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As Pete Crow-Armstrong<\/a> authors his breakout season and Chris Sale<\/a> side-eyes Laz Diaz<\/a>, the battle for the future of baseball rolls quietly on in the background. On Thursday, MLB delivered to the MLB Players Association its latest set of proposals for the next collective bargaining agreement<\/a>. This is news for nerds and diehards \u2014 you either have to love the minutiae of labor relations or have a vested interest in the structure of the Rule 5 draft to get excited about this stuff.<\/p>\n Fortunately, I know what my audience is.<\/p>\n MLB\u2019s new proposals concern three areas: The creation of a weekly roster change window, a more aggressive Rule 5 draft, and the creation of free agent blackout periods during the offseason.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s deal with each in turn.<\/p>\n Currently, teams set their active roster daily, and can make changes before and after every game. MLB wants to change that to a weekly structure; every club would have to set its 26-man roster on Monday and live with it throughout the week. This proposal is full of exemptions \u2014 injury, bereavement and paternity leave, the restricted list \u2014 for processes that exist now, but absent those special circumstances, teams could only promote and demote players on Monday. Teams would also be allowed to carry 14 pitchers on their 26-man rosters, up from the current limit of 13.<\/p>\n The injured list would change to reflect the new roster rules. Where we have a day-based IL now (7-day, 10-day, 15-day, and 60-day), MLB wants to go to a one-week, two-week, or 12-week IL to match the weekly transaction window. Position players would have to spend one full week on the IL, pitchers two weeks. The current 60-day IL, which allows players on long-term injured reserve to be exempt from 40-man roster limits, would change to a 12-week IL. (For those of you who don\u2019t want to do the math, 60 days is eight and a half weeks.)<\/p>\n \n You Aren’t a FanGraphs Member\n <\/p>\n \n It looks like you aren’t yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren’t logged in). We aren’t mad, just disappointed.\n <\/p>\n \n We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we’d like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.\n <\/p>\n 1. Ad Free viewing! We won’t bug you with this ad, or any other.<\/p>\n 2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.<\/p>\n 3. Dark mode and Classic mode!<\/p>\n 4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.<\/p>\n 5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.<\/p>\n 6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn’t sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)<\/p>\n 7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.<\/p>\n 8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don’t be a victim of FOMO.<\/p>\n 9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.<\/p>\n 10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!<\/p>\n \n We hope you’ll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we’ve also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn’t want to overdo it.\n <\/p>\n The next pillar of MLB\u2019s proposal is the Rule 5 draft. The Rule 5 draft exists to prevent teams from hoarding major league-ready prospects indefinitely. If a prospect isn\u2019t added to the 40-man roster within a certain period of time, any team can draft him for a nominal fee, and if they can keep him on the big league roster all year, they get to keep him.<\/p>\n MLB wants to do away with the requirement to keep the player on the big league roster and shorten the timeline for prospects who enter pro ball through the Rule 4 (i.e., the first-year player) draft. Players who enter affiliated ball before age 20 would be eligible for the fourth Rule 5 draft after they sign; players who turn pro at 20 or older would be eligible for the third Rule 5 draft.<\/p>\n Finally, MLB wants to create a free agent signing window that starts on Day 1 of the Winter Meetings and lasts until December 21. Anyone who doesn\u2019t sign by then would have to wait until the first week in February. Teams could still make trades or re-sign their own pending free agents before the Winter Meetings, and the five-day window after the World Series to exercise or decline a contract option would remain in force. But between the end of the first signing window and the start of the second, no major league transactions would be allowed. <\/p>\n MLB says these proposals are designed to limit midseason roster churn, encourage a return to more traditional big league playing roles, and spark interest in free agency, like what we see in the NBA every summer. Those goals seem uncontroversial enough, but this being a labor dispute in postmodern America, it\u2019s important to look for the catch, because there always seems to be one.<\/p>\n Having laid out the broad strokes of MLB\u2019s plan, I\u2019ll offer four points of analysis.<\/p>\n First, and most important: None of this matters. Every one of these measures was proposed contingent on the MLBPA accepting a salary cap. The Rule 5 proposal additionally works in concert with MLB\u2019s proposal to limit the amateur draft to 12 rounds and make it college-only.<\/a><\/p>\n I\u2019ve said over and over that the MLBPA\u2019s stance on a salary cap might as well include the phrase \u201cover our dead collective body,\u201d as it has for almost 60 years. In his post on these proposals<\/a>, Evan Drellich of The Athletic quoted a statement from interim MLBPA executive director Bruce Meyer: \u201cThe suggestion that the only way to limit roster churn, or incentivize earlier free agent signings is with a salary cap is entirely unserious\u2026 Players have proposed changes that would address these priorities, but the league is not interested in any changes that don\u2019t directly reduce the rights of all players and shift leverage to the owners.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s still early, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, it\u2019s not a good sign when one of the principals of a negotiation uses the phrase \u201centirely unserious\u201d on the record.<\/p>\n My position on the general shape of this CBA negotiation remains unchanged: Only one Big Four sports league has imposed a salary cap on its union in the 21st Century. The NHL got its salary cap, and severe salary rollbacks, but not until it broke the union. And that took canceling an entire season, which damaged the sport in ways from which it still has not recovered 20 years later.<\/p>\n It\u2019s going to take at least one lost season to break the MLBPA, maybe more, and I have no idea whether the owners have the stomach for that intense a fight. I\u2019m not sure the owners themselves know at this point; that\u2019s the kind of thing we won\u2019t be able to get a read on until next February or March at the earliest. Until then, we can treat any proposal that\u2019s contingent on a cap-and-floor system as DOA.<\/p>\n Point no. 2: I understand why Manfred is licking his chops at the idea of a free agent bonanza every offseason. This all dates back to 2023, when everyone went to the Winter Meetings in Nashville and twiddled their thumbs waiting for Shohei Ohtani<\/a> to sign. Manfred, his people, and a lot of the national newsbreakers had a freakout because the market was waiting for Ohtani, and Ohtani\u2019s agent wasn\u2019t leaking anything publishable.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where this signing window nonsense started. As a general principle, I tend to be highly skeptical of proposals to make systemic changes to combat past problems of idiosyncratic origin. Remember when the refs blew a pass interference call in the NFC Championship game, so the NFL made pass interference reviewable for a year<\/a>? Let\u2019s not do that to free agency because the weirdest superstar in recent baseball history cut off the content spigot for four days. I was there, I was bored out of my mind too, but let\u2019s not do anything rash.<\/p>\n There are elements of this signing window I don\u2019t mind. I don\u2019t mind giving teams an extended exclusive negotiating window with their own pending free agents. It wouldn\u2019t change much, with the open market right around the corner, but fans would probably appreciate anything that gives their team an advantage when retaining homegrown players.<\/p>\n A transaction blackout around Christmas and New Year\u2019s is probably healthy, too. The NHL has one, and Formula 1 has an enforced summer break in the middle of the season where factories have to shut down. In the past, the threat of a major trade or signing has made for a useful excuse for me to avoid my relatives around the holidays, but I can think of something else.<\/p>\n But keeping that window shut until two weeks before camp opens would only create artificial pressure on free agents to sign. Meyer nailed this in his statement \u2014 I\u2019m sure Manfred wants an NBA- or NFL-style free agent bonanza, but it\u2019s especially useful as a Trojan horse to install a deadline that reduces free agents\u2019 leverage. It\u2019s not as draconian as the trial balloon that would\u2019ve limited free agents to one-year deals past the deadline, but players would be forced to sign before Christmas or risk remaining unemployed until the start of spring training.<\/p>\n Besides, I remain unconvinced that four days of frenetic action is preferable, from a standpoint of mainstream interest, to a steady trickle that lasts three months. Manfred might look at other sports and covet what they have, but making an NBA, NHL, or NFL structure work for baseball is more easily said than done. Manfred himself must\u2019ve learned this lesson from his efforts to promote the draft.<\/a><\/p>\n