NEW YORK — Across sports, players’ unions don’t start these fights anymore and they certainly don’t win them, so it makes what the baseball players just pulled off that much more impressive.
Prior to the lockout that ended Thursday, baseball had a 26-year lull without a work stoppage. During that time, every other men’s sport not only had owner lockouts, but lockouts motivated by the owners’ own attempts at change — to add, to claw back, to institute a salary cap. And every time, those owners succeeded, in full or in part.
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For more than a quarter-century, players had never been the aggressors in a work stoppage. They’ve perpetually been stuck on defense, and sometimes, the results have been ugly. In a 1998 illustration that’s still famous in basketball circles, then-NBA commissioner David Stern was depicted riding a horse, trampling Patrick Ewing and the head of the basketball players’ union. Even the famous 1994-95 baseball strike was a defensive measure, at least in part. Bud Selig and company wanted a salary cap, which the players staved off, and all the owners got out of it were piddling things called the luxury tax and revenue sharing.
So it is pretty remarkable that in 2022, baseball players not only went on the offensive, but actually left a stoppage with more than they arrived with, not less. The $20 million increase in the competitive balance tax from 2021 to 2022, now starting at $230 million this season, is the largest increase ever. The $129,500 increase in the minimum salary, up to $700,000 for this year, is also the largest year-over-year jump. The pre-arbitration bonus pool amounts to $250 million in new money over the course of the deal alone.
Yet, it is telling that the union’s vote on the proposal they accepted Thursday afternoon was 26-12. That roughly a third of the executive board felt there was more to accomplish right now, in continued negotiations in 2022, not in the future.
It tells you where the sport is coming from, a reminder of how many areas players felt had gone askew in the last decade, if not longer. There was a lot that players set out to change, and had outlined publicly. Some got done here, some didn’t, some might in the future, and some might never.
“We went into negotiations this year with a pretty big list of things we felt needed to be addressed,” one veteran player who was in favor of the deal wrote to The Athletic on Thursday night. “Getting young players more closely compensated for the value they bring to the league was high on that list. Substantially raising minimums and creating a merit-based bonus pool both address that concern. We also knew it was our responsibility to keep incentivizing teams to be competitive rather than mediocre and happy.
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“The competitive balance threshold lags far behind where we believe it should be based on team and league revenues. So the hope is that pushing these new thresholds up will take away the excuse for teams not acquiring the talent they need to win.
“Did all of our concerns get addressed in this agreement? No. And they will have to be dealt with in the future. But we feel good about the progress made today. And we get to play now, which is what we’ve always wanted.”
In the conference room where Rob Manfred gave his press conference on Thursday night, other MLB officials milled around, and you could see the sense of relief, the smiles. Manfred’s first words in addressing the public: “I have to say, I am genuinely thrilled…”
He’s not always a good salesman — how many deadlines were there in the last week and a half? — but he sold that sentiment. The commissioner should be ecstatic, as everyone in the sport should be, that baseball is back. But it was also a telling vibe: There was no detectable sense of regret among management for the language in the new deal, no sense that the owners had given too much, had bent too far. It may exist somewhere, but it’s not prevalent.
The player side reaction was more mixed, muted. Because two things, ultimately, are true about this 99-day lockout: the players achieved a lot, and they could imagine achieving more. The group of eight players who deal with the union leadership most intimately, the executive subcommittee, all voted to turn down the owners’ proposal. But the vast majority of player representatives to each team, some of them acting directly on the wishes of the teams they report to, felt, at the least, satisfied with what the owners offered. So those closest to the union’s process were more committed to extending it.
Randy Levine, the president of the Yankees and formerly a chief negotiator in baseball, likes to say that bargaining is incremental. That sentiment exists on the players’ side, too. It was Levine who oversaw the arrival of the luxury tax coming out of the 1994-95 strike. And over time, slowly but steadily, the owners worked that element increasingly in their favor. They played a long game, one that sped up in the last decade, to make gains. The players, if they want to continue to make strides, likely have to play the same game.
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“I’ve never been surprised at the solidarity of the MLBPA,” Manfred said Thursday evening. “It may be one of the best unions in America. It has been historically, that’s for sure.”
In the last 100 days and in the last five years, the players took a step toward reaffirming that standing. A larger step could have been taken, but that shouldn’t obscure too much of the one that was.
(Photo: RJ Sangosti / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post via Getty Images)
