Solve the baseball labor problem!

Great Debates
21

But there should be a free market for baseball players. The current labor agreement certainly does not create a free market for any but the most experienced ballplayers. As you can probably tell from the second paragraph of my OP, I’m very much in favor of eliminating the restrictions on younger players that work against a free market. Imposing further impediments, such as a salary cap, only makes the market for ballpayers that much less efficient.

Besides, we’ve recently seen what salary caps do to the sports that adopt them. The NFL is absolutely horrible these days. Yeah, more and more teams are competitive these days, but that’s because they’re all equally boring. Give me the glory days of the 70’s through mid-90’s, when there was no salary cap and football giants roamed the land. C’mon, which would you rather watch, the '79 Steelers, the '92 Cowboys, or the '01 . . . shit, I can’t even remember who won the Super Bowl this year. That says it all, I think.

There’s plenty of blame to spread around for baseball’s labor woes. The player’s union, as you point out, has sacrificed the interests of junior players for the sake of big payouts for a handful of long-term veterans. I dislike both management and the union for their anti-competitive stands.

But they already DO have the right to determine what their labor costs will be. Nobody put a gun to George Steinbrenner’s head and forced him to give Derek Jeter a $190 million contract. That’s how the free market works.

22

As evidenced here, no one seems to have a definitive way to end the labor problems of MLB, and allow all teams an equal chance to compete for a championship.

But I am astounded by the sheer arrogance of those of you who say, “Can’t compete with the Yankees, Mets and Dodgers? Fold, then.”

You wait and see how much of a shit even people in New York give when they are part of some eight team, big-market, elite all-star league. The league loses its vitality in an instant if it is not truly national, and every team has a competitive chance.

I’m not sure if a salary cap is the answer, but I tend to think some form of salary cap is in baseball’s future. The owners like that idiot in Texas can’t be relied upon to police themselves. (Watch and see how many pennants Texas wins over the course of A-Rod’s stay there. Let alone World Series championships. If the line is 1, I’ll take the under.)

A cap that allows teams to overspend to keep their own free agents could be helpful. But it could still be abused by teams like the Yankees. Young stars that other teams developed would still look to be cherry-picked by a team like the Yankees, which would then be able to give them the mega-bucks a season or so down the road.

Revenue-sharing makes more sense to me (but still has problems). MLB owners need to realize that their livelihood lies not just in the strength of their team, but the strength of their league. I think baseball is by far the most shortsighted major American sport in this regard.

There should not be a situation where it is an absolute impossibility for some teams to get certain players.

23

No arguments here. Baseball is a traditionalist sport, although that’s changed a little over the past 15 years (going back to when the LCS was extended to seven games). Revenue sharing is the way to go, because right now each team feels it’s an island or, if you will, an atoll that must support only itself to survive.

There is another major problem regarding the financial straits of MLB: signing bonuses paid to newly drafted players. There has been an increase in the number of first-round signees who are commanding massive, massive contracts, despite having little or no professional experience (Tim Kurkijan of ESPN went over this a few nights ago.) There’s no inherent problem with tossing money at someone to play baseball, but more and more of these draftees are not panning out (anyone heard from Brien Taylor lately?) Team pays millions and millions to Joe Schmoe, 1B out of Highland High; Joe, because of the money invested in him, is promoted to the bigs sooner rather than later and doesn’t develop. And then because of the pressure on him to perform at the major-league level, he stinks up the joint further and is burned out at age 24. An exaggerated scenario, yes, but it’s becoming more and more prevelant in one form or another. (Plus you have the resentment factor on the part of the current players.)

24

My understanding is - and I might be wrong - is that the MLBPA consists of 1,200 members (30 teams each with a major league roster of 40 players). Players in the rest of Organized Baseball, who play for the 180 non-independent minor clubs comprising the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues are non-union, and don’t join the union until they are put on a 40 man major league roster. If they are demoted back to the minors and put off the major league roster, they are then also back out of the union.

If we’re going to talk about what should be done, then MLBPA should spread its wealth, expand its membership to include and protect minor league players, and negotiate for career minor league players to get some benefits, like higher salaries and pensions. Taking the liberty of the inexact quote from memory, I think it was Earl Weaver who said that management was stealing from the non-union minor leaguers, that they needed them around for their prospects to play against but that they wouldn’t pay them enough to make a good living, and that instead the parent club paid them in fools’ gold by holding out the false hope that someday they would make the majors. I don’t expect this reform to happen anytime soon. And obviously, I’m not talking about Brien Taylor or others who, as dantherman correctly points out, got big signing bonuses and are already set for life, regardless of whether or not they ever become major league stars.

What should be done - and which also will never happen - is that the various city governments that are subsidizing the big league stadiums should form a consortium and sumarily evict the freeloading billionaire team tenants and their millionaire ingrate players from their taxpayer built digs if they don’t reach a settlement. Once use of the facilities is freed up, then the city governments can organize their own professional sports leagues, and impose reasonable player wages and set reasonable beer prices. The players will have nowhere else to go if they want to play. Obviously, many of the players are rich enough to quit, and that’s ok, because as has been pointed out, there is plenty of available talent out there.

25

According to CBS Sporstline, Oakland is averaging, over 27 home games so far, 23,426 per game. Low, yes, but according to them attendance is up 41% from last year.

26

Ah, revenue sharing. Now there’s a concept I can get behind to a much greater extent than is currently practiced. As Milo points out, the Yankees are going to have a hard time drawing a crowd if there’s nobody to play against. Thus, owners should admit that other teams are directly responsible for much of the revenue their own teams bring in, whether it’s through ticket sales or broadcast rights.

The hard part, of course, is determining how to share the revenue. I don’t think a pseudo-socialist, throw-all-the-money-in-a-big-pot-and-divide-it-up approach is at all desirable, since that drastically reduces each team’s incentive to maximize its profitability. On the other hand, teams share a much larger portion of ticket revenues with their visiting opponents, and also their income from local TV and radio broadcasts. Revenue from merchandise sales should remain entirely with the teams whose logos are on the stuff.

As for the big signing bonuses for draft picks, I agree that a lot of them seem pretty ridiculous. What’s Mark Prior getting, something like $15 million. But once again, nobody’s making the Chicago Cubs pay that much money for a guy who may or may not ever pitch an inning for them. My complaint is that the demand for such bonuses is preventing lower-revenue teams from drafting the best available talent. Then again, I’m not sure why there should be a draft at all. Many teams, including some low-revenue clubs like the Expos, have done a pretty good job of developing talented inrenational players, and international players are not subject to a draft at all.

Patrick M: “Impose reasonable player wages and set reasonable beer prices”? “The players will have nowhere else to go if they want to play”? Surely you jest. I mean, Cuba has a pretty good baseball team with just such a system, but then again our team full of minor leaguers still kicked their butts last year in the Olympics. :wink:

27

Just out of curiosity, how does the NFL handle this? I know that the two leagues are mostly incongruous, but revenue sharing does seem to work there. Anyone know how they split it?

No, no one’s making them do it, except the agents for these kids demand a certain amount; if the demand’s not met and the player is not signed, he simply re-enters the draft the next year (a la J. D. Drew). As it stands now, the kids can easily hold up a team if they don’t mind waiting another year to play in the majors. (They can even sign on with an independent team, like the Newark team Jose Canseco’s on now.) And if Team A drafts a player but refuses to sign him for what he demands (and the player won’t sign for less than what he demands), and that player goes back into the draft the following year, then if ANOTHER team also refuses to pay that same kid, the teams are accused of collusion. Also, I would think that the MLBPA pushes for higher bonuses, too, and we all know how powerful of a lobby they are. So yeah, they are kinda sorta being forced to pay it - either they pay the $$$ now or the player’s gone, perhaps even to a divisional rival.

The Twins have that problem this season. They have a nice low draft pick, but they probably won’t be able to afford signing him. So they could lose that guy and get nothing from the first round (although they would get a compensation pick next year, IIRC).

The Expos’ player development isn’t all that international. They do have quite a few Latin players on their current roster, but what about Asian players? (Unless I’m forgetting something.) Also, even though international players are not subject to the draft, you still need to pay them. Ichiro, Sasaki, Nomo, et al are not cheap. The Mariners had to mortgage SafeCo to pay Ichiro’s salary.

28

dan:

First off, I just spotted a rather important omission from my last post. The sentence should read:

As it stands now, they share only small portions of the gate with the visiting team, and nothing at all from local broadcast revenues. Sorry for any confusion.

The NFL has very broad revenue sharing, especially with merchandising and broadcast revenues. I’m not sure how they handle income from ticket sales, though. This is somewhat easier to accomplish for the NFL, since all of its broadcast contracts are nation-wide, while most broadcast revenue for MLB teams is from local deals. Still, as I noted above, NFL football blows chunks these days, and I’m not eager for baseball to follow in its footsteps.

I agree that the ability to hold a drafting team hostage by threating to wait a year and re-enter the draft is very harmful to low-revenue teams who can’t afford to pay the bonus demands of the best prospects. If the draft is to remain–and I’m sure it will–something has to be done about that situation.

But as for the relationship between the players’ union and draftees, forget about it. MLBPA is looking out for its own, and is apparently quite willing to screw the non-roster minor leaguers and draftees. Mark McGwire has been fairly vocal about the unfairness of this situation, but he’s a voice of reason who isn’t likely to sway too many self-interested union votes. I’ve seen quite a bit of speculation that the union will permit the owners to implement signing bonus caps and similar measures on draftees (something like the NBA now has) as a concession that gets them something else in return.

You may have missed it, but the amateur draft was earlier this week. The Twins had the first pick, and they took Joe Mauer, a high school catcher from Minneapolis. He’s a good player, but they took him in large part because the best player available, rhp Mark Prior, was demanding $16 million, while Mauer “only” wanted $6 million.

As for the Mariners, Ichiro Suzuki wasn’t quite as expensive as you’re making him out to be. True, the M’s had to pay his Japanese team $14 million for the right to negotiate with him, but Suzuki himself agreed to a contract for around $5-6 million a year. That’s starting to look like a pretty good bargain.

And re: the Expos, their Latin players are precisely the international players I was thinking of. Only a couple of teams–especially the Dodgers–have done much player development in Asia, and serious baseball hardly exists other than in the Americas and Asia. Japanese and Korean players also tend to come to MLB by way of professional teams in their home countries, unlike Latin players. I think the explanation for that is that it’s possible to make good money in the Asian leagues, whereas the Latin countries are generally so impoverished that it’s much more lucrative for a promising kid to sign up with an MLB team and develop within their system rather than play for a dirt-poor local team.

29

I’m only jesting a little, Minty. In fact, we here in the U.S. of A already have wholly government sponsored pro sports teams that do quite well both in terms of performance and attendence. As exhibits 1 through 4, may I present the Florida State Seminoles, the Ohio State Buckeyes, the Nebraska Cornhuskers and the Penn State Nittany Lions. The state, through their wholly owned subsidiary universities, in effect pay the players through the barter system, providing scholarships in exchange for the player’s performance. The player’s salaries are capped via NCAA rules. Pro baseball is completely different than college football and college basketball, you say? It doesn’t have to be, says I.

30

Yeah, but you can’t even buy a beer at most college sports events these days, even for $5 each. I fail to see how that’s an improvement on MLB. :slight_smile: Besides, the price of tickets to major college sporting events ought to be a clear indication that a salary cap does not result in lower ticket prices for fans. Tickets to UT football games this fall are $40-45 each, despite the fact that the players don’t (officially) earn a penny for playing.

Seriously, though, I don’t mind in the least the idea of local governments getting involved in team ownership. Why not, when several teams are already owned by the public thanks to the magic of the stock market? There was actually a pretty good law review article on sports team IPO’s a couple years ago in the Journal of Corporation Law.

But if governments are going to get involved in team ownership, they should play by the same free-market rules as the rest of the country (ideally) plays by.

31

Heck, major-league baseball and NFL teams are already subsidized by local governments, if only indirectly. Witness how easy it is for an NFL or MLB team to strong-arm their city into building them a new stadium.

32

Hey, don’t worry. I suspect we’re on the same side, here. :slight_smile:

While football’s not that great due to this weird thing called parity, its quality isn’t the issue here. And yes, the NFL has a national broadcast contract, while baseball’s is largely local. But there are other outlets; each team currently has its own merchandising deal, and I’d have to think that spreading it around somehow (not equally, but somehow) would only benefit the game.

Yep, that’s just what I mean. Top picks feel they can demand things now, thanks at least a little to Mr. Drew. But who’s to say Mauer won’t be better than Prior? It’s tougher than ever to fully gauge how well a player will do in the bigs. (I did hear about the draft, but I didn’t follow it. It’s just not that big of a deal; unlike other sports, draftees usually go to the minors first, and when they come up they’re usually not expected to produce immediately. So it could be years down the road before the benefits are fully realized. So I dunno, the draft doesn’t hold a lot of drama for me. I’ll see how they do down the road, if they make it to the majors. :slight_smile:

It is. You’re right, it is. Ok, so maybe I was a little facetious! But with his success, foreign-born players will have more leverage to demand more money from the MLB clubs. Sure, they don’t have to be drafted, but they still need to be signed as free agents. While signing international players is still in its infancy now, it’s possible it’ll be a full-blown free agency of its own, with scores of players coming from overseas, and not cheaply.

I think we’re arguing the same points, really.

33

There are a few roots to the A’s problems. One is that they haven’t been great in recent years, last year being an exception. Then the Giants went and built Pac Bell Park, which is more than a baseball draw - it’s a tourist attraction. Non-fans who thought it might be fun to go to a game on a nice afternoon started choosing lovely Pac Bell over the Coliseum, whereas previously they would have gone to sunny Oakland over San Francisco’s own little piece of the Arctic, Candlestick Park. Then Al Davis struck - when the Raiders moved back to Oakland, he made the city officials add seats (which don’t get filled, but that’s another story). The new creation is not very aesthetically pleasing.

The A’s have been making noise about moving to Santa Clara. There are two obvious plusses for this plan: location, and money. It’s only about 30 miles away from Oakland, so fans could still come to games, especially if BART ever expands to San Jose (ha ha). Also, Santa Clara is rich. Much richer than Oakland. There are twice as many people in San Jose as in Oakland, and some of them are millionaire computer people (this is Silicon Valley). In Oakland, the A’s have to compete with the Warriors and the Raiders. In San Jose, there are only the Sharks. Unfortunately for the A’s owners, there is a substantial roadblock: the Giants.

Back in the late eighties/early ninetines, the Giants were desperate to get out of Candlestick, and tried to move to Santa Clara themselves (their proposed plan was rejected by Santa Clara voters). During this process, MLB declared Santa Clara to be Giants territory. (Actually, they declared almost the entire Bay Area to be Giants territory, with the exception of the East Bay.) So, in a word, the Giants have to give the A’s permission to move to Santa Clara. Which they will never do. It’s the same deal that Peter Angelos has with Washington - no new team is gonna infringe on my MLB-given territory!

34

I tune to watch them get their asses kicked and to have a good laugh. A-Rod’s signing did bring in more sales, but I think that was at least partly due to the promise of the team winning. Now when I watch Ranger home games on the tube, I see fans holding ‘I want my money back’ signs. It will be interesting to see if attendence drops off after the All-Star break.

But back to ‘star-power’. I still contend that it should be a buyers market for the GM’s if they had some sense and some patience. A-Rod’s a star, and Piazza’s a star and they have drawing power because of their ablity, but there are a bunch of guys waiting, and able, to take their place, IMHO. And I still believe that GM’s are too often getting man-handled by superstar agents.

35

OK, the quote must have been taken out of context, then, because it was definitely Beeston who made it. I agree that it’s easy to manipulate the books, but I recall that in the last labor fight, the players union wanted an independent audit of the owners’ books, and the owners refused to allow it. Seems to me that even if an independent review proves nothing, the owners should still be willing to allow it–if they’re in fact losing money.

I don’t see contraction as either a viable option nor a desireable one. A buyout won’t happen, and if MLB EVER wishes to expand again, a potential new owner might very well be reluctant to invest in the new team’s franchise fees, given the precedent of contraction.

One point re teams “losing” money. Even if a team loses money on the day to day operations, the owners rarely (if EVER) lose money when the team is sold. I don’t believe any team has ever been sold for less than it was purchsed, even accounting for inflation.

I also disagree about the salary cap mentioned by PatrickM. Owners have consistently tried to tie in revenue sharing to a salary cap. That’s an artificial association. One does not necessitate the other.

Further, some teams, like the Yankees, are unhappy with the revenue sharing plan currently in place. It seems the money given to smaller teams is supposed to be put back into player development (or some such), but instead is often pocketed by the smaller team’s owners. Or so Steinbrenner has alleged, anyway.

On another note, I absolutely, positively agree with PatrickM re the union doing more for minor leaguers. This actually hurt then in a previous labor impasse when “scabs” like Rick Reed (who crossed the line because they were NOT being taken care of) were potential replacement players and “stuck” in the majors when the players came back.

dantheman, it’s possible that Joe Mauer may end up being better than Prior, but Prior’s the better bet. Hometown heroness aside, I suspect Prior goes first (and Texiera goes higher) if signing bonuses are “capped” a la the NBA.