Spring is just around the corner. For sports fans everywhere that means the upcoming March Madness Tournament, speculation about the National Football League (NFL) Draft and Major League Baseball (MLB) ballplayers reporting for Spring Training. Except unlike most years, that last one might be in jeopardy.
Just like in 2020, baseball team owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) are going down to the eleventh hour to strike a deal on how the season should play out. This deals with several issues ranging from whether there should be a designated hitter across the American and National Leagues to rules over when players can enter free agency. If the two sides are unable to come to a deal, there could be a lockout, and we could see real games get canceled.
Let us first define some terms. At stake here is a lockout where management (the owners) initiates a work stoppage, whereas a strike would be initiated by labor (the players). Examples of a lockout are the 1999 and 2011 National Basketball Association (NBA) lockouts where the owners held up a Collective Bargaining Agreement (the contract both sides sign that defines conditions, salaries and benefits) due to changing landscapes and skyrocketing salaries. An example of a strike occurred in 1994 when MLB players’ resistance to a salary cap (a restriction on the total amount teams can spend on player salaries) resulted in a work stoppage that canceled the World Series for the first time since 1904.
Currently, the two sides are arguing about many issues as time ticks away and the chances of a complete season dwindle by the hour. Many of the issues center around competitive balance and salary. As stated before, MLB owners are in favor of a salary cap where all teams in theory would be restricted to spending the same amount of money for a roster. In theory, this would provide for greater parity, as rich teams like the Yankees and Dodgers would not be able to easily outbid smaller market teams like the Kansas City Royals or Oakland Athletics. On the other hand, the players are arguing that this is just a way to prevent players from receiving their just compensation. The players are also looking to increase the minimum salary paid to younger players and those in the minor leagues.
Another issue on the docket is service time. Unlike the NFL, the MLB has several minor league teams called their “farm system” whose primary purpose is to train younger players before they make their way up to the pro squad in the big leagues. When a player is promoted to the bigs, they begin accruing service time, or the amount of time spent on the pro roster during the season. Under the current rules, players can reach free agency (the period where they can sign with whatever team they want and sign for jaw dropping money) after their sixth year of service time. The thing is, players stop acquiring service time if they are on a minor league roster. This means that general managers can keep otherwise pro-ready players in the minors to delay their entrance into free agency. This happened to future All Star third baseman Kris Bryant in 2015 and meant he was still on his smaller rookie deal until this season at age 30. Players argue that this structure damages the game because it means that teams are not motivated to put their best teams on the field in favor of pinching pennies and building for the future. This has led to another phenomenon that is not unique to baseball: tanking.
Tanking is the act of intentionally trying to lose games in order to attain assets like draft picks that will inspire future winning. Tanking can take many forms — intentionally signing worse players, resting veterans or service time manipulation. The Philadelphia 76ers (NBA) initially popularized this trend, and now it has spread to baseball. Because baseball has very few playoff spots (6 guaranteed spots and 4 wildcards, at least for the moment), two-thirds of the league is essentially incentivized to try to lose games as the season progresses. It saves them money and helps them in the future. Unfortunately, this practice also hurts the players and especially the fans that support these teams.
To remedy this, the players have proposed a lottery system for the MLB draft so that the worst team would not be guaranteed to get the best pick. This strategy could work and has been used for decades by the NBA, but the owners have another solution: playoff expansion. MLB owners want a 14 team playoff so that mid-level teams are still working throughout the season to construct a playoff-worthy roster. The MLBPA wants a 12 team playoff, saying that the 14 team playoff is simply a money grab, and therein lies the problem.
The fourteenth best team in baseball is not going to win the World Series, that simply is not a possibility. If they were good enough, they would have won more games over the course of the lengthy regular season. All that playoff expansion accomplishes is the dilution of the product and more money in the pockets of the league’s owners from another few games they can sell to TV networks. For evidence, look at the expanded NFL Wildcard Weekend that featured a game on Nickelodeon for the past several years. This focus on money has infected all leagues, but baseball has had it the worst. In 2020, some team owners did not want to restart in fear of losing money over no ticket sales. Imagine that! A sports owner who does not want to games to be played.
This process of the players and owners bickering over service time and salaries is not helping any of the problems at the core of baseball. The games are too long. Young people are less engaged. Preseason NBA games in the fall get more social media buzz than the World Series. If baseball owners keep pinching pennies, they will lose the primary source of all that revenue: their fans.
