![]() ![]() Without a deal, the league says, games will be missed and player salaries lost. Now, the sides find themselves at another inflection point, one with the ability to do grave harm to the game - a "disastrous outcome," Manfred said recently. The league then waited 43 days to present the union its next offer. "We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations," Manfred wrote. ![]() 2, when the league instituted what commissioner Rob Manfred, in a letter to fans, called a "defensive lockout," MLB acted first - ostensibly in the name of proactivity. Since the 1994 player strike that canceled the World Series - and especially over the last two collective bargaining agreements - the league has through canny negotiating positioned itself to be the aggressor, a role with which it has grown comfortable and familiar. What doesn't go to the players goes to the league and teams, and owners control how their teams spend money. "We're just trying not to get screwed," one player told ESPN.Įasy as it is to point to the average major league salary ($4.17 million last Opening Day) as a sign players aren't on the wrong end of anything, it's also facile. Finance in sports is a zero-sum game. Now, following a quarter-century of labor peace and the relative complacency that accompanied it, the players are energized and engaged beyond what even they expected. The MLBPA grew into the strongest union in the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s by marrying morality and money - by fighting for itself and for the betterment of the game simultaneously. ![]() In aggregate, they served as a call to action for the players, who even now struggle to pull off the delicate balance of being aggrieved while trying to negotiate a larger piece of a $10 billion-plus pie. The commissioner has called the World Series trophy a "piece of metal," and the league has awarded the team that did the best job curtailing arbitration salaries a replica championship belt.Īny of these is a problem. The luxury tax, instituted to discourage runaway spending, has morphed into a de facto salary cap, and too many teams are nowhere near it anyway, instead gutting their rosters and slashing their payrolls because the game's rules incentivize losing. Players' service time has been manipulated to keep them from free agency and salary arbitration. Player pay has decreased for four consecutive years, even as industry revenues grew and franchise values soared and the would-be stewards of the game pleaded to anyone who would listen that owning a baseball team isn't a particularly profitable venture. More than that, they're tired of the game they love saying, in ways both active and passive, it does not love them back. The players are angry at the trajectory of the negotiations, which have inched along for almost a year with little demonstrable progress. It is a study in the consequences of bad behavior - of indignities big and small, of abiding by the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit and, worst of all, of alienating those who make the sport great. That baseball finds itself on the precipice of such an ugly denouement is no accident. Barring a miracle eleventh-hour agreement Monday on a new labor deal that ends its lockout of the MLB Players Association, the league has said it will cancel Opening Day games. MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is in a crisis of its own making, a self-inflicted wound borne of equal parts hubris, short-sightedness and stubbornness from a class of owners who run the teams and seemingly have designs on running the game into the ground. Inside the self-inflicted crisis boiling over as MLB's lockout deadline arrives You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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