Impending Labor Talks are Reason To Worry

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In baseball, as in anything else, what you don’t hear is often more important than what you do hear. And what you aren’t hearing right now is all the ludicrous rhetoric that typically starts going around when the sport’s collective bargaining agreement is on the verge of expiring.

Commissioner Bud Selig hasn’t embarrassed himself by going on a national tour threatening the fans of various successful teams with contraction. Owners aren’t caterwauling about how small market teams like the Chicago White Sox and Houston Astros are unable to compete with the large market likes of the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Cardinals. With the game more popular and profitable than it’s ever been despite its massive drug scandal, most everyone agrees that the CBA, which expires in December, will probably just be extended, with some slight modifications. The owners aren’t going to lock out the players, the players aren’t going to strike, and everyone will continue making fabulous sums of money. Doubtless all is well with our national pastime.

Perhaps, but baseball’s owners always seem to find a way to make fools of themselves, even when doing so serves no purpose and works against their financial interests. In the 1980s, for instance, ownership, in blatant violation of the CBA and federal labor law, decided that an appropriate response to rising free agent salaries would be simply to agree among one another not to sign any free agents. The players’ union filed suit.

The following off-season, the owners again colluded, and the union again filed suit. What happened the next offseason? The owners, of course, again colluded, and the union again filed suit. The eventual judgment against MLB ran well into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the conspiracy subsequently poisoned negotiations between the players and owners to the present day.

The root cause of collusion – and of many of baseball’s problems – is that the owners, collectively, don’t respect contracts. They’ll honor them when they’re forced to – and they have to be forced to all the time.

Last year, Colorado tried to get out of an epically idiotic $40 million commitment to pitcher Denny Neagle after he was caught with a prostitute by invoking a “morals clause” in his contract. (An arbitrator didn’t buy it, and the Rockies had to give him nearly all his cash.) A few months later, the Yankees were looking for ways to get out of their commitment to Jason Giambi despite having willingly excised standard language that would void the contract in case of steroid use. Oddly, though, they haven’t seemed to be in very high dudgeon about his past steroid use since he’s gone back to hitting like Jason Giambi.

We see this on a wider scale right now with two problems that have the potential to be huge obstacles in labor negotiations. The first is revenue sharing, and the second is Senator George Mitchell’s ridiculous steroids investigation.

Revenue sharing among clubs is meant to help poor teams become more competitive. The Kansas City Royals, for instance, get about $40 million from MLB no matter what they do on the field. The problem is that the CBA contains no enforcement mechanism, so bad teams like the Pirates and Royals have enormous incentive to cut expenses as much as possible and simply pocket the checks that teams like the Yankees are cutting them.

This is corrupting to the sport, undermining the idea of competition, and creating a small, permanent underclass of teams that don’t even try to win. MLB’s solution, rather than to insist that teams honor their contracts and spend revenue sharing money on payroll, scouting, development, and so forth, is to moan about a “salary floor,” to which the union is inexorably opposed for the same reasons they’re opposed to a salary cap. If you start hearing a lot about a salary floor this summer, think twice before buying season tickets for next year.

The second (and potentially much bigger) problem has to do with Mitchell’s investigation. Given his ties to Red Sox and Angels ownership and his longstanding chummy relationships with the sleazy plutocrats who run the game, Mitchell should be scoffed at on general principle. It now appears he’s violating the CBA on behalf of the commissioner’s office, as well.

It’s been widely noted that the mere existence of such an investigation without the consent of the players union is problematic under the terms of the CBA, and it’s been somewhat less widely noted that Mitchell’s requests to the doctors of former players for medical records are even more problematic. Least noted of all, though, is that even in sending letters to players (let alone their doctors) Mitchell is in egregious violation of the CBA, which contains specific language requiring the union be given “reasonable advance notice of any investigatory interview with a Player.”

Such notice having not been given, Mitchell – and by extension MLB – are actually violating the CBA as brazenly as if David Wright decided he didn’t want to play for the Mets and impulsively declared himself a free agent.

It’s this sort of antagonizing, needless, and idiotic behavior, driven by sheer hubris, that has traditionally made baseball’s labor negotiations so excruciating. Royals – stop regarding your welfare checks as profit. George Mitchell – stop violating the CBA. Fans – be wary. Even when things look good, baseball is always one stupid day away from forcing labor catastrophe on everyone.

tmarchman@nysun.com


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