Baseball Avoids Disaster Just in Time for a Fresh Start

There was something thrilling, as in an amusement ride that sends you upside down, of surviving what seemed like the brink of disaster.

The world of a baseball player is defined by wins and losses. Thursday was defined in positive terms for Major League players. With the end of a collective-bargaining agreement dispute that pushed baseball one toenail away from falling into the abyss, the players gained the greatest increases they ever obtained in minimum salaries and the Competitive Balance Tax while also getting an unprecedented bonus pool for young players—without losing a paycheck.

If the lockout that owners imposed on Dec. 2 and ended Thursday was a fight over money in a $10 billion business, the players won. They recovered ground they lost in the prior CBA when they took their eye off economic issues and the owners let front offices McKinsey-fy the game to “commoditize” them, as union chief Tony Clark so expertly put the hacking and dulling of the game.

The owners also won—on their own terms. They traded economics for quality of the product. They won the right to start crafting a faster, more watchable, more modern game, gained an expanded postseason, and—this was job No. 1—avoided the first in-season work stoppage in 27 years.

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Fans get a balanced schedule, the expanded postseason and a game played with better pace and no defensive shifts (starting in 2023). Asked why baseball is moving away from those heavy intra-division schedules, commissioner Rob Manfred said, “Our teams and our fans like a greater variety of opponents.” With more playoff spots, it makes even more sense to have schedules that are more alike.

The CBA agreement arrived at the right place in the nick of time. Manfred put a 3 p.m. deadline on the owners’ last proposal Thursday. And just as the 6 p.m. Wednesday deadline he gave the union set the endgame in motion, this one worked just as well. Manfred may have stumbled as a messenger—touting stocks as a better buy than owning a ballclub and daring to chuckle on the day he announced Opening Day was canceled—but he reproved why he is the owners’ commissioner: he is a labor lawyer who knows how to close a deal. Baseball’s streak of not losing games to a work stoppage stretches to 31 years.

Asked to describe the pivot point in negotiations, Manfred said it was when the union made a counter to essentially defer a decision on the international draft, which had become an 11th hour obstacle. The union sprung into such action only after Manfred surprised them by jumping to cancel games after the union dallied through his 6 p.m. deadline to give him a counter.

“That was the big moment,” Manfred said. “Hats off to Tony to sending over the proposal that he did. That was a key move at the right time. I felt good Thursday morning, but I knew we still had a way to go.”

Manfred applied one more pressure point. When he made the last proposal, he tied it to a full season and the clock. If the players did not accept it by 3 p.m., he told them, the promise of full pay for a full season expired. Games would be lost and a wicked fight for back pay would then complicate dead-in-the water talks. He waited.

“At various points, I wasn’t sure” it would be accepted, he said. The players took the deal.

“Deadlines are always important,” he said. “It’s hard to move the process, particularly on contentious ones, without deadlines.”

There was something thrilling, as in an amusement ride that sends you upside down, of surviving what seemed like the brink of disaster. The game exhaled, and now gets the more enjoyable thrill ride of free agency played out at warp speed.

Do the Cubs stretch for Carlos Correa now that a sixth playoff spot has been added in both leagues? Or do the Dodgers blow through the latest CBT thresholds to get him? Do the Braves keep Freddie Freeman with the security of a DH spot to cover the back years of a long contract? Or do the Mets, Yankees or Dodgers take advantage of Atlanta leaving him on the market in what is now a gold rush?

The agreement changed the conversation about baseball with dizzying speed. All again seemed right in the baseball world, with one exception: what was going on with the executive board of the union? They voted 8-0 against the deal—in solidarity as it turned out. The same players who worked so hard to deliver this historic deal for the union chose not to take their victory lap. Worse, their own rank and file repudiated them. The teams voted 26–4 to accept what the board didn’t want.

The union board members were Andrew Miller, Max Scherzer, Marcus Semien, Francisco Lindor, Gerrit Cole, James Paxton, Zack Britton and Jason Castro. Together they have earned $1.53 billion, including guaranteed future earnings. Five are clients of agent Scott Boras.

One month ago, Scherzer put the needs of the union into a tweet. The players, he said, were fighting for “a system where threshold and penalties don’t function as caps, allows younger players to realize more of their market value, makes service time manipulation a thing of the past, and eliminate[s] tanking as a winning strategy.”

Done. The players obtained their goals, including an unprecedented award pool that sends $50 million a year to pre-arbitration players. According to one source, however, the board didn’t like the deal because it thought the CBT should go higher. It went up $20 million in the first year, to $230 million. The 9.5% increase was the best ever negotiated by the players. It rises to $244 million in the fifth year.

And yet apparently it wasn’t enough for the board. The vast majority of the 1,100 players disagreed with their leaders, a shocking turn as negotiations go. The rank and file decided they liked the deal better than those who were sitting at the table. They weren’t about to lose two weeks’ worth of paychecks—that’s $53,846 for those making the minimum, a 22.7% raise—just to give the Yankees or Dodgers another $2 million to spend on Freeman. More than two-thirds of the players earned less than $1 million.

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From here, now baseball needs a true partnership. As important as it was for these negotiations not to cost a single regular season game, there was a cost to the gamesmanship and acrimony both sides expended to get there.

As one MLB executive put it, “Wish we could have looked beyond the current system and designed something from scratch that better reflects how players are valued today and allows some collaboration to fix the game and grow the pie.”

Said Manfred, “One of the things I’m supposed to do is promote a good relationship with our players. I’ve tried to do that. I think that I have not been successful in that.”

Is this a new start? The game feels as if it is coming out of an inert era. It will look different next season. A generation of talented young players is not waiting to “pay their dues” to claim the reins, as was the old school way. If this fight was about the younger players, they made their voice heard in the final vote.