MLB Lockout 2022

[ewitkows]

They are never going to get a salary floor with out a salary ceiling. Honestly I have no problems with teams tanking for a couple of years and trying to get better. The way to win is to draft well and make good trades. Teams that spend big rarely win the series. Even the dodgers drafted/developed a lot of their core guys. I can't think of a team that year in/out tanks and doesn't field a completive team. Of the teams that finished last, AZ had a goo team and spent some money only a couple of years ago, PITT had a really good team and went to the playoffs 3 years ago, Washington won the WS 2 years ago, Texas just spent like a billion on FA, MINN, was a solid playoff team 2 years ago, Baltimore is in an insane division and after a really good run in the mid 2010s , they could figure out how to rebuild. Now they seem to be on track to having a good young team in 2 years.

[Thurston Fluff]

I feel both sides are being short sighted to some degree. The players seem fine with large market super teams because they feel large markets with unlimited resources will provide more money to the players. Which is true in a vacuum but doesn't take into account how having such a competitive imbalance reduces overall revenue. If the sport doesn't grow, or only grows in a few large markets, there will be less overall money spent on players.

The owners can't get the revenue sharing right which again limits overall growth. If both sides could put aside their personal best interests and worked on growing the whole sport all their personal interests would be better served.

But when a person is looking at millions of dollars difference today it's hard to think of how many more millions they could all get tomorrow.

[Axman59]

You can avoid tanking with two simple fixes. First, you create a lottery for the top five picks, or top three, or a number along those lines. Second, you don’t let a team have a top three (or top five if you prefer) pick twice in any three year period. If that’s how they line up, you shift them down accordingly and shift up the next eligible team.

 

Whether it's a lottery with top 3 or top 5, teams will still tank to get into the top 3 or top 5. Look at the 76ers in the NBA.

[igor67]

Do a better job with allocating competitive balance draft picks perhaps?

[nate82]

I don't think you can fully eliminate tanking unless you go to an extreme measure which wouldn't be a good idea. I think if you add a minimum salary floor and if teams are below it by the end of the season they are not allowed to draft in the top 10 would be good.

 

For a lottery I would like to see the teams actually play against each other to determine what pick they actually get so 1v2 3v4 5v6 6v7 8v9 and 10v11. In order to be eligible for the lottery each team must be at or above the leagues minimum salary. The lottery would occur the day after the season ends and the games would be played 1-3 days after the lottery is concluded. The teams can only use players who were on the teams 40 man roster on the last day of the season. The total number of wins from the playoff teams will be the total number of ping pong balls and will be divided out by the number of wins (1 win = 1/4 of a ping pong ball) each team has who did not make the playoffs and are above or at the leagues minimum salary.

 

This will put an emphasis on teams to continue to try to win in order to get more ping pong balls to get a better draft spot.

 

The league gets 6 more games that can be televised to bring in more revenue and the players get a win on the tanking part. There will still be some tanking but the lottery would help in this regard.

[ewitkows]

The only thing I would love to see is what the NBA has, where the hometown can sign a FA for more money and longer deal than as a FA. What I hate about the NBA is that they use it to sign and trade players to where they want to play. The player would never agree to it but if the max length on a deal was 5 years and the home team could sign him for 6 it would help the smaller teams like us keep teams around a little longer.

[ThisIsMyCrew]

I think the league as a whole benefits from no “cap”. The Luxury tax more or less works that way. And any team that goes over, only benefits the leagues overall number. Hard to eliminate the millions of free dollars they get from teams.

[TURBO]

I think the league as a whole benefits from no “cap”. The Luxury tax more or less works that way. And any team that goes over, only benefits the leagues overall number. Hard to eliminate the millions of free dollars they get from teams.

 

Seriously?

 

I can see how a large market fan base "might" be able to reason it that way, but a small market fan?

 

How high can your payroll be before you hit that luxury tax? 200 million, 250 million, meanwhile, teams like us sit at 100 million...

[ThisIsMyCrew]

I think the league as a whole benefits from no “cap”. The Luxury tax more or less works that way. And any team that goes over, only benefits the leagues overall number. Hard to eliminate the millions of free dollars they get from teams.

 

Seriously?

 

I can see how a large market fan base "might" be able to reason it that way, but a small market fan?

 

How high can your payroll be before you hit that luxury tax? 200 million, 250 million, meanwhile, teams like us sit at 100 million...

 

To clarify, I meant that the “MLB” or their office or wherever the fine money goes to benefits. As in more money for there purposes, whatever those are. Manfred gets more money to waste. I should’ve been more specific. That was my reasoning on why it is beneficial compared to just a cap.

[Baldkin]

There will never be a salary cap unless the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Cubs, et al. agree to sharing their market's television revenue with smaller markets.

 

That is the only way you could set up a cap that the players union would agree with. Otherwise, you are vastly shorting the percentage of money that the players are getting from revenue.

 

The fact that most owners are now treating the Luxury Tax threshold as a salary cap is a huge reason why there is a lockout right now.

 

Revenue has gone up 59% over the past decade. Salaries have only gone up 51%.

 

Ron Cox wrote a solid article about it here: https://www.justbaseball.com/mlb/major-league-baseball-strike-possibility/

 

There is also the complicating issue of how much revenue is going to the owners’ pockets, as opposed to the players. A recent extensive study of owner-player revenue distribution by Maury Brown for Forbes concluded that there has been a decade-long trend in which revenues distributed to players have not kept pace with overall MLB revenues. As baseball had increased its overall revenues from $6.12 billion in 2010 to $9.7 billion (net revenues) in 2019 (a 59% increase), the percentage amount going to MLB players had fallen short of these revenue increases. For example, MLB player salaries had only increased from $3.12 billion in 2010 to $4.7 billion by 2019 (a 51% increase) (Brown, Forbes, Dec. 31, 2019).

 

To complicate this even further, this distribution of owner-player revenues only measures direct baseball sources of revenue such as local and national media, MLB licensed products, ticket sales, concessions and parking, and advertising. What is missing are the owner revenue streams that derive from public subsidies of stadiums, tax write-offs, boosts to team-related business ventures, and long-term appreciation of franchise value, which are pocketed exclusively by the owners.

 

This battle has been brewing (pun not intended) since the spring of 2020, when the Owners set off negotiations around the pandemic shortened season and demanded that the players accept a % of the revenue to prorate their salaries.

 

The players then asked to be able to see the books, which of course, the owners denied.

 

I mean, it went like this, and it always goes like this:

Owner: "We promise to give you half."

MLBPA: "Okay. We will agree to that, but you have to show us what we're getting half of. We want to see the numbers and the data."

Owners: "Nope. We have nothing to hide, but we won't show you that. We promise to give you half."

[brewcrewdue80]

Not that this would happen, but in regards to draft, tanking,, and competitive balance:

Set it up so the teams that receive competitive balance draft in top 10 via their record. With the last 5 then alternating with big market losing records 11-20. The last 10 are then ordered by records amongst large markets. You would remove a big market from ever seeing a top 10 pick.

Then you do 2nd round and beyond by worst records the remainder of the draft. There isn't a competitive balance round. There would be a payroll floor for the 15teams that are competitive balance to receive these higher draft picks. With penalty to being given a worse 1st rd pick should payroll not reach the floor. (Say they fall in line with large markets and the w/l to draft position)

Another Incentive to win could be teams with winning records that next draft gain an extra year of the player they draft in 1st round. They're going to reduce it to 5 as rumor, but instead winning record keeps that player at 6. This would factor in the draft allotment games played by clubs as a 2nd rd pick would not have a 6th year potential, so teams draft top players more frequently vs drafting a 40s/50s rank to draft a top 30s rank the following rounds. There again is your incentive to put out a winning team by spending to win.

[brewerfan82]

Not sure if this has been brought up/clarified already, but I was curious about whether or not trades could still be discussed/negotiated during the lockout (just not completed) and looks like they can: https://fansided.com/2021/12/03/reminder-mlb-trade-discussions-can-still-continue-lockout/

 

This could make things interesting once the lockout's over: 1.) I wonder if there will be a flurry of trades, and 2.) I wonder if the extra time dedicated to negotiating and checking in with other teams will result in any unusually complex trades

 

Anyways, could become entertaining, and maybe we'll get some leaked trade rumors while we wait for this thing to end!

[SRB]

Not sure if this has been brought up/clarified already, but I was curious about whether or not trades could still be discussed/negotiated during the lockout (just not completed) and looks like they can: https://fansided.com/2021/12/03/reminder-mlb-trade-discussions-can-still-continue-lockout/

 

This could make things interesting once the lockout's over: 1.) I wonder if there will be a flurry of trades, and 2.) I wonder if the extra time dedicated to negotiating and checking in with other teams will result in any unusually complex trades

 

Anyways, could become entertaining, and maybe we'll get some leaked trade rumors while we wait for this thing to end!

 

Hm, interesting. Kevin Goldstein was pretty adamant in a recent Fangraphs chat that teams had been told not to contact each other, unless I'm misremembering.

[brewerfan82]

Yep, you're right! https://blogs.fangraphs.com/kevin-goldstein-fangraphs-chat-12-13-2021/#more-379632 (at the 12:20 mark)

 

Vince L.: Are teams still talking trade now, even during this “freeze”?

 

Kevin Goldstein: They’re not allowed to, and the messaging from MLB to teams about not having such discussions has been . . . pretty serious. I don’t think talks are down to zero, but I do think they are dramatically reduced.

So at minimum there's some disagreement on that, but as you said, Goldstein seemed pretty confident they've been told not to.

[Roderick]

"....but as you said, Goldstein seemed pretty confident they've been told not to."

 

Just a couple of GMs talking about their roster and their needs is all that is going on........

[brewerfan82]

There is also this tidbit from a Bleacher Nation article before the lockdown went into place, so it's possible the league made it clear after this point that teams should not be talking about trades during the lockdown:

 

https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2021/11/17/are-players-worried-about-backdoor-trade-talks-during-a-potential-mlb-lockout/

 

There’s also this, via Jeff Passan at ESPN, which I hadn’t at all considered, mostly because it’s a little icky and less certain:

 

It’s easy — when tension is high, when stakes are present — to read a lot into a little, to think something like the reason the trade market hasn’t gotten hot yet is that teams plan to discuss deals during the lockout and, when it’s all over, spring them and disrupt leftover free agents’ plans for how to traverse the market. Years of labor discord tend to provoke paranoia.

According to Passan, the slowness of the trade market this November could be an effort by the teams (coordinated or not) to save all chatter for during the lockout, at which point teams would hammer out deals that would stay on standby until the minute the new CBA is inked.

 

The problem is that this would allow teams to satisfy some of their roster needs without dipping into free agency, further reducing any remaining leverage the players did hold in what was already going to be a shorter period of time after the new agreement. Put simply, a team won’t have to go over the top free agent X if you already traded for player Y. Instead, they can comfortably sit back and say “take it or leave it, because the season starts in two weeks.”

[monty57]

The owners initiated the lockout, so it would seem odd if the union could tell the owners/GMs that they couldn't talk with each other about potential trades. That would be like the owners telling the agents they can't talk with their clients about potential teams they're interested in signing with until the new CBA is signed.

 

I'm certainly no expert in labor law. It just seems like that wouldn't be something the union could dictate upon the owners.

[CheeseheadInQC]

It is possible both are correct. There is no rule preventing them from talking but the league has told them not to in order to avoid any appearance of bad faith.