Ongoing CBA negotiations

[Benjamin Grimm]

 

This is from ESPN. This is the first time I'm seeing the term "Cornerstone Player Provision"

MLB wants maximum 5-year deals for free agents changing teams

Link to the full article: https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/49186750/mets-fire-manager-carlos-mendoza-34-47-start

As part of the next collective bargaining agreement with players, Major League Baseball wants a maximum contract length of five years for free agents who are switching teams while organizations will have the ability to keep their own players for up to six years, calling it a Cornerstone Player Provision.

The potential change to free agency comes as the league addressed reserve clause issues in a Thursday meeting with the MLBPA and would take effect after the 2027 season.

The league's proposal includes raising the minimum salary from $780,000 to $1 million in 2027 for players with at least two years of service time. Any player with zero or one-plus years of service time will receive $1 million if they receive a full year of service, which includes $900,000 minimum salary plus an automatic $100,000 bonus from the Pre-Arbitration Bonus Pool. The increase in the minimum is the largest year-over-year increase in MLB history, according to league data. Minimums would increase in future years along with the payroll floor and ceiling.

Additionally, players who reach five years of service time by age 30 would become eligible for free agency, a provision the union first put forth recently as part of its own CBA proposal. Currently, players of any age need six years of service time before becoming a free agent. That system has been in place since the advent of free agency in MLB in 1976.

The league also proposed eliminating deferred contracts as well as the qualifying offer but didn't ask for any changes to its arbitration system.

[MFS62]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Grimm said:

 

organizations will have the ability to keep their own players for up to six years, calling it a Cornerstone Player Provision.

I think that's the way it used to be. Teams could keep a player in the minors for three years, after which they had to be added to the major league roster or possibly lose them in the Rule V Draft.  Then, they had three years during which they could be optioned to the minors from the major league team. 

I don't see how this changes anything.

Later

[metirish]

The league also proposed eliminating deferred contracts as well as the qualifying offer but didn't ask for any changes to its arbitration system.

 

What about opt outs ? Something needs to give there 

[Benjamin Grimm]

36 minutes ago, MFS62 said:

I think that's the way it used to be. Teams could keep a player in the minors for three years, after which they had to be added to the major league roster or possibly lose them in the Rule V Draft.  Then, they had three years during which they could be optioned to the minors from the major league team. 

I don't see how this changes anything.

Later

It's very different. It's saying that the Mets could have signed Pete Alonso or Edwin Diaz (for two very recent examples) to a six-year contract, but every other team would have been limited to signing him for five years.

[Frayed Knot]

40 minutes ago, MFS62 said:

II don't see how this changes anything.

It's a change because this has nothing to do with minor league players or with pre-FA major league players.

So had this been in place last winter, for instance, the Mets could have offered Alonso a six-year FA contract whereas no other team could offer more than five. What it most resembles is what the NBA once called the 'Larry Bird Rule' which, similarly, gave a bargaining edge to the team the player was already on. The NBA did this because, in a sport that's more star-driven than any other one, they thought it was essential that a team be able to keep a player so identified with their organization. (aka: the old 'I can't imagine ______ in any other uniform" ploy)

Of course NBA superstars bounce around all the time now so I'm not sure it ever really served its stated purpose (of even if it was ever intended to). Nor am I sure how any of this will appeal to players. MLB is both proposing to cap the length of a contract the players can sign and also, less directly through caps, the amount of money in said contract.

 

 

oe: cross-posted with Grimm

[MFS62]

Got it. I thought it meant 6 years of control from when they  initially sign a player, including the minors.

Thanks to both of you.

Later

[whippoorwill]

Tell me about what’s maybe going to happen 

 

I never hear about it except here 

[Edgy MD]

A lot of things are maybe going to happen.  But one thing that isn't going to happen is a union that saw Juan Soto set the bar at $51 million per year for 15 years acceding to a five-year maximum for free-agency contracts.

[MFS62]

I hope they can ex post facto* that to stop paying Bobby Bonilla.

Later

 

* = I know that's not legal, but I'd give it a try anyhow.

[Benjamin Grimm]

David Lennon, in Newsday, is reporting that MLB is proposing a minimum age for the draft. No more drafting players directly out of high school.

• Quote

  Major League Baseball has proposed making high school players ineligible for the amateur draft as part of ongoing negotiations with the Players Association for a new collective bargaining agreement.

  • The proposed change would take effect for the 2028 draft.
  • Draft-eligible players would need to be 20 years old by Sept. 1 of the draft year and at least two years removed from high school graduation.
  • According to MLB, 75% of high school players drafted never get promoted to the majors.
  • Since 2023, 82 college players reached the majors within two years of being drafted, according to MLB.
  • The proposed change would benefit MLB owners, who wouldn't need to commit to huge signing bonuses for high school players.

   

  The article also says that the draft would be reduced from 20 rounds to 12. This would also, obviously, allow teams to reduce the sizes of their minor league organizations as they'd be offloading more of the player development to colleges and universities.

[Edgy MD]

That shit is amazing.

Where in the world do they get off conspiring with each other and with the union to deny opportunities to obviously skilled amateur players?

End the anti-trust exemption NOW!!!!

[Gwreck]

Why do you think the MLBPA is in favor of this?

[Benjamin Grimm]

The proposal is from the owners. I don't expect the Players Association to see this as a positive.

[smg58]

I read the original headline and think "MLB wants work stoppage to last until 2032."

[smg58]

Not that the bit about making HS players ineligible portrays the owners in any more of a sympathetic light.  Is minor league baseball really a financial drain? 

[Benjamin Grimm]

9 minutes ago, smg58 said:

Not that the bit about making HS players ineligible portrays the owners in any more of a sympathetic light.  Is minor league baseball really a financial drain? 

I wonder about that too. I mean, yeah, they're paying the salaries and potentially medical bills of a lot of non-prospects in the Rookie and Low-A leagues. Kids who are just there to play catch with the relatively few actual prospects at those levels. But these kids aren't making much, they're not traveling by plane, they're presumably not staying in fancy hotels. It seems like it's a small expense for a multi-billion dollar industry. Apparently though, instead of paying those kids, MLB sees it as more cost-effective for college students to fill those roles.

[Gwreck]

1 hour ago, Benjamin Grimm said:

The proposal is from the owners. I don't expect the Players Association to see this as a positive.

Neither do I, but the comment above discussed “[owners] conspiring with each other and with the union to deny opportunities to obviously skilled amateur players,” hence my question.  

[Gwreck]

 

30 minutes ago, smg58 said:

Not that the bit about making HS players ineligible portrays the owners in any more of a sympathetic light.  Is minor league baseball really a financial drain? 

It’s not.  And MLB had already slimmed down the affiliated minor leagues quite a bit in recent years (with now only 4 affiliates per franchise).

[Edgy MD]

1 hour ago, Gwreck said:

Why do you think the MLBPA is in favor of this?

I don't, but obviously MLB would need the association to sign off on it for it to come to pass.

And MLB has a long history of (and more than a little success at) pitting the association members against the amateurs who would replace them.

[Frayed Knot]

2 hours ago, Gwreck said:

Why do you think the MLBPA is in favor of this?

Maybe because other players' unions (NFL & NBA) are in favor of it and show no signs of seeking to reverse the imposed limits.

 

Quote

Is minor league baseball really a financial drain? 

No. But what this would do is have those first two years out of HS weed out a certain percentage of potential draftees so that the ones who would eventually get drafted and enter the minor league systems would be (theoretically) a better lot as a whole.

Think about the NFL and their ban until three years after HS (in the NBA it's one year), That minimum allows the NFL teams to ignore every kid who stops growing at 17/18, every one who discovers drugs and pussy at 19, every one who blows out his knee at 20, as well as those who realize by age 21 that they simply don't have the talent/desire/work ethic needed to move on to the next level. All those never-will-bes are removed from the NFL draft roles for free by the NCAA their captive and unaffiliated minor league system through which virtually all potential players must pass.

It's a nice racket.

[Edgy MD]

And the NFL and NBA don't have an explicit anti-trust exemption — although to different degrees, they functionally operate with a tacit one.

[MFS62]

That "minimum age" will go right out the window for International players?

Later

[Benjamin Grimm]

It seems that way. I suppose they're thinking that the international players are less likely to have the opportunity to play college ball. Have there been any Dominican players, for example, who played in college before going on to play minor- or major-league baseball? I really doubt that the number is much higher than zero.

[Frayed Knot]

So just to add a cautionary tale to the whole concept of a salary cap, the NBA today suspended LA Clippers owner Steve (Microsoft) Balmer $30 million, suspended him for a year, suspended the GM for six months, and took away the team's next Five 1st round draft picks as a result of a scheme which invented a no-show (but not no-pay) job given to star player Kawhi Leonard which was, in fact, a scheme to circumvent the salary cap.

This was likely not the first time this has happened in capped sports -- and certainly not in supposed 'amateur' sports such as college football/basketball nd their theoretical salary cap of $0 -- but it took outside reporting (Pablo Torre) to expose it and close to a year-long internal investigation before the NBA finally acted.

[Benjamin Grimm]

Losing five first round draft picks is a lot worse than Tiger Woods being fined $1,000! That's a penalty with teeth!

[Frayed Knot]

Basketball people were pretty shocked when all this came down on Wednesday (or maybe late Tuesday), mainly because it seemed like the commish's office was dragging their feet while "sources" were casting doubt as to the accuracy of Pablo Torre's reporting (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize). It all gave the feeling that if they ignored this long enough then maybe everyone would simply forget about it and it would go away.

And then ... BAM!

Nothing but a (relatively) small fine and no suspension for the player involved in all this even though he was certainly in on the whole cap evasion game. All of which kind of cements Adam Silver's reputation as a player-friendly commissioner and the NBA overall as a player-run league.

 

The larger point here, and the reason I brought it up in this thread, is that, even before considering the whole 'fairness' concept of a salary cap in the first place, they don't really work. If a team or teams think a player is worth some amount but the rules say he can't get that much then someone is going to figure out a way to get it to him. It's happened in the capped world of the NFL at various times and we know how well not paying college players worked (which is to say: didn't work at all) for over a century or more.

I'm sure someone here knows more about the relatively recent "fair play" (I think they're called) rules in European football (soccer) than I do, rules which seek to govern how much one team can spend and therefore dominate their league(s). But I do know there have been instances of teams pulling end-arounds to skirt those regulations as well.

[Centerfield]

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but I don't understand why every salary cap argument isn't countered with revenue sharing.  If I understand the system correctly, the NFL pools all of its broadcast deals, league sponsorships, and merchandising, and distributes that revenue evenly to all 32 teams.  Effectively, they eliminate most of the big market/small market gap by putting all teams on an equal floor.  

MLB revenue sharing is much different.  I read that 48% of local revenue is contributed to revenue sharing, with 52% being kept by the local clubs.  

If the owners were really interested in competitive balance, they could increase the revenue sharing, adopt the NFL model (or something closer to it),  And then much of the disparity would be eliminated.  They wouldn't need a work stoppage for this, and I doubt the players would have much objection, if any.

But they won't.  They never even consider this.  Because competitive balance isn't what owners want.  They want salary suppression, disguised as competitive balance.  

[Frayed Knot]

Couple of things here: 

1) The NFL model will never be like the MLB model because the NFL broadcast pool is a) HUGE and b) almost entirely centralized since 100% of football games are broadcast by one of the participating networks. iow, aside from local radio rights (a teensy weensy portion of the whole) there's not a lot of difference in the broadcast incomes of teams. By contrast, baseball's central broadcast money is evenly distributed just like the NFL's. But then each team also has its own local TV/radio deals which can vary widely and represent a much larger portion of the whole. So unless you're going to pool all that local money and then split it up evenly there's always going to be disparities. Now pooling all that local money is never going to fly with the larger market teams. Plus, if teams were only going to hang onto 1/30th of any new monies they earn via local media, it would remove all the incentive for clubs to strike better deals for themselves or to do things like start their own networks (YES, SNY) or streaming services. It would be a big dampener on both incentive and investment.

 

2) Of course the ultimate goal is salary suppression. They'll call it 'cost predictability/stability' or some such pseudonym but, yeah, the idea is to limit the cost of labor overall and set it on a predictable path from year to year. And I've harped on this for years now: there's no correlation between a cap and so-called parity/competitive balance. The NFL, which not only has long had a hard cap (no exceptions for incumbent players like the NBA) and has consistently had more teams in their playoff tourney as compared to completely cap-less MLB, has had Fewer Super Bowl winners, Fewer Super Bowl participants, and More franchises on the outside looking in (defined as those who have failed to reach a conference/league final ... iow, be a Final Four team) than MLB has had WS winners / participants / and non-final-four teams. You'll hear it said often that it's the complete opposite by those who simply assume that of course a cap increases parity (or by those who think part of their job description is to parrot whatever the NFL tells them) it just doesn't happen to be accurate.

In this century, the NFL has seen 13 different teams win a SB (43% of teams), 20 different teams play in a SB (62.5%), and has five franchises which have not played in an NFC or AFC championship game (15.6%). In MLB those numbers for the same time frame are 16 (53.3%), 22 (7.3%), and 2 (6.7%)

 

 

* SB winners: Seahawks (2), Eagles (2), Chiefs (3), Rams (1), Buccaneers (2), Patriots (5), Broncos (1), Ravens (1), Giants (2), Packers (1), Saints (1), Steelers (2), Colts (1).

SB participants: All except Redskins/Commanders, Cowboys, Lions, Vikings, Bills, Dolphins, Jets, Browns, Jaguars, Texans, Chargers. Raiders

No conference championship games: Texans, Cowboys, Raiders, Dolphins, Browns

 

 

World Series winners: Dodgers (3), Rangers (1), Astros (2), Braves (1), Nationals (1), Red Sox (4), Cubs (1), Royals (1), Giants (3), Cardinals (2), Yankees (1), Phillies (1), White Sox (1), Marlins (1 ), Angels (1), Diamondbacks (1)

WS participants: all but Brewers, Reds, Pirates, Padres, Orioles, Twins, Angels, Mariners

No NLCS/ALCS: Reds, Pirates 

 

[smg58]

I'm not sure that the Dodgers have been any more dominant than the Chiefs in the 2020s.  And the Jeter/Rivera-era Yankees were not nearly as dominant as the Brady-era Patriots.

[Centerfield]

32 minutes ago, Frayed Knot said:

 So unless you're going to pool all that local money and then split it up evenly there's always going to be disparities. Now pooling all that local money is never going to fly with the larger market teams. 

This is kinda the point.

The owners' position is basically that "there's no way for small market teams to compete without a salary cap".  So they justify a work stoppage in the name of competitive balance, while throwing the blame on "greedy players".

But that's not true.  Revenue sharing in the manner I described can level the playing field, without salary suppression, without a work stoppage, and it will benefit competitive balance more than any proposal currently on the table.  But the owners would never agree to that.  As you correctly point out, it will never fly.

My point here, is the players should be banging this drum nonstop.  The players' position should be "don't lock us out.  If you want competitive balance, share all of your revenue evenly among yourselves."  If you do that, the onus would be on the owners to justify their behavior.   

Trying to get into whether there's more parity in the NFL vs. MLB is a losing battle.  It requires data.  It requires thinking.  The public is too stupid and too distracted to be swayed by arguments like that.  They need simple and direct.

Owners:  The league is unfair!  We need a salary cap so the smaller markets can compete!

Players:  That's dumb.  Just agree between yourselves to share your revenue evenly.  Problem solved.