TAMPA, Fla. — No sooner than the Super Bowl leaves town, pitchers and catchers will start arriving at Legends Field and spring training complexes everywhere. Come hell or high COVID, baseball is starting up on schedule, but there is a reason no one is feeling much joy about it.
This latest impasse between the owners and the players union, in which they couldn’t even figure out a way to avoid risking the health of everyone in the game, makes one thing perfectly clear now: Baseball is heading toward the apocalypse. The insane $45 million the Dodgers will be paying Trevor Bauer in 2022? What will it matter if there is no 2022 baseball season — which now is looking more and more of a likelihood?
When Rob Manfred and the owners sought to delay the start of spring training and the season by a month, proposing a 154-game season in which the players would still be paid for 162 games, it seemed like a sensible compromise might be in the offing, especially when they also agreed to make the DH universal, in effect adding 8-10 more high-paying jobs in the National League while also further protecting pitchers from injury. In exchange, the owners wanted to expand the postseason to include seven teams from each league.
It took the union, however, 24 hours to reject the offer while failing to make any counter proposal.
But there was a reason there was no deal and it’s the same reason a lockout for the 2022 season in the absence of a new collective bargaining agreement appears inevitable: The players and the union have an intense distrust for Manfred, while at the same time the union chief negotiators, Tony Clark and Bruce Meyer, border on the incompetent.
Here is how one agent explained the impasse to me:
“Look, we should all agree the safety and health of the players and their families is first and foremost and by starting spring training now with the pandemic still raging in Florida and Arizona, we’re jeopardizing not only the players, but umpires, managers, coaches, trainers, front office people and support people. But at the same time, Manfred comes up with this proposal as players are already starting to report and making housing plans. It’s a proposal with nothing in it for the players when the commissioner has the unilateral right to stop the season at any time. As for the universal DH vs. the expanded playoffs, the universal DH is probably worth about $20 million for the players as opposed to the expanded playoffs being worth $100 million for the owners.”
The players also feel an expanded playoffs would serve as a further disincentive for clubs to spend money if nearly half the teams in the majors can get in.
But the agent went on to say, union leadership, which got their pockets picked by the owners in the last CBA, must share the blame for their inability to make a deal. Union chief Clark is not a labor lawyer a la his predecessors Marvin Miller and Don Fehr, and Meyer, his chief negotiator, has had no prior success in negotiating any labor settlements; his primary area of expertise is said to be in antitrust. “And the last time I looked,” the agent said, “baseball has an anti-trust exemption.”
What’s really at the crux of the players’ discontent is the lack of spending on free agents this winter by all but a handful of teams. So far, there have been 10 major league clubs that have spent less than $15 million on free agents. Another four — the Cardinals (likely $16M on Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina), the Padres ($21M Jurickson Profar), the Nationals ($21.5M on Brad Hand, Daniel Hudson, Jon Lester) and the Red Sox ($27.1M on Garrett Richards, Enrique Hernandez, Hunter Renfroe) — have spent less than $30 million. Of the 10 teams over $30 million, the biggest spenders have been the Dodgers (Bauer), the Yankees (DJ LeMahieu), the Phillies (J.T. Realmuto) and the Blue Jays (George Springer), each of them on one player, and the Braves at $91M with Charlie Morton, Drew Smyly and Marcell Ozuna.
More problematic for the players, as of Friday there were still nearly 150 unsigned free agents with three or more years of service time, while on Thursday the Associated Press reported the MLB average salary in 2020 fell for an unprecedented third straight year to $3.89 million, a drop of 4.2% from 2019. Of course, you could have fooled the Dodgers.
