You know what’s coming now.
worse.
Worse offers. Worse bitterness. Worse results.
And not just for players and owners.
You can start imagining anyone working in a big or spring training league, wondering what to do next and how much it affects every subsidiary business around these sites (think of bars, restaurants, clothing, etc.). ). We already have the roadmap that owners will not just lose money without mitigating the consequences. Thus, how far we are from hearing terms like “leave” and “layoffs” for club employees again due to widespread work disruptions during the worst of the 2020 pandemic.
And players love to play baseball. They don’t do that. They will miss more than salaries. Lost games will affect the potential for career achievements, which are more limited than almost everyone in the country. How many thirty players are on the ice right now who don’t know – but will soon – that their careers are over because organizations just won’t spend the time or money to introduce them at a glance once they consolidate is spring preparation starting?
That should be part of the calculation here, let’s move on – how long is it worth staying away from the players. This will cost them not only 2022 salaries, but will also tighten the notion of the owners about what will be spent on the current class of free agents with hundreds in it? If you get another $ 300 million in discounts and that costs current players $ 300 million, I’m not much into math, but that’s not a profit.
This is all about why MLB and the union need to get back on the table – and now. Time is the enemy and the walls not only surround the owners and players, although the near and long term will also be miserable for them.
The weather will allow the hawks in each camp to be heard louder and it will be easier to consolidate coalitions. There are already owners who are wondering if management should accept all the short-term pain and stay out long enough to get players to accept a salary cap like the NBA, NFL and NHL have. There are owners who want to do it to crush the union, but others actually think that achieving a 50-50 partnership with the players would be better for both parties financially, because together they could solve problems, increase the game. (and mutual revenues) and that the promise is worth the short-term cataclysm.
There are certainly votes on the part of players who do not want to surrender until the luxury tax thresholds rise to the same percentages as sports income. Quite a reasonable question, except that Commissioner Rob Manfred never gets the votes he needs. So we can sit long enough not to wonder about Aaron Judge’s viability as a free agent compared to his AARP eligibility.
Manfred is currently deleting the first two series off the regular season. This only adds to the problems, such as service time will be credited to players for lost games at a time when the parties are unable to make a deal with the current package of problems. Want to see how much worse it is with 12 games, 24, 36?
If you support the sport, your hope is that both sides acknowledge that they have reached at least a third base in negotiations that lasted more than a week in Jupiter, Florida, and are trying to get back on the table quickly to regain some momentum to try to go home. Both sides (of course) have different interpretations of how close they were on Monday night.
Players believe that MLB overestimates closeness as a two-point tactic: 1) use the sense of accomplishment to motivate players to the finish line, and 2) make players look bad if they explode. I don’t put anything next to the owners. They have been moving too slowly in both negotiations and offers. But I will say that I have spoken to half a dozen team employees over the last two days who insist that they went to bed on Monday night, informed to prepare that the deal is on the doorstep. So, if MLB was pulling the wrong target, the league would attract it to its people to make the charade more believable. And I asked all these club employees directly, and no one thought it was a charade. If I’m being lied to, I think we should add an Oscar for Best Fake Office.
However, it is not a mistake that the parties have moved towards each other. Most of the extras for players at the moment are for redistributing dollars to players before the arbitration. Maybe this will lead to some higher overall costs. The key issue, as it always would be, is the luxury tax.
Players rightly see that it acts as a de facto salary cap, and if you want to challenge “rightly”, then know that the threshold was $ 210 million last year and five teams – Yankees, Mets, Phyllis, Red Sox and Astros – there were salaries for these purposes between 206.6 million and 209.4 million dollars. If you think this is a coincidence that is not on the doorstep, I have a loose team in the small league to sell you.
So raising the thresholds is vital for the players, if nothing else to do where the teams will put a higher amount of breaks. MLB’s latest offer was the first threshold to be $ 220 million for the first three seasons of a five-year deal and $ 230 million for the latter. An interested observer (OK, me) wonders if it started at $ 230 million and ended at $ 240 million, if that could motivate a deal.
This interested observer knows that the right place to ask these questions is at the negotiating table. No next meeting was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The greater the distance between Tuesday’s next negotiating session and the next, the more devastating it becomes. Time is now the enemy, leading to more lost money and acquired rage.
Return to the table.