7:54 pm: According to Bob Nightengale of USA Today, the proposed pool system could allow players to increase their salaries by as much as 385% depending upon their WAR totals and placement in awards voting. He adds that under this system, reigning NL Rookie of the Year Jonathan India would be in line for a $1.193MM salary despite not yet being arbitration eligible.
3:31 pm: After weeks of silence between the two parties, Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association met today for a second straight day as they work toward a new collective bargaining agreement. While an agreement is not believed to be anywhere close, there’s at least been some semblance of headway in talks (though the extent of that progress is debatable).
For instance, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman tweets that the MLBPA had sought to raise the minimum salary from $570,500 to $775,000 — but MLB had countered with a proposal for a $600K minimum. (For context, the minimum salary has risen between $7-10K in each of the past several seasons anyhow.) The league today moved that offer forward a bit further, offering a $615K minimum salary for players with less than one year of Major League service time, per Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post (Twitter link).
Of course, the value of that “concession” is rather subjective. As Travis Sawchik of The Score observes, in order to keep up with inflation, the league would’ve needed to push the minimum salary to $650K just to match the minimum salary from the start of the 2016-21 collective bargaining agreement. Viewed through that lens, the league’s offer could actually be seen as a step back. The Athletic’s Evan Drellich adds that the minimum salary for players with one to two years of service would be $650K under the current proposal, while players with between two and three years would receive at least a $700K salary.
Interestingly, Sawchik reports that MLB proposed fixed salaries at those league minimum figures for players in each service bucket. While players would presumably still be free to sign early-career contract extensions, that would eliminate the system of teams renewing contracts for pre-arbitration players at amounts slightly higher than the league minimum. As one recent example, the Mets offered Pete Alonso a salary a bit north of $650K in 2020 (nearly $100K more than that year’s league minimum) as a reward for his Rookie of the Year-winning 2019 campaign. Under MLB’s proposal, that kind of deal would no longer be permitted.
Janes adds that the league has also dropped proposed scenarios that would alter the arbitration system and eliminate Super Two status — a designation that allows some players to reach arbitration a year early. Shrinking the number of players who can reach arbitration seems like something that would’ve been a non-starter for the MLBPA anyhow, so as with the incremental increases to the minimum salary, taking that component off the table doesn’t feel like much of a step back.
More interestingly, Major League Baseball agreed to the MLBPA’s proposal for a bonus pool, funded by central revenues, to reward pre-arbitration players (Twitter link via Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal). Pre-arb players would be in line for bonuses based both on Awards voting and on reaching certain Wins Above Replacement markers, Janes notes.
That figures to present its own levels of complication, as there are multiple versions of Wins Above Replacement. Beyond needing to agree on which form of WAR to set as the standard, the concept isn’t likely to sit well with the proprietors of those metrics. Baseball-Reference’s Sean Forman has already taken to Twitter to explain how uncomfortable he is with the notion of players being assigned millions of dollars based on a metric that is constantly undergoing slight tweaks to keep up with changes in the game (his Twitter thread on the matter is well worth a full read). Additionally, as Sports Illustrated’s Emma Baccellieri points out (Twitter link), there are some obvious potential conflicts of interest in tying pre-arb bonuses to awards voting that is conducted by the media members who cover those players.
For this bonus structure to work, the two sides would need to agree on the particulars of the bonus pool — and it does not appear as though they’re remotely close to doing so. While it’s promising, to an extent, that MLB was at least amenable to the union’s proposed framework, ESPN’s Jeff Passan tweets that the MLBPA proposed a $105MM pool from which to reward those players. Not surprisingly, the league balked at that figure and countered with a $10MM pool — a figure at which players surely scoffed. Large as that gap may be, the mere fact that MLB is open to the concept clears the admittedly low bar set to declare progress in these talks.
It bears repeating that elements such as the minimum salary, arbitration and this newly conceptualized bonus pool for pre-arbitration players are all merely pieces of what is a much larger puzzle. The league’s larger priorities still include, perhaps most notably, the expansion of the playoff field — an endgame that would dramatically increase television and gate revenues at the most lucrative point in the MLB schedule. Players, meanwhile, have sought changes to a service-time structure that incentivizes teams to keep prospects in the minors longer than would otherwise be the case, a marked increase in the competitive balance (luxury) tax threshold, and measures to eliminate the incentives for teams to tank — among many other elements.
Suffice it to say, while it’s refreshing to hear of any progress, however slight, between the league and the union — it remains abundantly clear that major headway still needs to be made if Spring Training is to begin in mid-February, as currently scheduled. Most have suggested that a deal would need to be reached by Feb. 1 in order for that outcome.
The greatest concern is that any lack of accord between league and union will ultimately result in some portion of regular-season games being wiped out. Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson-Smith and Drellich both suggested last night that Major League Baseball on Monday expressed a willingness to go down that road, if necessary, though the loss of regular-season games still figures to be a last resort and a worst-case scenario on all sides. There’s certainly a middle ground, where Spring Training could perhaps begin in late February or early March, paving the way for a truncated exhibition season and a full 162-game slate.
Whenever an agreement is reached, the league will also need to lift the current transaction freeze, sending front offices and player representatives alike into a frenzy to get the remaining group of unsigned free agents into Spring Training camps as quickly as possible and to resolve any outstanding arbitration cases. Front offices will need to work with fervor to complete any trades or other offseason dealings in an expedited fashion. The longer it takes for the league and union to strike a deal, the more hectic the aftermath of that agreement will be.
I guess any talks at all should be considered positive but both sides are still unrealistic as the players are shooting for the moon while MLB is low balling. Just stop with the dog and pony show and get down to business.
It’s called compromising. Getting two parties with conflicting interests together to negotiate and compromise is the quickest path to an agreement.
$105 million bonus pool, though?! They wanted twice the entire Cleveland Guardians payroll just to go towards bonuses for pre arbitration players? There would be players making several million a year in salary before they even hit arbitration. That would be on top of the frequent $10 million signing bonuses some of the guys get in the draft. What would those arbitration numbers look like? Players would have to be traded much more frequently from small market teams because they could start getting close to $40 million a year before they ever even hit free agency.
Frequent $10M bonuses? No player has ever gotten a $10M signing bonus under this iteration of the draft rules. The majority of drafted players receive $100K or less in terms of signing bonus.
Fans have strange ideas.
the entire point of the bonus pool is so individual teams don’t pay the bonuses. It is a pooled source of money.
In your case, the Guardians would pay the next super stud youngster the minimum salary and the extra $10 million would come from the pool.
Currently each draft slot ( 1 – 10) is assigned a specific amount ( slot value) of guaranteed bonus money..
Only player selected in the first 10 Rounds are eligible to receive a slot value bonus offer.
A team risks severe penalties from MLB if they spend more than the specified “slot value”
A player drafted out out high school can choose to accept or return to college. and retain their eligibility.
In 2021 the largest slot value bonus offered & accepted was Jack Leiter @ 7..9 Mil ( 2nd round)
But if I’m an owner, I dont want to put 3 to 4 million into a pool that might not go to my players. Plus, even if your players do get some of it, they dont attribute those dollars to the team. It’s a weird idea
If you’re an owner you will be very aware that payroll is a smaller slice of the revenue pie than it was at the last CBA and the players aren’t going away until something is done to put it right.
This is a relatively painless way to shift the balance back a bit
Owners might not balk so much at a $110M bonus pool as at the consequences that’ll have for arbitration years. Since arbitration is decided as percentage raises from previous salary, letting a pre-arb player make a few million would likely cost their team tens of millions over the course of their arbitration years. The smaller the bonus pool, the less costly the consequences for arbitration years.
@Steve Adams: What was the amount of money Steven Strasburg got from the Nationals when he was drafted about a decade ago? I thought I remembered hearing it was around $10 million. I could be wrong. The bonuses are really inconsequential when it comes to the arbitration system. Paying pre-arb players a potential 385% increase would make players unaffordable to keep for small market teams before free agency. The A’s are looking at trading guys like Olson because of his $12 million salary. What’s going to happen if players are getting $40 million before free agency? You can’t give players a 385% pre-arb raise without making it virtually impossible for some teams to keep some of their best players even before they become free agents.
Actually, I just looked it up. The first article I looked at says the Nats gave Strasburg $15 million when he was drafted. Not $10 million. Maybe not frequent but certainly existent.
Compromise would be fine but the MLBPA only knows how to shoot for the moon and then roll over and play dead for the owners.
It’s crazy to me that people still don’t understand what negotiations are.
I had no idea it would be so much, I won’t pay it.
Well, that’s all right. We can just put it right back in there.
Elements of negotiation that revolved around a specific dollar amount are rarely what holds agreements up. Numbers can be compromised on and horsetraded. Very promising that, even with demands far off between the sides, there appears to be agreement that the lux tax threshold will go up (by some amount), there will be a bonus pool for pre-arb (of some size). and the minimum salary will go up (by some amount). All good and can be worked out. Remaining qualititative, as opposed to quantitative, issues are expanded playoffs, DH (although I don’t think owners consider that a big deal), and whatever is agreed to prevent service time manipulation. And draft pick compensation and revenue sharing.
Expanded playoffs will render the regular season irrelevant. Even worse, we’ll see .500 clubs appearing in the “World Series”. Do we really want another watered down product like the NBA?
The NBA is not watered down and usually the best teams make it to the finals. MLB is a distant third among the team sports in the U.S and if they do not get their act together it is going to be real bad as there will be no McGwire and Sosa homerun chase to save it this time.
Have you seen the first round of nba playoffs? Or even the first round of nfl playoffs this year. Teams in the 13-16 range dome belong in the playoffs. Expanded playoffs shouldn’t happen, and that’s coming from a mariner fan lol
Benny, although you have the Giants in your backyard and if anyone has ever been to SF the Giants fans are a rapid and loyal fan base, I think you’re too close to the Warriors. The NBA doesn’t have the fan base you’re thinking of and I would say the NFL is the obvious king, then there’s a big drop to second. I think the NBA may have a slight edge right now, and I mean slight, but the NBAs popularity is not even close to the Jordan era.
What criteria are you using for claiming MLB is “a distant third” ?
The NBA is more popular than MLB in just about any metric you can use. Only real old people think otherwise, which is exactly MLBs core demo
Hilarious. The NBA has easily passed MLB in popularity. It’s most egregious in how much older the average MLB fan is and how much more popular the NBA is in other countries. It’s not the 1950s anymore. No league does a worse job of marketing itself to young people than MLB. The facts are what they are
Yadi – from the Natural: “What criteria are you using…”
He asked for a specific basis for your statement and you just regurgitated what sounds like your opinion again and then you insulted him and others because they might be older (and more experienced) than you.
You: “The NBA is more popular than MLB in just about any metric you can use.”
What metric are you using? I’m not saying it’s not true. I don’t know.
Just curious about what official data you are using because you stated it exists.
An 83 win team has already won the world series. No, it’s not fair — but it IS entertaining. Sometimes you just have to sit back and enjoy the show instead of taking it too seriously.
The greatest sport ever, ruined by money and lawyers. Makes me want to vomit.
MLB has, and always will be its own worst enemy. Any time they have momentum, they end up in a work stoppage.
This time they didn’t even have momentum
In regards to momentum I was referring to the fanfare over Ohtani.
Why do they have to make this all so complicated?
A player spends more that a month in the big, it counts as a service year. Free agency after 5 years. Arbitration for only 2 years. Minimum salary $1.5 million dollars. Increased Murphy Money in spring training (like $700 a week) for all players. Owners are making a mint on those spring training games. $700 a week for instructional league.
Hey, it’s fun to spend other people’s money!
Half the teams in baseball would be unable to field a competitive team under those terms. $1.5m is actually a decently sized salary for the Rays and Pirates. And taking away a year of minimum salary control would destroy those teams’ draft-and-develop strategies, which are built entirely on getting value out of pre-arb and early-arb players.
The difference this year is it’s not the rich teams that are driving this car, it’s the low revenue teams. And they’ll never consider that kind of offer.
Jorge, I agree with your first sentence, but nothing beyond that. I’m not sure where your numbers come from besides your imagination. The MLBPA already agreed that 5 years until free agency is off the table.
That said, 5.5 years until free agency and 2.5 years until arbitration would solve a couple major issues: service time manipulation and the randomness and uncertainty of Super Two.
Peg league minimums to increases in league-wide revenue. Go back to the early days and recalculate the increase in league-wide revenue since that time to set the base year of 2021 to determine 2022 minimums.
We may disagree on the specifics, Jorge, but if we agree on the principles then there is room to discuss. Hopefully MLB and MLBPA feel the same way.
I don’t think us projecting the dollar amount is effective. What I see is fan bases arguing. I hope that we, as a collective, want to see this worked out fairly.
I’d rather raise hell about the hall of fame today, personally. More fun being a fan doing that.
@ Jorge
$1.5m min salary?; the Rays and Pirates would have to fold. They couldn’t handle paying all the young players THAT MUCH!
That’s only a 39 million minimum payroll. Even with their awful attendance, figure an average of $30 a ticket x 761,000= approv 22mil. The rays TV deal pays 82 million a year, so thats 104 million. Add in merchandising, concessions, revenue sharing, etc… and the rays can handle a 100 million payroll.
should just have the league minimum set to be adjusted by year for inflation in perpetuity and call that an agreement.
Amen! Normal COLA that everyone should see. But really only the rich actually see lol.
Yes. The same thing with the luxury tax thresholds.
Peg both to league-wide revenue rather than general inflation.
I don’t think the union would have been happy taking a pay cut during the pandemic when revenues went down.
The problem with pegging anything to league revenue is that owners are masters of misrepresenting their revenues when it benefits them to do so. For example, teams that own their TV network can underpay themselves for their rights. I’m sure their accountants could find many more opportunities.
The idea of a bonus pool for pre-Arb players seems like a tough program to manage. During any one season, there are probably 15-20 pre-Arb players (max) who are good enough to be eligible for some type of league award. If they are looking at using WAR, maybe there are 30-40 of these players who put up a WAR of over 3.00. These players will have base salaries of $570K – $775K (depending on who wins in the next CBA), but the union is asking for a bonus pool over over $100M to reward these players? That seems quite excessive to me. This would also cause significant issues with the CBT. If you have a team with 2-3 rookies or second year players who have excellent seasons and they become eligible for payouts from this $100M bonus pool, that could add an additional $6M-$10M in player bonus salaries which would impact CBT levels. How can teams possibly plan for this? What would most likely happen is that teams would stay well below the CBT just in case a few of their youngsters have breakout seasons.
A better program would be to identify these handful of players at the end of the season and reward them by increasing their salaries the next season (no more than doubling last season’s salary). If said player is ready to enter arbitration the following season, they would first double his salary as a reward for the previous season’s performance and then base the arbitration raise off the new salary. That way, there is no impact to the current year’s CBT and therefore no excuses for teams to stay well below the CBT to account for potential year end bonuses.
Also, why would the league need to fund this bonus pool? Shouldn’t each team be responsible for rewarding their over-achieving players? It really doesn’t make much sense to me at all. I hope this doesn’t hold up the entire CBA as there really isn’t a clean way to manage this.
$25 Million Bonus Pool for the top 30 pre -arb players.
Than CBT for year 1. At $218 Million.with 2% increases.
Penalties over CBT
20 Million – 100% Luxury Tax
Repeat offenders – Doubling of the Luxury taxes owed.
Year 1 pre-arb -$650,000
Year 2- pre-arb – $700,000
Year 3- pre-arb – $750,000
Provide the bonus pool to the union and let them have the headache of managing it. Have the bonus pool not count against the CBT. As its not being paid by any one team, it shouldn’t put any team in a penalty situation. Lastly, it’s a bonus, not salary, and cannot be used as part of the base in arbitration. If the player wants the bonus again, they have to earn it again, based on the criteria set by the union.
@stymee
Then the players can b*** at the union for NOT getting more bonus money.
Exactly. They can also complain about why they didn’t earn some of the bonus, or why it wasn’t a larger share.
Guys we might have baseball in 2023
Calm down, Sally. At least they’re talking.
If the league minimum is $600K then who cares about inflation!
I think they can handle it a little better than someone who is at the poverty level. If the player can’t handle inflation then they have a serious issue.
I agree,
I don’t think a player making $600,000 or more really cares what the rate of inflation is.
to be fair, for most players its prorated.
Kind of way besides the point. The players see salaries declining both as a percentage of the game’s revenue and in real dollar terms. Any union representing a group of employees in that situation is going to prioritize reversing the trend, or they aren’t doing their job.
So this slight progress on a few things took over 7 weeks? Really? Seems like stuff that could have been done early on to get things going. Instead these so called adults wait until they have to try to rush to make an agreement and risk however much of the season. Ridiculous.
The owners asked the players at the beginning of December if they could exchange proposals that retained the current 6 years to free agency. The players said ‘no’ and the meeting lasted 7 minutes or something. The union didn’t move off that until this week. Ball’s totally in the MLBPA court for the delay. That was an obvious non-starter and they were told it was a non-starter. Now that it’s gone the roadblock is too.
It’s more a positive than a negative. They’re talking, making proposals, concessions, etc. They’re meeting again tomorrow. They’ll get there.
Using WAR is problematic for the reasons Sean noted. If they did use it, they should use a blended version of all three — fWAR, rWAR and Baseball Prospectus’s VORP.
I wonder if MLB can use similar formulas but then lock them so that they control their own WAR. Let’s call it mWAR! MLB is flooded with data analysts. Creating a version of WAR that MLB and the MLBPA own shouldn’t be an impossibility.
That’s a sensible idea.
Come up with the new form of WAR, and then watch the baseball change.
In the NFL and NBA you have drafted players who are on 4 year deals with a supplement 5th year. Where as in MLB if you’re in the minors say 3yrs then add 4-5 years that’s about 7-8 years before you hit free agency, but in MLB they allow it after certain accrued time of MLB service and or around 29,30 years of age. If players could reach free agency sooner, they’d make more money, right? Add the minimum payroll spend and that should help players improve the avg salary. Granted, NBA and NFL don’t really throw their drop picks in a development league, I think its about time MLB and the minors have a better system in place. I think this bias is due to MLBPA only negotiating for MLB, but the system for the minors needs improvement. Help both areas, and you’ll help baseball.
the big difference is every NFL player and most of all NBA players go to the parent clubs immediately. the Practice Squads a d G League are not the same as the Minors.
Make the revenue sharing money be spent on payroll, then hammer out the fine details on the bonus pool and playoffs.
This thing is all about money. Just start with the big stuff first.
There are a lot of aspects that go into “fielding a more competitive team” and it’s not just payroll for players. Not sure you can simply demand it be only on payroll, especially when you have luxury taxes, etc.
“Competitive imbalance” is the union’s way of saying “teams not paying players.” They don’t care about wins and losses as much as dollars.
If you take a look at the revenue sharing prior to the pandemic, each team took about $120 million out of the revenue sharing pot. However, each year about 10 teams ran payrolls below that number.
Make a salary floor of a 2 year average of the revenue sharing pot. It doesn’t affect the big clubs as they are already paying into the pool. Really, it would affect the Pirates and a few others each year.
Anybody know what CBA stands for? Reminder, the MLBPA signs each new CBA. The owners and MLBPA jointly created this system.
MLBPA uses the concepts of “competitive balance” and “tanking” as a thinly disguised veil to cover their attempts to get higher salaries. That’s all this negotiation boils down to.
Don’t kid yourselves, the MLBPA doesn’t care about us, the fans, and our concerns about tanking teams and fielding competitive teams throughout the league any more than the owners do. And conversely, the owners don’t care any less about tanking than the MLBPA does.
The real problem with teams receiving revenue sharing money; it’s to help improve the team but not necessarily has to go to improving the major league roster.
So you get the Pittsburgh’s and whoever spending the money on player development but not major league roster salaries
105mm bonus pool? I mean, I think young stars should be rewarded for their success, no doubt – but that was simply a silly number.
Just as silly as $10m.
Hopefully they use both numbers to end somewhere between.
I am interested, however, that this is the first step toward paying for performance.
Before you know it every player will have a lower salary based strictly on service time and get bonuses from a set pool for their performance.
Interesting.
If there is such a pool, the number is going to be an awful lot closer to $10MM than to $105.
Football is ascendent and keeps getting better. Witness the 4 great games this weekend. Meanwhile, in baseball, they’re haggling over small dollars and taking everyone away from the serious business of what’s important – the product on the field.
you are allowed to watch both you know
and yet i get Spring Training ticket offers.
Is a $105 million bonus pool really that silly? That’s $3.5 million per team. And when considering that teams could have multiple players worthy of such bonus funds, it’s not all that crazy of a number
I believe Vlad Guerrero Jr. is arbitration-eligible this year, but what if he and Bichette were both in their final pre-arb years? It wouldn’t be a stretch to say the Blue Jays should pay an additional $3.5 million (well, really, more) to these two.
Of course, not every team has such a duo. But look at the Astros with Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Luis Garcia. Or if the White Sox hadn’t signed Eloy Jimenez and Luis Robert early. The Tigers have a young core that is likely to outperform their pre-arb salaries.
The crazier offer is the league’s $10 million—which would be just $333,333.33 per team.
Why would the Toronto team, or any other team, play a single cent to any player in their final year of salary arbitration?? The players want to keep arbitration instead of a mutually-agreed stat-based payment system, because they want to be able to try to convince arbitrators that they should be paid higher than the mutually agreeable stat-based system says. In Mookie’s final year of arbitration he got $27MM from the Sox. Now there should be a Christmas Tree supplement to that as well? Clown proposal bro. There is no salary problem in baseball other than for some pre-arb players. and if there is any supplement fund it will go to pre-arb players.
I don’t wish to be unkind but it really is startling how off the wall the anti-club MLB haters are.
Still amazes me that neither side worked on these things in the year or two leading up to this. It’s not like both sides didn’t have there leverage and didn’t know when this would expire. Prime example of failed leadership
The NHL pays out a $750,000 minimum salary in a sport with comparable roster sizes but half the revenue.
MLB has no excuse here.
The saddest part of all this is that these stupid “economic” details are the only things that matter to the powers that be in the sport, and whatever they come up with, it won’t do a single thing to make the game better.
And baseball will continue to lose fans. And no one who could do anything about it will care until they start to really lose money. And by then it’ll be to late.
These negotiations will be remembered as a monument to selfishness and greed on all sides, and a lost opportunity to grow the game. Which will in fact never, ever, happen.
Agreed. With all the talk, there has been no concessions made to make this sport what it should be financially…a Cap&Floor system, finding ways for stars to be able to make money from any market, make the game the way that fans in all 30 (soon 32) markets would enjoy. All they have been about is leverage for more money over each other., while forgetting about us fans from all of the markets. There should not be small windows of success for small market fans while fans in big markets never really go through rebuilds because their teams hoard players from small market teams. Fans in every market should be able to know that the star player their team developed, will have a serious chance to stay his entire career with that team…no matter if they are a big market team or if they are the small market teams. Nobody on either side has that plan in place.
You might as well complain about how actors and studios only care about how much the actors and crew etc get paid, rather than the art, so you can’t watch a movie.
Except in that case it isn’t true.
Truncated ST and full season, you say? That’s not a recipe for injury disaster. Nope, no way!
I’d imagine they expand rosters to 28 or so for the first month of the season if they don’t get in a full Spring.
Even with that, I’d bet you’re right on injuries.
MLBPA already blinked in these negotiations. Then the owners set them back on their heels with the announcement that they were willing to lose regular season games if the players tried to get to that timeframe where the MLBPA would have the most leverage. There won’t be a “most leverage” timeframe for the MLBPA. So they won’t achieve major changes that favor them in the CBA. Time to settle boys.
“An announcement that they were willing to lose regular season games”? What are you talking about, there’s a lockout? Anyone on the player side who didn’t already know that they would lose games if there was no deal is too stupid to be negotiating a collective agreement. That’s like “an announcement” that this week Thursday will follow Wednesday.
I’m not there and don’t know what’s going on, but it reads like an ordinary process. They really don’t respect each other do they ? Reads like the ex wife and the mistress trying to split the deceased billionaires estate.
If the owners would fire Rob Manfred this deal would get done in three days..
That’s what we need, another version of fantasy baseball.
Manfred is the mouthpiece of the owners
Rob Manfred and Halam have done a very good job in my view. In the context of the players’ Internet Agenda, a collection of Christmas Wish List proposals collected from people on the internet who know nothing about either business or collective bargaining, Manfred and Halam have remained calm, haven’t resorted to negotiating in the press like the players’ union has from the beginning, avoided running down their adversaries (again unlike the players’ union) avoided childish claims of being ‘threatened’ unlike the players’ union, have come up with creative solutions to problems, and have generally steered towards a deal.
If there’s a deal soon the lion’s ;share of the credit goes to Manfred and Halam. Although piling on and cheap shots are easy for people on the internet they’re not the way Manfred and Halam have done business. Kudos to them.
I think the parameters seem to be set on all issues, now they just need to bang out the middle ground. I’m encouraged!
Stop with the enthusiasm. You’re supposed to be wringing your hands over a source of entertainment that doesn’t affect your personal life at all. Now try again.
Can we trade Manfred for a couple of Chicago dogs and a 6 pack of Old Style.
No takers.
Hot dogs cost too damn much. Manfred ain’t worth it.
Let me know when the umpire yells, “Play ball!”
What happens when the umpire is a robot?!
$105m dollars coming out of Revenue sharing would reduce each team’s income by about $3.5m.
This year there were at least 100 pre arb players playing regularly, and maybe 400 rookies. If a 3WAR player gets say, $1m there may be a few bucks for the cup of coffee guys
I’m fine with a system that improves pre-arb saleries, just as long as it isnt WAR based. find a better metric for goodness sake.
I’m fine with WAR as long as they set the WAR metrics ahead of time, or more specifically exactly how they are grading it!
Agreed. WAR being used for anything but debates among fans is a mind-bogglingly bad idea. At the very least MLB would have to develop its own formula so it wouldn’t be changing all the time or be game-able.
Unfortunately there are major issues with any and all metrics.
WAR may very well be the best all encompassing stat but to just show how ineffective it can be let’s look at 2 players:
Austin Allen C Oakland: 4 games 0.2fWAR
Martin Maldonado C Houston: 125 games 0.2fWAR
This is despite the Astros pitching coach calling him the MVP of a team that went to the World Series.
Baseball players are not robots. No matter what metric or stat you use it can’t fully measure a players value or performance
If WAR is so good at measuring all-around performance, why does it need to come in so many flavors? Fact is, it’s a totally tricked-out stat, which at no point as far as I know has ever been correlated to the reality it is supposed to predict. The keepers of these stats don’t even want them to be used the way they are being proposed to be used now. What’s wrong with this picture, except practically everything?
The MLBPA signed the last several CBAs after negotiating hard to benefit the stars, those already making millions. In the process, they neglected the vast majority of their union members who make the league minimum, a mere $600,000. The MLBPA just woke up to the fact that their rank and file majority has been woefully under represented…by the MLBPA while the MLBPA coddled a few of their stars who desired to make an extra $100,000,000 so they could hit the record books for the biggest contract in MLB history. The owners went along with it because of the perception that individual stars are more valuable financially than marketing baseball as a team sport.
Both sides are to blame, but I laugh every time the MLBPA tries to paint the owners as the bad guys for the poor suffering players who ONLY make $600,000 a year.
The minimum salary for a MLB player should probably begin at or around $1M as teams have been pushing playing time toward pre-arbitration and arbitration-eligible players, putting downward pressure on older midrange players. MLB will never go for that large of an increase, but their $600K proposal is not realistic as it amounts to a pay cut in the face of rising inflation and revenue. Great for the owners, bad for the players. The MLBPA’s ask is reasonable, but they’ll have to come down and MLB’s ask will have to increase. Midway is somewhere around $675K. Build in the form of a MLB-specific COLA moving forward.
I’ve decided tanking is 100% on the fans.
Go.to a Tigers’game. Support tanking.
What makes me so angry is the fans are the ones who actually get screwed here. Where is baseball without its fans? The players are being just as greedy (if not more so) than the owners. Meanwhile opening day starts are delayed or seasons or cut short because of these lockouts. Both sides are greedy. The players think they have the fans on their side in these meetings and they really don’t. Players are making ridiculous money and are ruining the game alongside the owners. Makes me want to quit watching and supporting my favorite sport…and I hate that.
So the owners need to restrain themselves further from paying free agents as much as they would otherwise?
Every day, a new definition of greedy.
I was thinking about a way to incentivize winning. Lottery is one idea, but how about giving each non-playoff team an extra $100K for every win above 62. You penalize $100K for every loss below 62. They keep their draft position,.
For example, winning 75 games will give that team $1.3 million more. The Dbacks keep the #2 slot but have $1 million less to spend overall in the draft because they did not put a competitive team on the field.
I bet that would incentivize a better product on the field because I think draft pool money is worth more than the position in the draft.
Winning is the incentive for winning. The rest is just effort trophies. The idea of paying more for doing a better job at what you are already paid to do is ridiculous.
And yet, baseball is a business, and in business money is the incentive and the reward. As a business, baseball can set the profit motives within the sport any way it wishes, and as of now they have set the profit motives to include rewards for losing. Seems to me if you are concerned about rewarding trophies for effort, you’d want to change the system of incentives too.
I think MLBTR should adopt a policy to specify what percentage of MLB revenue is being discussed, every time an article mentions one of these $10M, $105M, etc. figures.
Because those numbers seem astronomical to anyone who’s not aware of the kind of revenues in sports. However, once you say that MLB offered a bonus pool of $10M (or 0.1% of the League’s total revenue) for pre-arbitration players who perform at an all-star, gold glove, silver slugger etc. level (and are often the main reason why fans show up to the ballpark), readers would be able to tell just how insultingly low that offer is.
And when you then say that the PA countered with $105M (or 1% of total revenues), readers would be able to tell how reasonable the PA is being. Some might even think they’re not asking for enough, and that these players deserve more than just a measly 1%..