By Mike Steffanos November 4, 2020
There was a piece by Evan Drellich in The Athletic last week that caught my eye, but in all of the excitement surrounding Steve Cohen's final approval by MLB owners, I wasn't able to get around to writing about it. The current CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) between MLB and the Players Association is set to expire after the upcoming 2021 baseball season. It's been a long time since the last strike/lockout in 1994-1995, but those of us who lived through it still remember it vividly and dread the potential for a repeat of that event. The ugly negotiations that preceded this season were a red flag that a quarter of a century of avoiding those stoppages is very much in jeopardy this time around. And how cruel would that be to all baseball lovers, even more so to Mets fans like us who have waited so long for a regime change for our club?
Before I go on, let me assure you that this isn't going to be purposefully worst-case piece trying to drum up clicks. I do think both parties have a large incentive to not allow things to continue on down the road they travelled earlier this year. Both team owners and players should be worried about how the continued negative effects of the pandemic on the economy will impact them, and how staging ugly public battles will only drive fan interest away from the game. I don't expect everyone to be holding hands and singing Kumbaya together, but I do think that both sides will try much harder to do more negotiating with each other and less in public.
Still, there are real issued separating the two sides, and the prolonged failure of this year's negotiations show that bridging those differences won't be easy. MLB owners spent a lot of time going onto local sports radio stations complaining that the players wouldn't agree to a revenue sharing proposal. They claim that they want to be "partners" with the players, but the owners never have been and never will be willing to allow complete transparency their true profit and loss information. I rarely do this, but I want to share something I wrote at the time in my post linked above:
I'm going to propose a hypothetical to you. You get offered an exiting new job. You get around to the part of the interview where compensation comes up. You ask about salary, and the company representative tells you, "It depends. You will be paid 1% of the company's total revenues after expenses." Your eyebrow arches up, and you ask, "How will I know how much money this company makes? Will I be able to look at the books to verify what I am told?"
The Company rep smiles warmly and reassuringly at you, while simultaneously shaking his head. "No, sorry," he replies, "we don't share that information. Don't worry, though, you can trust us." You smile back, getting up out of your seat and facing the exit. "No thanks," you reply, "I don't think I want to work for you under those terms."
As you head out the door the Company rep cries out, "But if you'll only trust us we can be partners! We can advance this company and build revenues together! Your lack of faith in us is giving me the sads."
You keep walking, because you understand if they force you to take their word for how much money the company is making, you're not really a partner. You're just a patsy.
It seems likely that the owners are going to push for revenue sharing again. Maybe this has a chance of happening if they're willing to figure out a way to be really transparent with revenues, but that likely won't happen. There is virtually no chance that the players would agree to this without that transparency. In my little hypothetical quoted above, anyone that agreed to sharing revenues without complete transparency would be a patsy.
The players would be bringing their own baggage into all of this, too, because there is great dissatisfaction with the last agreement, with the thought that union head Tony Clark gave away too much at the previous CBA negotiations. Essentially they see the high luxury tax penalties serving as a more or less de facto salary cap, while the qualifying offer and draft pick compensation undoubtedly harmed the negotiating position of the top free agents. As we learned back in May and June, the baggage both sides carried into negotiations really made reaching an agreement incredibly difficult.
Things aren't likely to get much easier with the uncertainty that still hovers over exactly how next season might go down. Will there be fans in the stands at the start and, if so, how many? Does the season run the normal 162 games, or do they start a bit later, hoping for a widely available vaccine to open things up?
In his piece in The Athletic, Drellich reports that there is some sentiment towards delaying the new CBA negotiations, possibly pushing them back another year to a time when potentially there would be more certainty about what the post-pandemic economy might look like for Major League Baseball. That would make a lot of sense, but that would have to be agreed to by both sides, and accommodations would have to be made for whether to keep a universal DH and some sort of expanded playoffs. This is certainly something that hangs over all of baseball, but it has significant personal interest to me as a Mets fan.
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