Mike's Mets - Waiting for a New CBA

 

 By Mike Steffanos

Back in the early months of the COVID-19 era, I spent a lot of time writing about the negotiations between MLB and the Players Union as they tried to agree on playing some sort of season. I remember that when the talks began, I was reasonably optimistic that a deal would be made relatively quickly. It seemed that both sides had an incentive to come together and come together for the country.

Needless to say, it didn't play out that way. Rob Manfred, negotiating for the owners, spent May and early June presenting offers that contained poison pills that the players would never accept — primarily including some variation of a salary cap — then issuing self-serving press releases criticizing the players for turning them down flat. When the Players Association returned with a counterproposal, Manfred and the owners would mostly ignore it without even making any counter. Despite their protests to the contrary, it was clear that MLB management had no desire to come to a quick agreement.

In hindsight, it was clear that Manfred didn't want to give the players anything that might impact the CBA negotiations still over a year away. But it was equally clear that Manfred and the owners wanted to play the shortest regular-season possible combined with expanded playoffs. When the clock ticked down far enough to ensure things would play out that way, then negotiations finally moved. Manfred also exercised the right of the commissioner to implement a 60-game schedule unilaterally.

It's hard to look back on that time without bias and come to any other conclusion than Manfred and company were negotiating with calculated bad faith, working toward the desired end from the beginning of the process. Any potential optimism I might have for the current CBA negotiations died back in the summer of 2020, watching all of that go down.

MLB's decades-long run of avoiding work stoppages seems destined to come to an end with this year's negotiations. Don't get me wrong. There is still plenty of time to get spring training underway on schedule. Even if spring training gets going a couple of weeks late, there's no reason not to believe the season can't start on March 31* as planned. However, I have a funny feeling that we're going to lose some regular-season games before this thing gets settled.

* When I originally wrote this piece I incorrectly had April 1 as Opening Day. I have since edited this with the correct date of March 31

The Players Association has fared poorly during the last couple of CBA negotiations and is desperate to reverse some of their losses. They've always been against a hard salary cap in baseball, but they really didn't foresee how the Luxury Tax would function as an effective soft cap for the vast majority of MLB teams. The Dodgers have shown some willingness to exceed the cap. Steve Cohen's Mets have already blown by the cap with some significant roster needs still left undone for whenever an agreement finally does get done. Still, even large-market clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox have shown surprising deference to the tax. While they've been willing to go over it in some years, it's hard to argue that it hasn't held down their spending quite a bit.

Meanwhile, more teams adopting a tanking strategy has resulted in ridiculously low payrolls for those clubs. While top free agents can still command huge contracts, baseball's middle class of veteran players have been the big losers in this scenario. Because MLB clubs can pay artificially low salaries to young players, especially those who haven't reached 3 years of service and aren't eligible for arbitration, solid veteran ballplayers who aren't stars find themselves squeezed out by younger, cheaper players. Even more so when the several tanking clubs show no interest in them at all.

The Players Association would like to see the Luxury Tax go away. Since that's not going to happen, they want to see the threshold as high as possible. They also want to see rules to combat tanking and penalize teams who finish with artificially low payrolls and low win totals over multiple seasons. They also want to see young players' salaries raised higher by shortening the 3-year time frame before they're eligible for arbitration and also cutting down the 6-year wait for free agency.

In their version of a perfect world, most MLB owners would love baseball to have a hard salary cap like all other major US sports. They understand that isn't going to happen, at least not this time around. Barring that, Manfred and the owners would like to keep as much of the status quo as possible: low salaries for young players and no changes to the 3-year wait for arbitration and the 6-year wait for free agency. They'd also like to see the luxury tax threshold stay as low as possible.

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