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\u2019re facing a strike and they don\u2019t want to lose the season again,\u201d Latham said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because under a cap, player earnings become a zero-sum game. Players and owners would decide in advance what percentage of the league\u2019s overall revenues each side would receive for a given year.<\/p>\n
An increased minimum salary, then, would not represent additional money going to players overall \u2014 not on its own. It would be just one way of distributing the fixed percentage of revenues owed to players.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 favor.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s notable that a higher revenue split \u2014 say, 56 percent \u2014 wouldn\u2019t automatically convince the union to jump on board the cap train. The union believes that over time in subsequent negotiations, the percentage would dip.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s younger players, even if it comes attached to other elements players or union officials dislike.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt strikes me that the interests of the players diverge, depending on whether you\u2019re somebody who is dependent on a minimum, and maybe that\u2019s the best you\u2019re going to do in Major League Baseball,\u201d Latham said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn collective bargaining, usually the unions on economic stuff will be the ones wanting more,\u201d Colvin said. \u201cIt\u2019s not unusual for management to be more like, \u2018We\u2019re fine with the status quo.\u2019 So it\u2019s often the union that\u2019s initiating.\u201d<\/p>\n
The previous negotiation might play into the league\u2019s strategy.<\/p>\n
In March 2022, players voted 26-12 to accept the 2022-26 CBA. Eight of the 12 \u201cno\u201d votes were on the union\u2019s executive subcommittee, a group that works closely with union officials.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
By then, both sides\u2019 strategies might look different anyway.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re testing each other out,\u201d Colvin said of these initial discussions. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of jockeying back and forth, trying to explore what\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re just in the status quo, tinkering here and there, it\u2019s easier to get an agreement. If one side feels they need to have a big change, that does have the potential for more conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Major League Baseball could be barreling toward a horrible year in 2027, when games could be canceled amid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85,3276],"class_list":["post-759243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports","tag-sports-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}