After a 2018 offseason that saw countless veterans linger on the free agent vine much longer than anticipated, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark is expecting yet another cooled stove this winter–and, judging from comments made to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal on Thursday, he doesn’t sound particularly pleased about it.
“The Hot Stove season has traditionally been about ticket sales and fan engagement,” Clark told Rosenthal. “Yet several clubs are laying the groundwork for more of the same [this offseason], even as franchise values skyrocket and central revenues continue to increase. These blanket proclamations send precisely the wrong message to fans, and undermine the competitive landscape that fuels interest in the game from day one of spring training through the final game of the World Series.”
For context, it’s important to note that Clark is largely responding to recent comments made by several C-level club executives and owners around the game: Red Sox brass has indicated a desire to get under the CBT threshold in advance of 2020; the Rockies, fresh off of a fourth-place season, indicated a lack of “flexibility” in regard to finances for 2020; and, just this week, our own Steve Adams delved into the possible maneuvers the Astros could undertake in avoidance of the luxury tax line, after owner Jim Crane poured cold water on the idea of a Houston-Geritt Cole reunion. For teams at every position in the standings, “spending” has become a center-stage PR concern in 2019.
Clark also took pains to note that MLB saw a decline in gate attendance for the fourth consecutive season, with, specifically, a 1.6 year-over-year drop from 2018 to 2019. That such a decline would occur while another term–“tanking”–is also becoming common parlance would seem to add some teeth to Clark’s comments. In 2019, 20 teams finished with 90-or-more losses or 90-or-more wins, while a whopping eight teams finished with 100-or-more losses or 100-or-more wins.
Rosenthal’s column also features comments from MLB deputy commissioner Dan Halem, who takes–as one might expect–a more tempered view of game-wide spending patterns, noting that the Minnesota Twins saw a huge jump in 2019 attendance despite a quiet 18-19 offseason in terms of spending (the club’s two “major” expenditures being a collective three years of commitment to Marwin Gonzalez and Nelson Cruz). Certainly, this instance of public back-and-forth represents an interesting bit of repartee occurring between both league and players union in advance of the current collective bargaining agreement’s expiration in December of 2021.
Times have changed Tony.
Roll with it…..
Sure, “roll with” billionaire stooges making more money off the backs of hard working players. Stop defending the cheapskate owners. Stop it. Clark should force teams to spend or else they lose their draft picks.
Tony Clark can’t force teams to do anything.
Tony Clark should have negotiated something in the CBA to try and protect against tanking. Instead of negotiating for personal chefs and better hotels.
You are correct. He also took a 10% pay cut for 40 man roster players not on the active roster. I do not think Clark is a bad person but just not an astute union person. Great speaker!
I don’t understand why the MLBPA doesn’t unionize all minor league players. Is there some rule somewhere that I am missing? It would keep the teams from using theses players in a lockout. It would also force teams to pay younger players more. Does the union only care about the millionaires in the majors?
I must be missing something.
Yes the union only cares about the players on 40 man rosters and those in the majors.
They dont care about minor leaguers getting paid a living wage, as almost all of them will never make it to the majors and a big payday. Why waste time and resources that could take away from the gravy train of millionaire players? Its not worth it to the union.
It’s absolutely worth it to the union. Making their replacements more expensive to develop increases the value of an established big leaguer. The players thought limiting draft and IFA spending would set aside more money for them. That didn’t work out so well.
That’s actually an interesting question
jonbluvin…..
First year minor league players at low A and below only make $290. a week. Unbelievable!
Everyone who is a billionaire certainly earned and in no way does things that are absolutely despicable, and if you really want to become one everyone has an equal opportunity to do so in America. Back to Fox News…
The majority of billionaires today made their money investing in hedge funds that shipped middle class jobs to China and took over big Pharma so they could jack up prices. I would call that very despicable.
And yes, I know you were being sacastic.
How dare you tell him what to do, fascist.
Thanks Kayrall!
I’m not defending anyone, especially billionaires
(I am not one). Simply that front office outlooks have changed and Tony needs to come up with creative solutions instead of raging against the dying of the light. You were out a strike ago Mr. Four…..
Yep. Tony agreed to this CBA. He knows he failed the players and he’s trying to save face by blaming everyone but himself. Owners are playing by the rules that were collectively bargained. Nothing to see here but an inept union leader who failed the people who hired him.
He didn’t fail Bryce Harper. It’s hard to justify more spending for teams getting burned by big contracts. If players agents sought shorter contracts with a higher AAV, players like Miguel Cabrera and Pujols wouldn’t be cautionary tales for GMs. Any contracts lasting longer than six years is almost always disastrous, that’s why only top revenue teams do them.
Shorter service time requirements to reach free agency or create an incentives system for giving big money extensions to young superstars.
Maybe a contract that gives the player a piece of lifetime jersey sales.
Ha! I didn’t read this below but I just posted an extensive version of something very similar to what you just said below.
Again, I post my suggestion for the next CBA of having after year four only 50% of the salary goes against the tax threshold when you re-sign your ow free agent. Add in that revenue sharing proceeds had to be used towards these contracts. Players will get their money, fans get consistency with respect to rosters and owners while paying the bucks don’t get additionally soaked or penalized.
Well hey a good solution for next time is to read the CBA before you agree to it.
Badda Bing!
Agreed. He makes it sound like it’s one sided. Many MLB players have their cake and eat it too…namely, fully guaranteed contracts. You don’t see players offering to renegotiate contracts after having bad years or injuries. I’m all for players trying to make as much as they can, but we don’t live in a socialist country (yet), so owners are certainly at liberty to control their team spending as they see fit. It is a business, after all.
Don’t see players renegotiating after bad years. Lol. You also don’t see teams renegotiating the horribly underpaid pre-arb contracts either
What about the opportunity the young players get and the recent explosion of arb. year contracts? Mookie getting $20m this past year and $30m next year helps bring up all contracts. Some players will get more in their last arb year than they will when they become a free agent should they get injured or have a down season. The arb years are just increase after increase. Also, players can’t go to another country to get more money. If you lower the free agency period to say four years, the superstar will get more but the player who as just mentioned gets hurt or has a lousy fourth season can get less on a yearly average basis.
Averaging one players salary with others is a Ponzi scheme. You make 10 mil. I make 500k and the average is 5,25,000. I am no where near your earnings. The club controls arbitration. If they think the arb salary is going to be too high they can non-tender the player. It’s all in their control.
The first thing I noticed when they announced the last CBA agreement was how little the luxury tax thresholds increased. With the increasingly bigger piece of the pie going to the owners over the last couple of decades, I was very surprised that the players had agreed to it. The luxury tax has turned into a de facto salary cap.
It’s early, but if I had to guess, I think we are heading towards a strike in a couple of years.
Exactly, he has failed the players multiple times in the CBA. Agreeing to the old qualified offer system was bad and to fix it he made the problem even worse with a low CBT number and massive punishments for going over.
tony…you couldn’t catch up to the high heater…get over it brah
That 8 lb. necklace got in the way.
Maybe with a cap and floor poorer teams wouldn’t have to tank, Tony.
AGREED!!! MLB needs a salary cap!!! Then the same teams wouldn’t be in the playoffs every single year!
So Detroit, Chicago, KC, Miami, etc would suddenly spend up to the cap and get competitive? Bring it!
MLB needs a salary FLOOR not a cap, and big league teams need to pay ALL minor leaguers $75,000 a year, not the $12,000 peanuts they get.
You can’t have a floor without a cap. Forcing teams to spend more will not allow them to be competitive for talent. If the same teams can just keep out bidding the lower half revenue for talent, the lower half will just be spending more money on the same lower talent players. It will not improve team competitiveness.
It’s not about competitiveness, it’s about sharing the wealth that ONLY the players are creating. Owners don’t play, barely anyone can name the owners of their fave teams: they’re faceless, soulless, money-hungry billionaires sucking the life out of a game they have nothing to do with. They are a scourge upon the league. Share the damn wealth.
A salary floor won’t matter much without a cap. You want parity, you need to set limits on both ends of the spectrum. $200MM cap, $75MM floor, no exceptions. Players would never go for it, though.
Move to Sweden already and shut up. Good lord.
Warriors and Patriots. No salary caps don’t create parity and if you look up any article on such nonsense, it will tell you that your biased opinion is flawed.
Owning a business is harder than working for a business. Owners have to pay salaries with liquid funds, meaning they have to be making good decisions with all of their billions in order to keep the baseball juices flowing.
Good point strike four
It IS about competitiveness. There are millions of fans in lower market areas that don’t watch or attend games because of people that think competition doesn’t matter. That costs owners and players money. The players don’t deserve a larger piece of the the pie if they aren’t at least willing to help build a bigger pie.
Warriors have only been good for 5 years. Six years ago you couldn’t pay people to wear Golden State apparel.
$100MM floor no exceptions in this day and age is nothing! There would be people lined up to buy teams that would spend that much!!
The wealth is being shared. The MLB players get paid well. They need to increase payroll at the minor league level, shorten up service time requirements to 4 years, give teams a right of first refusal on the players first FA contract after his 4th year. What kills MLB is the trans local TV contracts….NFL negotiates as one. Big markets clean up.
If MLB did away with the luxury tax, it would increase salaries. The unfortunate piece to this is that it would be about 8 teams pushing $300 mil. It would be fantasy baseball for billionaires.
I side with the owners today on long term deals for older players. These players need to get their cash from ages 26-33, not 34 plus. Verlander has performed under big$ short term deals but Miggy, Pujols, Stanton, Ellsbury, hell even Harpers deals are crippling. The Yankees just got Texeira off the books!!!!!! Paying those guys prevents younger players who deserve the cash from getting paid due to luxury cap restrictions. The bidding war for Cole would be intense if there wasn’t a cap! A team like the Yankees could go 5 years $250m for him and not blink!
Wrong again, communist.
That’s why they pay
Chinese salaries
or jack up
the price of
their product
(big Pharma).
Lol no
just a floor. teams going beyond the luxury tax brackets is not am issue and good for the players. a team can still tank with a floor. when it comes down to it, picking anywhere between 1-5 tends to yeild the same results in the MLB draft, so i dont think owners will be too angry.
No it haant. 20 teams you dont have a salary floor without a salary cap.
Why?
Because the purpose of a system like that is to increase fan growth through parity. A floor without cap wouldn’t do that. It would just make sure the “tanking” teams spend more money and the winning teams have to offer record breaking contracts. It would help the players but not even remotely help the league owners as a whole. It would only hurt them on average. Why would they ever agree to that. Not to mention that no major American sport has ever agreed to a basement without a cap. MLB players already get guaranteed contracts that don’t have a max. Why would they also be the only ones to get a basement and no cap? It’s not like they sustain as many life altering injuries as NFL players and those guys have a cap and non guaranteed contracts. As a result they are given a basement and all of those things create the most parity in the country. That’s why NFL has the highest fan base in America.
Lol 75k for all minor leaguers. You are beyond out of touch with reality. It’s sad honestly. I hope when you get older you realize that. Look up the farmers in the cocoa industry if you want to see some actual exploited workers.
The stuff you say is nothing but nonsense. But I suppose that’s what its like to be an over liberalized kid from California. All you hear is what is wrong with Big Industry X and you come up with these kind of nonsense solutions that you can rationalize as being great ideas.
Ehhh, not as good an idea as you think.
Over in the NHL, you’ve got teams like the Arizona Coyotes and Ottawa Senators that are taking on bad contracts from other teams just to reach the cap floor. There’s no way they could reach the floor by convincing high-end free agents to sign with them, because players want to go somewhere where they can win.
There are a ton of hockey fans out there who want the salary cap abolished because it actively punishes their team for being successful at drafting & developing.
No way man. The salary cap in the NHL has created the best parity of the major sports. Nobody wants the league to turn into Toronto, Chicago, and New York just buying championships.
Manfred and Clark deserve each other.
The game has become very boring. We don’t need to see Scott a Boras holding out for the last dime and players like Bryce Harper having to sign with a team he never wanted to play for because they had the highest bid. What does he expect when Boras holds up the market and nothing happens.
Harper went where he wanted – a place that payed up for the value they believed he brought.
You must mean a team that was dedicated to being so “stupid” that they believed Harper was going to bring the value for what they were willing to pay.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for almost 2 years now. To alleviate the issues of guys not getting paid, I think they’re going to have to do something in the CBA at some point to either lower team contol by a year, or maybe bring back some sort of restricted Free Agency with 1 year left. I could see that leading to more trades, but a better chance to reach the open market before age 30, while still giving teams a chance to keep their players. Arbitration process also has to change, so you dont have so many non-tenders. Not sure how this would effect small market teams, in their ability to plan, and supplement lower cost young guys with free agents, and fit that into a more doable payroll, but it raises the importance of your farm system even more, and I think lowers the chance of a FA signing being a bust….Not entirely sure how they can go about it, but we cant have these situations where guys just arent getting signed. I dont know those ideas would be the right move to fix it. Just throwing them out there. Otherwise, we’re going to see more and more really good players not getting paid, or sitting out, b/c teams are smarter now about what they want to spend on, and it’s a younger and younger game. So to me, the best option is to find a way to pay guys when they’re most productive more often. Again though, I feel like there would have to be a way to implement it, b/c it’s not something you can just shift to right away
I think they’re going to have to do something in the CBA at some point to either lower team contol by a year,
————————————————
Instead of lowering it by a year, they should make it age-limited. Players get screwed by becoming free agents too old, sometimes. Even a mediocre players can sign a decent contract if they are a FA by age 28.
Tony definitely needs new ideas…..
Yes team values are indeed rising, but because a team is valued at 1.6 billion, doesn’t mean that team has 1.6 billion to spend.
Yes, some teams are particularly worrisome with their lack of spending. I think we can agree it is in some cases merely a way to line the pockets of owners. But that has always been true. But teams that are trying to get, or stay, below the luxury tax are not the teams to use as the poster child for this fight.
As for long in the tooth veterans not getting big contracts any longer, that’s just part of the new era we are in. Youth sells and delivers. The more 35 year old vets there are on rosters, the fewer 24 year olds there will be. It’s just smart business to be able to identify young players who can do what, or more than, the older players do and at a much cheaper price.
Hey Tony Clark why in the world did you agree to a $206m level of the luxury tax in the first place. Given all the revenue in baseball maybe you should have made raising that level instead of worrying about getting chefs in the clubhouse.
Tony Clark time for you to resign already!
You do realize That the negotiations were not all Clark and that there are 30 union reps from each team with each having an agenda of their own.. Why do you think teams have specialty chef’s in the clubhouse, salad chef’s and other such nonsense in the last CBA?
Maybe had Tony Clark.. Even some really qualified rep been given a list of what IS important to the MLBPA been allowed to negotiate head on head, rather than a 30 headed snake which was clueless the player’s may have gotten a better deal.
It’s not hard to imagine what went on during negotiations.. some reps demanding these nonsensical additions and ownership throwing out some important agenda in return as a concession.
The return of a Marvin Miller type negotiator to reign in this nonsense could fix this, or shutting out foolish player reps entirely from the table.,
JoeBrady … exactly
I agree but it is still a fair arrangement. MLB has the commissioner and 30 team owners. MLBPA has Tony Clark and 30 team reps. It’s hard to get more fair then 31 vs. 31. If that hurts the MLBPA then it is their fault for bringing so many people to the table.
Hey Earth to Tony, a lot of these players are overpaid. in my opinion everyone is overpaid!
Not only that, these guaranteed contracts are a bunch of Bull Schiste! And so is the shift for that matter! I gotta stop cussin man, but who wants to pay good money to see a bunch of overpaid bums and a shift that steals, literally steals the elegance of the game!
Putting a bunch of computer weenies in charge of defense is for the birds!!!
Let’s see… The concept of “hit them where they ain’t” is a pretty old one in baseball. Maybe if the hitters would learn to accept a single to the weak side of the shift, the shifting would stop. A defense has EVERY right to do anything legal in its power to stop a hitter.
me!
The current CBA generally works against the older players, not the stars, they are getting paid. The Union signed it. The Luxury Tax needs to be raised and be able to rise faster than it does. Although, I’ve always been against it a salary floor is badly needed. I also think expansion is a good idea. It will add 50 or so Major league jobs and probably hundreds of minor league jobs as well. Some will worry about watering down the talent. I’ve been through many expansions and if it waters down talent at all it’s only temporary at best, Imagine a couple of new owners willing to spend on FA”s to fill out their draft lottery teams and having lots of payroll room to do it. I do.
Ever notice how records get challenged during the first couple of years after expansion. That brings interest to the game.
Unfortunately, we aren’t going to see expansion until Tampa and Oakland figure out their stadium situations.
Clarke bungled the last CBA. He allowed himself to be distracted by smaller issues, like the QO, and paid no attention to the larger ones…like tanking, like service time manipulation, like how the draft is handled, etc. He’s upset because he sees the failures, and know they land on him. Tanking and non-competitive teams is bad for baseball. I don’t have a problem with a team, mid season and seeing itself out of the race, making a few opportunistic trades. But a deliberate strategy to be bad for years is just bad for baseball–it cheats the fans, and even cheats the teams not lucky enough to be in its Division. Unlike some of the other commenters, I also have no problem with talented players making boatloads of money. If I could throw 98 MPH or hit a ball 475 feet, I’d want to be paid as well. But baseball should take a hard look at itself and ask if it’s providing a quality product to as many cities as possible.
“Minnesota Twins saw a huge jump in 2019 attendance despite a quiet 18-19 offseason in terms of spending”
Attendance went up because the team won. DUH.
but are being swept away again by the evil empire!
Yup. Win and they will come. Except in Oakland and Florida…..
Stop rewarding failure. Top pick goes to the team that just missed the playoffs. Teams with payroll below 75 million need to pay a tax. Last place more than twice in a 10 year span gets taken over by the league.
No one cares what the mouth piece tony Clark has to say.
750 mlb players plus number of prospects and free agents that haven’t been employed do really and strongly care! plus many fans who don’t want to watch many talents moving to other sports!
Out with the old, in with the new. If they were good enough they’d have their spot. Guess what, they suck. How many are drafted each year? How many international prospects are signed each year. How many trashy players are still playing or finally got the boot in the last off season.
They are trash.
Call the owners bluff then.
Offer up a salary cap/salary floor system where the players get 50% of all baseball revenue (they currently get about 40%).
The floor should be no less than 90% of the ceiling, so the payroll disparities are minimal.
This guarantees a (mostly) level playing field and guarantees the players get paid.
The ONLY downside is that the same 6-8 big market teams won’t be able to buy their way to relevance every single year. Which, of course, means that those teams, the league, the TV networks and 70% of the fans in baseball would oppose it.
@forwhomjoshbelltolls
Not true. MLB players got 54.8% of revenue per forbes.com for 2018 and well over 50% since at least 2006.
Where did you get that 40% nonsense from?
Not Forbes.
When have any of their sports related numbers ever been right? Serious question. They pull their franchise values out of their backside.
And, let’s say that your number is correct, then…what are they whining about?
It’s not, so they are. The players share has been dropping for years.
NBA, NHL and NFL players get a fixed % of their sports revenues. Baseball players rejected that deal in the hopes of getting more, they got less.
If they make that choice again, that’s on them.
That floor is kind of high…..
And baseball owners have creative ways of hiding local revenue…..
This is all on Tony Clark. A couple of other posters mentioned it, but it took me maybe a minute of looking at the CBA to realize the cap was increasing 2% while revenues were probably increasing 6%.
But the players and agents are also at fault. How is that we commoners can spot this with no problem, but the players, agents, lawyers and union missed it.
Why would it mention the redsox desire to get under the cap if they are over it that means they are clearly spending and actually to much,
if teams are over then they would be able to give less in contracts due to the penalties so getting under would only make sense no?
MLBPA you have a great chance to prepare and prioritize what is most important for next negotiation. Fighting for bloated contracts/dead money deals of past for oldish players needs to be shifted to getting those talents to FA a year or 2 earlier. Giving all the non-playoff teams same odds of getting picks 1 thru 20 in complete luck lottery for at least first couple rounds of draft also takes the major benefit of tanking away (paired with salary floor/cap). Not so hidden secret is mlb wants the economic imbalance for big market Yanks/LAD/Cubs/RSox to make postseason 80% of the time while other clubs have to be quite a bit smarter to overcome those that can outspend a lot of mistakes.
1.raise the minimum salaries and arbitration pay based on previous year production
2.if hurt most of the year,next year arbitration salary lowered based on half the current salary
3.only annual salaries after age 30-no long term commitments and guaranteed salaries
4.if free agents leave the team organization that they came up through,give that team consideration from the receiving team of draft picks and minor league players depending on how good the player leaving is
Why should baseball players have it any different than any other professionals such as doctors,lawyers,engineers etc?
Because good players are a limited resource. It’s supply and demand economics…..
The problem with baseball is that players don’t want to put in any of the financial risk that other major American sports athletes do and they are dead set on the idea that there will be no hard salary cap no matter what. They want guaranteed contracts and an arbitration system that sets player values so high that teams would rather walk away then pay them. The biggest problem in MLB is parity. The lack of parity exists only because there is no salary basement/cap in the sport. The owners will never agree to a basement if there is no cap. Why would they? It would only cost them more money. The other big problem is the guaranteed salaries that MLB players demand. If people like Chris Davis, Miggy Cabrera and Albert Pujils are going to make $20-$35 million a year for several years in a row when the owners don’t even truly want them on the team anymore it means that money is going to have to come out of other players pockets. MLB players as a whole could easily get a much larger piece of the pie as long as they were okay with the idea that players who have nothing left in the tank shouldn’t be paid like stars. This is where the NFL gets us right. Owners can walk away when they believe a player is done producing. As a result the NFL has a salary basement that is more than twice as high as many MLB teams ever spend. The basement is about 97% of the cap. Even role players are set for life as long as they can perform on the field. I would never suggest a cap with no basement. The only thing dumber than that is basement with no cap. They are mutually inclusive for the good if the league. When people ask whether I would rather have players acquire the money or owners I obviously would prefer the player. I would rather have 2 of my friends become millionaires then 1 become a multi millionaire and one be broke. That is totally besides the point though. I am totally against taking someone’s money and giving to someone else because it is more to my own liking. That just sounds completely immoral. As a fan of many professional American sports I have to say what I think is best for the league is parity. I don’t want to see the same teams win it every year. I want to see half the teams that are in last place this year actually make the playoffs next year. That happens in the NFL all the time. Does anyone really think Seattle, Detroit, Baltimore, Pittsburgh or Miami even stand a chance of making the playoffs next year? No. Of course not. The fans of those teams know it too. That decreases fan attendance which hurts the owners more than anyone else. The easy answer is to tell owners to spend more money. The Detroit Tigers did that with Miggy Cabrera and now they are screwed because of it. Baltimore did that with Chris Davis and now they are screwed because of it. If the MLBPA wants to require that players are going to get paid over $30 million a year GUARANTEED for as much as half a decade after they are truly useful then they have to make some sacrifices. Those sacrifices end up coming from the pockets of more productive players. I am not okay with that. If players want to make more money on average then they should want the league to make more money as well. That would be best exploited by a salary basement/cap system. NFL players play for a sport that has the largest fan base in the U.S. They also damage their bodies and brains through a much brutal sport. Even they are willing to play on a non guaranteed contract/salary cap scenario. The result of that agreement is increased parity and there for increased profits. That means that even though the NFL has more then double the quantity of players, some of the average capable role players make $10-$15 million a year. Tony Clark is grandstanding new because he knows the players are upset with the current CBA deal. When he signed it he believed that some owners thought his players would be so valuable that they would be willing to break the luxury tax thresholds. Unfortunately they don’t don’t that because they are spending too much money on guys like Chris Davis, Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols amongst many others. In addition to that many other MLB owners are deathly afraid that big contracts they may hand out in the future could end up like that. MLBPA should bite down and accept the fact that parity is the most important thing and that aging players that don’t bring their teams success don’t deserve to be paid like they do. Then the players will get a bigger piece of the pie. The only problem is that the MLBPA thinks of people like Chris Davis as players that deserve to be looked up to when his time is over.
StandUpGuy …. tip …. its called a paragraph. No one is going to read that eyesore you wrote
I read it and yes, my
eyes are sore…..
What active 40 man? There is an active roster of 25. The other 15 get (in the minors) paragraph two money
Lol
I would like to see teams be able to cut players like Miggy, Pujols and Chris Davis and not have the dollars count against the floor or the cap. There contracts are guaranteed and the still get paid so that’s really the penalty towards the team.
But that allows the rich
teams to get around the
luxury tax…..
Question who forces an owner to pay 20 mil a year for 15 years….no one. It’s the owners decision.
Players have zero to complain about. Look at the lifetime earnings of some of the league average players. I.e. Elvis Andrus, Brett Anderson, even my favorite player, Brett Gardner.
Nevermind injured or severely compromised players that signed years ago and now produce little to no value. See Ellsbury, Cabrera, Votto, Pujols. Owners should be able to buyout long-term deals that are an albatross, or else only a handful of players will ever see another deal longer than 5 or 6 years.
See my comment to
hetzel01…..
When did Tony Clark turn into Benjamin Sisko?
Clark is in a difficult position, he represents the players and each season there are many new players in the MLB ranks, but some older players no longer have contracts. I try to think how I would feel as a young player coming up, getting my first chance at a taste of the big leagues, and the MLBPA head thinks a washed up old guy should get a huge contract that he doesn’t deserve instead of me getting my first shot. I think I would resent that. Screw Tony Clark. That’s not fair.
The problem with spending isn’t the fault of the owners or the players, it’s the fault of both. The ludacris tax system destroys what is an otherwise free market. With revenues increasing it makes no sense to tax teams for spending that money on the field. That said, half or even a quarter billion dollar contracts are absurd. The money should just be more evenly spread around. No tax means lower level guys can get paid more. The top tier have been making an absurd amount of money for quite a while now. Minor leaguers, stadium staff, countless coaches and trainers, MLB teams employ tons of people. I will never buy into baseball players making 20+million a season crying about their fair share.
comment section is a prime example of people showing why you never go full tard, but yet so many blowing owners here managed to do just that
Everyone who is a billionaire certainly earned and in no way does things that are absolutely despicable, and if you really want to become one everyone has an equal opportunity to do so in America. Back to Fox News…
See my comment to you above…..
Very good debates in this thread. I hope the MLBPA
membership reads them…..
Simple fix ya’ll. League wide base salary per game on the active 40 man.Assign a monetary value related to offensive statistics, defensive statistics, and added value execution plays (successful bunt,hit and run ect.)
Base guarentee on the rehab of injuries. In this way the owners win by never overpaying for a player’s contract. The players also never have a complaint about being underpaid as they get paid exactly what they were worth in that given season. Too many people trying to be too smart for their own good on this topic. Including the ones who are actually paid to discuss this topic. Simplest fix in the world. That’s why it’ll never fly, makes too much sense.
What active 40 man? There is an active roster of 25. The other 15 get (in the minors) paragraph two money