I was talking to The Little Girl last night about what today’s deadline is – the expiration of baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement at midnight Eastern – and it occurred to me then that I’ve never really experienced a day like today. I started doing the BN thing full-time shortly after she was born, way back in the summer of 2011. That means the first CBA talks I covered came (1) right after I’d started doing this full-time and there was so much I didn’t really know yet, and (2) just as the Cubs were transitioning to the Theo Epstein-led front office. We were distracted!
So, in my memory, that CBA simply happened like magic – with significant structural changes that wound up favoring the owners, by the way – and my duty was only to cover the changes.
Then, five years later, there was maybe a little more rancor, but again, it seemed a bit to me like the deal simply happened. Again, there were a couple reasons: (1) the negotiations were led by a new MLBPA Director in Tony Clark who may have been a little too go-with-the-flow, and a deal got done relatively easily because the players got crushed, and (2) the Cubs had just won the World Series. We were distracted!
Then you have this year. So, like I said, I was explaining to The Little Girl what was happening, and it occurred to me that today was truly unique in my baseball-covering experience. Tomorrow will be, too, since the owners will lock out the players, and we’ll have our first labor shutdown in over 25 years. It’s weird.
I know all the soft talk about how this doesn’t mean games will be lost, and it’s about controlling the negotiating process, and all that stuff. But it still marks a pretty significant moment in the history of the sport, and it frustrates me that the owners – after a couple clearly huge wins on the negotiating front – do not appear to be as open to fundamental shifts in free agency and arbitration as they should be.
To that end, while there are lots of other issues to be sorted out, the latest from ESPN suggests that is the real core of the disagreement:
The players want free agency after five years or 29.5 years of age, whichever comes first, while beginning the arbitration process after two seasons instead of three.
Owners won’t agree to such a massive overhaul of the system, according to a person familiar with the league’s thinking. Both free agency after six years and arbitration after three seasons have been tenets of the economic process in baseball for decades.
I get why the owners wouldn’t want to make a deal that could shift more money to the players, but at some point, you aren’t helping the overall sport by keeping things in such an imbalance (revenues have outpaced salary growth for years now). Focus less on your slice of the pie, and focus on growing the pie. That kind of stuff.
There will be more meetings today, but with everyone understanding that no deal is happening before midnight, it would probably be most productive for today to be about how things will proceed in the lockout. What can teams and players do and not do at team facilities, when will the next sessions be, what areas should each side really be focused on, etc.
Your most optimistic take from Evan Drellich at The Athletic:
The best-case scenario for what is effectively deadline day, Wednesday, would be a sense of momentum that convinces owners to put off moving for a lockout at midnight entering Thursday. Getting to a full deal by the end of Wednesday is impossible, but theoretically, they could gain enough steam in some areas to want to keep moving.
In other words, if somehow, magically, the sides got close enough today that they thought maybe they could get a deal done by, say, Friday, the owners could say they will start a lockout at midnight on Friday if no deal is completed. Having seen how these sides work in recent years, though, I’ve gotta believe that’s a 1% proposition at best.
Far more likely is that talks don’t move the needle much today, the owners lock the players out at midnight, and then tomorrow is full of ugly statements about how the owners are being intransigent, the players are being unrealistic, and on and on.
From there, we’ll get into what the lockout means, and what the timelines could look like – both for the lockout and for the then-revised offseason.
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