MLB and MLBPA finally reached an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement on Thursday, ending a controversial lockout that has lasted more than three months. Major elements of the deal, such as CBT levels and a bonus pool for players eligible for arbitrage, were communicated during the course of negotiations, but some minor details are still leaking out. Mark Feinsand of MLB.com revealed one such detail on Twitterwhich reads: “Starting in 2022, players eligible for salary arbitration who negotiate with their teams for a subsequent season’s salary without attending hearings will be eligible for full payment at the end of the season, even if they are released before start of the season. “.
This is a small change with the potential to have a significant impact. Under the previous CBA, arbitration contracts were not fully guaranteed until Opening Day, and players fired during spring training received only a fraction of the agreed salary. If a team fired a player more than 15 days before Opening Day, they only had to pay the player 30 days’ wages as severance pay. If a player was released less than 15 days before Opening Day, he will receive a 45-day wage.
This leads to an interesting compromise. On the one hand, this can be seen as a benefit to the players as they now have access to greater security knowing that the salary they accept will be fixed once they have agreed to it. But it also gives them an incentive to accept terms without a hearing, possibly leading them to agree to lower terms than they might otherwise receive, which benefits teams. Teams are well known to prioritize stifling wages as much as possible. In 2019, it was revealed that MLB is hosting an annual symposium where the team that does best at opposing players in arbitration is awarded a wrestling-style championship belt, which certainly hasn’t helped with the animosity that has persisted between players and the league since the signing. last CBA. This flaw in the new CBA could help teams achieve those goals, but at the very least could give some candidates who are on the brink of not bidding a ray of hope for greater financial security.
Elsewhere, CBA Jason Stark of The Athletic gives an interesting nugget on Twitter. “If a team has already claimed a player once this season, they cannot claim him again until all other teams have passed.” Stark aptly calls it “Jacob Nottingham Rule,” referring to the fact that Nottingham was the center of a hot potato game between the Brewers and the Mariners last year. Beginning the season with the Brewers, the Seeker was released in April, according to the Mariners, who returned the waiver to him in May. The Brewers returned it on a waiver request, only to send it back to the waiver wire two weeks later. On May 20, Seattle picked him up again, and put him on a wire again in early June when he finally cleared himself. The waiver priority is usually in reverse order of the current state. (The previous season’s standings are used for the first 31 days of the season.) In Nottingham’s case, there would be some teams that didn’t even have a chance to make a claim against him for much of this last sequence. year, as it would have been scooped out before their turn. Going forward, they will have a better chance of interrupting such a unique movement back and forth, as happened with Nottingham last year.
In a detailed column on the CBA, Stark adds some details about schedule changes starting in 2023. Although it was previously reported that teams would play all 29 other teams in the league every year, with the number of division games declining, details were not known at the time. Stark lays out a format that will begin next year: each team will play their division rivals 14 times per season, up from 19 for a total of 56. Teams from the same league but from different divisions will play six times each. 60 total. When it comes to interleague play, each team has an “opponent” they will play four times, three games each, against the other 14 teams in the opposite league. This equates to 46 interleague games. All these categories are equally divided between the road and the house, with the exception of the last. In the case of 14 non-rival teams that are in the opposite league, the home team in the three-game series will change from year to year.
Rocha Kubatko of MASNsports.com has a couple of other details in his CBA rundown. On doping, he says: “There will be an increase in the number of seasonal urine tests for performance enhancing substances and addictive drugs, and adjustments to the schedule of these tests to make them less predictable.” He then adds that “the program will now use dried blood spot testing rather than venous blood sampling for growth hormone testing, making Major League Baseball the first professional sports drug testing program to adopt this new technology.”
Finally, even though the talks reported an increase in the minimum wage for MLB players, there was also a jump for some underage players. From Kubatko: “The minor league minimum wage for players who sign a second major league contract or have previously played in the major leagues will increase from $93,000 in 2021 to $114,100 in 2022, $117,400 in 2023, $120,600 in 2024, $123,900 in 2025, and $127,100 in 2026. ”