Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1769: The Lockout Lookout

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talk to Evan Drellich, senior writer for The Athletic, about the state of labor negotiations between MLB and the MLBPA, the major issues separating the two sides, the odds of a work stoppage, how long a potential lockout could last, how the CBA talks may affect transaction activity, how previous […]

I'm standing on the edge of the world and I'm looking down I sight in the cold, stealing souls, there's a battleground How will we explain when we're too far down the line? Will you take it or leave it this time? This time Hello and welcome to episode 1769 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined as always by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello.

We've got a guest today because in many respects, this seems like the start of a normal offseason. If you go to MLB Trade Rumors right now, you will see stories there that seem reflective of a normal early November. The news that often flows immediately after the start of the season has picked up as usual. Gold Glovers are getting announced and the Reds seem to be deconstructing their roster. And players who played hurt in October like Alex Bregman are getting surgery. And Jace Tingler is the Twins bench coach now. And the Mets have tried and failed to talk to many more GM candidates. And, of course, free agent rankings are out. Fangraph's big top 50 list is out.

MLB Trade Rumors list is out. And we will devote our next episode to that topic. However, this is not a normal offseason, or at least not a normal month of the offseason. And the idea that it's just going to be baseball business as usual is still somewhat aspirational. it is CBA season, and how and whether the negotiations get resolved is going to dictate what happens between now and opening day, or what doesn't happen between now and opening day, or even when opening day will be, and whether the hot stove season will be even lukewarm for the next few months. So we're going to talk about that today. And joining us to discuss that subject is someone who has been and will be covering baseball's labor situation quite closely,

Evan Drellick, who is a senior writer for The Athletic. Hello, Evan. Hi, Ben. Hi, Meg. How are we doing? Doing okay for now. So I wanted to ask you how we're doing as a sport because that is something that you're covering right now. And you're coming to us from the site of the GM meetings that are taking place this week. And I imagine a frequent topic of conversation there will be, so CBA, what's going on there? So you have been writing about that topic. And I do want to back up and explain how the sport got to where it is and some of the history, but just sort of a snapshot of where things stand today. We are just a little over three weeks away from the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement at 1159 p.m. Eastern on December 1st.

So where are we? What's the outlook as best you can tell? You know, most people at this point seem to expect a lockout on December 2nd. So the deal expires 11.59 p.m. Eastern time on December 1st. And if there's no deal at that point in time, the owners are able to lock out the other side, meaning they would freeze everything. There would be no free agency. And at that point, meaning they would freeze everything. There would be no free agency. And at that point, the rule five draft, anything that would be part of a regular off season would halt until there's a new deal. So most people seem to think that's inevitable. What isn't clear is how long that lasts. You could have a lockout for three days. You could have it for three months.

And that's really the money question. There's still a chance that they find a way to get a deal done in time for December 1st. But it seems very, very unlikely that if there isn't a deal done at that point, the owners would say, OK, we'll just keep bargaining and allow the offseason to proceed normally. So no deal at December 1st, lockout, and then how long does it go? I don't want to skip to the end of the conversation, but just to give folks sort of a sense of the timeline here, what is the sort of last date at which we could see negotiations continue past December 2nd, right? We don't have a CBA. We're in a lockout.

The two sides are trying to reach some sort of accord. What's sort of the last date at which they could come to an agreement and we can expect to maintain the scheduled opening day? Because I think that for a lot of fans, this kind of back and forth stuff is interesting, but what they're really concerned about is, are we going to get 162 games next season? And are we going to start relatively on time in order to do that? So what is your sense

of sort of where the edge of the cliff actually lies? Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic there because you can argue, well, what does a lockout in December mean? Yes, free agency is bad for the industry to miss. It does put pressure on both sides to get a deal done, but players aren't paid until the regular season. In spring training, there's some money as well. So it doesn't become meaningful or as impactful until something's on the line, which is games. And so once spring training rolls around,

if a deal isn't reached, that's when I think the pressure would ratchet up for both sides and as far as an actual date no one at this point has has said to me this is the day that if we don't have a deal we positively cannot start spring training on time this is a day we positively cannot start the regular season on time you'd have to have a ramp up to the regular season on time, you'd have to have a ramp up to the regular season, right? So if it gets too late in a spring training, it's really an intuitive exercise, I think, at the end of the day. How much time do you need for spring training? What's the bare minimum? I'm trying to think what it was in 2020 when they were restarting during the pandemic, maybe three to

four weeks, anything less than that, you probably would have to push the season back. And you could get to a scenario where, okay, the regular season is starting later. Well, can it be extended? Could you still squeeze in 162 games in the, I believe it was the 1990 lockout? The season was pushed back about a week. They started a week late, but they were able to still get the full slate of games in. I think MLB worked out with CBS at the time who was carrying those games, the World Series games. They worked out a way to extend it. So, you know, you don't have to necessarily have the full spring training, but all of these are kind of frightening hypotheticals. But you will hit a point in time if they haven't reached a deal, probably late January, right? Spring training begins early February and then you start to

wonder, well, okay, how long does it take to get guys to camp? And all the logistical things are really what start to matter. What pressure is there to actually get a deal done by the time the CPA expires? I mean, is there sort of a sense of, oh, if we don't get a deal done then, then who knows? And so we just kind of want it to happen then? Or is there some force that is actually pressuring people to agree on something by then? Because when my colleague at The Ringer, Michael Bauman, was filling in for me on this podcast recently, he was talking about being on the bargaining committee at The Ringer Union when those negotiations were going on. And as he mentioned, there might not have been a deal

except for the fact that one of the prominent parties in the negotiations was pregnant and was about to give birth by a certain date, which kind of, that was like a hard end date. And I don't think either Dan Halem, who is handling things on MLB's end, or Bruce Meyer, who is the lead negotiator for the Players Association, is pregnant and about to give birth. So I guess that does not apply here.

So is it just avoiding bad headlines, not wanting to be the bad commissioner who started the lockout? Not that Rob Manfred could really be a lot less popular with the public, I think, at this point. Yeah, well, that's what I was kind of getting at in the previous question and answer, that there isn't a great compelling thing to keep everyone from a work stoppage in December. Yes, it is bad to lose free agency, but it doesn't become real. I think that's probably the best way to put it until there are paychecks on the line. Now, you can start to feel it from a management perspective. If players are sitting out there wondering, well, am I going to get paid for the 2022 season? That could be tough.

And also on the owner's side, they could be wondering, well, am I going to have the full gate receipts that I would normally have? Am I going to have a full 162 game season? But up until that point, whatever that is, where games start to be threatened, it's not as perilous. And what often happens in negotiation, I think negotiations broadly, but in collective bargaining is things wait till the last minute. In baseball historically, the last two CBAs, the economics waited until the last minute, and they did not have a lockout. We haven't had a work stoppage since the 1994-95 strike. And so then you can start to ask, well, could there be incentives on either side to go through this? And you can wonder if the commissioner's office and the owners want to

test the resolve of the players you can wonder if they have an interest in seeing free agency pushed back it's possible i guess you could argue go it would go either way but let's say free agency ends up being a three-week window in february right let's say they get a deal done february 1st they push back spring training and right, well, we've got a little bit of time between the deal getting done and the start of spring training. So that's going to set off something of a frenzy. Do owners want that, or could that actually play into the player's hand? So you can start to try to slice it and wonder about, well, what would the incentives be on either side? And maybe the players want to test the owner's resolve a little bit. It's speculative, but it is something both

sides will think about is, well, what else could they kind of gain or lose from having the off season halted? Can you explain lockout versus strike? Because as you noted, there has not been a strike in MLBs since 94 to 95. And really, even in the NHL and NFL and NBA, there has not been a strike over that period. All of the work stoppages have been lockouts. And if you're just someone who doesn't care about the details and just wants to know when will there be baseball and how much baseball will there be, then maybe work stoppage, it's either this or that. It's all the same to you. But these terms are not interchangeable. Right. So a work stoppage is a lockout or a strike. And the last time baseball had either of those was the 1994-95 strike. And since that time,

if you look at the four major men's sports, NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, there has not been a strike in any of them. And what I understand and what people explain to me about that is in 94, you had the players walk out, I believe it was August, early August or mid-August. And, you know, that's them using the weapon. A lockout and a strike are more or less counterpart economic weapons that either side has. Management has a lockout. Players have a strike. When you get into the nuance of it, they're not exactly identical. But kind of for all intents and purposes of the discussion, you either have management saying you can't't come to work, or you have the players, the workers saying, we're not going to come to work. And every time there's been a work stoppage

since that 94-95 strike, it's been the owner saying, you can't come to work. And there's something preemptive about that, where the owners don't want to allow the players the opportunity to kind of control, A narrative and be when the work stops it's so it's it's a pretty major weapon for players to be able to walk out a month before the postseason the postseason is when owners make a a large amount of money uh and so it's a bit of the owners getting out in front of it and then the the other side of it, kind of a less cynical side of it, is the CBA expires in December. You have this runway for a reason.

There's a reason the CBA doesn't expire a day before opening day. But what you're likely to never see again is a season starting without a deal agreed to. So if a CBA is in force, you can't have a legal strikeout or a legal lock, a legal strikeout. You can't have a legal strike or a legal lockout. The CBA has to have expired. And so, you know, the owners, again, they could say, all right, we'll keep bargaining and we'll start the 2022 season on time and we'll keep talking. But then at that point, the 2022 season on time and we'll keep talking but then at that point players can walk out i mean you know on december 2nd if the players wanted to initiate a strike they could do so but it it

doesn't make as much logical sense you know there's not as much impact of players saying we're not going to show up to work well you're not showing up to work for three months four months anyway so it's a bit of a technicality, but there's certainly reasons why lockouts are what you see in sports now and not strikes. You mentioned the narrative component of it, and I'm curious what your read is on how much that piece of it matters to both sides at the negotiating table. When we were talking about restarting the season last year, we talked to a number of people about it,

and I think we have this idea that the public narrative around work stoppages and disputes between players and owners are meaningful and potentially damaging to the sport, but I think that a lot of the reporting has shown that that stuff doesn't actually end up making its way to the negotiating table quite the way that maybe fans would like to think that it does. But you also have the undeniable damage that the strike did to the sport back in 95.

So how conscious of the narrative are both sides? And how likely do you think fans are to be sympathetic to one versus the other? fans are to be sympathetic to one versus the other. I wish I had the power to or knew of a good study that had evaluated public sympathy over the years. I'm sure they exist. This is a little bit Twitter influence. It would seem to me that compared to 1994-95, there's probably less sympathy for owners than there would have been 25, 30 years ago.

That's just my gut instinct. But I don't really have the evidence to support that other than the ecosphere of Twitter. Both sides are concerned about narrative. I think there's an understanding that they can't control all of it. And naturally, I'm sure you'll see the millionaires versus billionaires stuff, which to an extent is true. You know, MLB hired a former Democratic political spokesperson, campaign advisor. I don't want to misstate what he did, but about a year ago, earlier this year, at the end of last year, and one of his charges is handling the league's dealings with media on labor.

dealings with media on labor. So the league takes this seriously enough that they brought on somebody whose duties, at least in part, are to deal specifically with labor. And they've been very – both sides have very intentionally attempted to be quiet thus far. And you can kind of see that. There hasn't been a flurry of news. You know, I and Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic and some other reporters as well, we've been able to still get some reporting done because, believe it or not, we're not at the mercy necessarily of the principles of which we cover. That would not be exactly the best form of reporting. But as we get closer, I would expect the public volume to, assuming there isn't some kind of miracle deal that gets

done in the next couple of weeks, it's going to get loud and very loud. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that because I saw the piece that you and Ken wrote and I was struck. I've just been struck by relative to last year when it seemed like every proposal that the league was submitting to the union to restart baseball had been leaked within five minutes of it being sent that it has been relatively quiet so i think you're probably right though that as we get into the the thick of things we're probably going to learn more than we've been able to thus far looking ahead to the negotiations themselves i think that the issues that are in play here are pretty well understood by our listeners. But I'm curious, from your perspective, you know, if you think about what each side has in leverage over the other, not beyond a strike or a lockout,

but just in terms of the actual mechanics of the negotiations themselves, what do you see as sort of the trump card that each side holds here in terms of trying to get what they want on some of the other economic questions that are on the table? The expanded postseason has a pretty large dollar figure attached to it. I don't off the top of my head remember what it is. I believe in 2020, we at The Athletic might have had an estimate of it. I just don't recall. But it's probably, I would think, low hundreds of millions. I don't want to overstate it. But, you know, it's not an insignificant amount of money to expand the postseason because you get the television rights fees. And, you know, the players are aware of the money that's attached to it.

You know, as far as a Trump card, I don't know that there is one. You mean, is maybe the better way to think about it, what are the major issues that could kind of swing either way sure is that is it sure yeah you know the d there's money attached to dh although i think it's less money than has been in the past yeah what what is not exactly clear at this point is how we know the players would like to be able to get to arbitration sooner we know they would of be able to get to arbitration sooner. We know they would, of course, love to get to free agency sooner. You can attach dollar figures to all these things. It would surprise me if they really were able to achieve an earlier arrival at either of those.

You can also attach a dollar figure to the international draft, but there's also a philosophical argument against the international draft that the players union is aware of. And there's a reason they've avoided it thus far. MLB has often looked at it as a distributional issue that, look, this is what the amount of money is. And you can pay players younger, but if you pay players younger, you're going to take away from older players or the top players. Whereas the union's stance has always been, it's not a distributional issue. If you free up the marketplace, the pie can essentially grow. There's no reason that both sets of players, younger and older, can't both see gains. So in a sense, they're talking a different language,

but both sides have the ability to attach a dollar figure to everything. The one that jumps out at me is the expanded playoffs, because we know the owners want it. The players might also want that infusion of cash, but there's also that competitive issue of, do you want to dilute your postseason, basically? I think it was last June as the two sides were trading offers back and forth and everything was getting leaked. And it was very spiteful about getting the pandemic shortened season started where the people that they surveyed were a little more likely to blame the owners for that situation than the players, which did seem like a little bit of a break with the past. But it was not a dramatic difference. break with the past, but it was not a dramatic difference. And I think the majority of respondents just like didn't know or didn't care, you know, which I think is probably true, which, you know, a lot of baseball fans are kind of casual observers or just like either to hell with both of them or,

you know, just tell me when the games are going to start because that's what I care about. And when we talked to Greg Boris on the pod last May, he's the director of communications for the MLBPA from 99 to 2018. And we had him on episode 1542. And he was saying that, you know, yeah, they'd like to have public opinion on their side, I suppose. But it seemed like it was not a primary concern, you know, that what really mattered was what was happening at the table. And, you know, to the extent that the public perception might affect solidarity among union members, let's say, that might have an impact. But really, it's about trading those where there seems to be the biggest disconnect. And it seems like there is just an enormous gulf between them that they're talking past each other, that they have nothing in common if you look at just the economics. Now, I know there are some other issues where maybe they're more aligned, but the economics just seem so central to this that I wonder how much of that is posturing and just sort of, hey, we've got some time to play with.

That is posturing and just sort of, hey, we've got some time to play with. So we're just throwing out everything on our wish list here. And then eventually we'll actually get down to business in the last 72 hours or so. But it does seem like both sides are sort of asking for or seeking what you would expect them to ask for or seek. So is there a bridge that can be built across that divide? Do you think a lot of that disconnect is just early posturing or is this a really fundamental difference that will be difficult to resolve? Possibly a bit of both. It's explained to me that often the first offers are wish lists. The problem with that is it kind of, well, what if one side's wishlist is more reasonable than the other, right? So you can kind of sit there and dismiss either of the first offers as wishlists,

but then one or both sides might say, well, yeah, but mine is a more reasonable wishlist. But that is the way it works is in collective bargaining. I talked to somebody who's taught at a law school and they were saying that their message was always, you know, you don't get if you don't ask, right? And I think that's true even outside of bargaining. And so the next set of offers, you know, really that the final week is going to be interesting. Does MLB move away from the very different structure that they've proposed? You know, they introduced, I shouldn't say introduced, it's been discussed before, but allowing free agents, players would become free agents at 29 and a half. You know, there's no age-based component right now. The problem with that

from the player's side is, well, the best players, the ones who typically earn the most money and then theoretically, you know, rising tide lifts all boats, the ones that bring up all the salary to the others, they hit free agency usually considerably younger than 29 and a half. And the trade-off, one of the trade-offs involved with that proposal from the league was a lower first luxury tax, dropping it to 180 million. And to go over the luxury tax would be more onerous, so that once a player does hit free agency, teams are going to be less likely to spend. So the union did not like that first proposal. And I think it's easy to understand why they didn't. At the same time, the owners sit there and go, we're not letting you get to free agency earlier. We're not letting you do all these

things, get to arbitration earlier, because they can attach dollar figures to them. They know what it'll end up costing them if they do that. So I don't know what form the next set of offers takes. I wish they would tell me. But I'm going to offer what might be a slightly petty thing, but just an observation. This is the notion of leaks. There certainly are leaks, right? There were, in 2020, both sides were being very public. They were making statements. There were letters that came out. So it's not a stretch to say leaks. I do detect sometimes that, you know, if anything gets out, there's kind of an assumption that it was handed to a reporter, which is kind of what a leak, at least to me, the definition of a leak is. It's very often not the case.

It's the case that people will hear things and then we will try to track it down. But it won't necessarily – I think there's a vision of the process being that like, you know, Manfred just calls up a reporter and says, well, you know, here's this. That's not really how this works. Certainly not typically. I'm not going to say it could never work that way. But there are people who hear about what goes on in bargaining, even if it's not coming, even if the first morsel of information isn't coming directly from the room. So something about leaks bugs me because I think it kind of removes the agency of the reporting a little bit. I'm not saying they don't exist. And certainly last year, there were some things that I think could be rightly qualified as that.

But not every news story you're going to see is the product of somebody standing on a street corner handing out a flyer with the latest information. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I'll take a little detour here because I did want to ask you about reporting about this before we get to some of the CBA specifics. You have had kind of an interesting career transition, right, from being a team-centric reporter to being a national reporter who is focusing primarily on the business of baseball. So you go from covering the Red Sox to covering the Astros back to covering the Red Sox again. And then you make this leap to a new topic that I guess you had touched on before, but this is sort of a new beat to a certain extent. And it's a complex one, right? With a lot of history and specialized knowledge and different sources than you would

be talking to about other types of baseball or sports reporting. So how does one go about making this one's beat? And I guess what is the reporting process like to the extent that you can say, you know, who has incentive to talk about these things? I mean, just generally people in baseball like to talk about whatever. So that helps, I suppose. But what incentive do the sides have to get something out there or how do you find something baseball writers who don't really have a background in economics or labor issues even who kind of dabble in cpa stuff and sometimes it seems like they are serving as a mouthpiece for one side or another or they get accused of doing that or at least or maybe they don't seem to have such a firm grasp of some of the context or the specifics. So I wonder how you ended up reporting on this and what you've had to learn in order to

do it. So you may recall, I was the Astros beat writer in Houston and for the Houston Chronicle doing that job. It's not that I didn't have interest in the off the field issues before, because I had written about some in prior years in my career. But to fully understand what the Astros were doing, you had to pay attention to the collective bargaining agreement. Right. So so Houston, one way or another, kind of forced me into it. And then perversely, I kind of liked it. It has represented for me another way to keep learning. You know, I've spent years following the team around the different cities. Red Sox and Astros were the two teams I was a beat writer for,

talking to players, learning about curveball grips and all these different things. And I could still learn endlessly more about that stuff. But to me, these are the real levers of power. If we accept some sort of randomness on the field, it doesn't mean we shouldn't write lovely, wonderful stories about what goes on on the field. And many, many people do that.

But something about the weight of what the lawyers do and the decisions that are made, it shapes everything. So there's some sort of intellectual attraction I have to it. Now, I'm an English major. I was an English major. Didn't particularly like going to class. So I wish I had an economics degree. I wish I had a JD. Arguably, I had somebody, an agent once said to me that it's actually good not to because once you have that, you start thinking like a lawyer and you retain something of an outside perspective if you don't. That was kind of the way I took it, which I think might be true. I've always said there are kind of two types of reporters in this world. There are the ones who think they know everything and then there are the ones who are keenly aware they don't. I would like to consider myself in the latter. And so to cover labor fairly inaccurately in baseball, I've tried to read up on some history

and I've done some stories about the history. And I did a big piece on Marvin Miller, did a big piece on the 1994-95 strike. I did a big piece on the antitrust exemption. These are all learning processes for me. And so I kind of have little mini courses that I've given myself through talking to experts about these subjects. But you have to be incredibly careful with every sentence. If I do a story alone or if I do a story with Ken Rosenthal, it's painstaking because you know that a slight wording in another direction can mean something different. You know, it requires precision. And I'm not saying I always am precise, but there's a lot of thought that goes into small wording sentence to sentence.

Doesn't mean I don't have regrets, but you're trying to really make sure what you're saying is what you want to say, because it does veer into legal writing and business writing. It's not, you know, I think your point about other writers, you know, I've heard people involved in labor and sports lament that, you know, it's written about as the same way people write about the contest themselves. And to some degree, they are, you know, they are two sides competing with one another. But it does require a really broad context. It is frustrating to cover something where a lot of the time people don't want to talk on the record. I think, you know, as far as why do people end up talking, I think it's the intuitive answer to a few things. One, people probably still want to have some say or input into a narrative. You know, they do want to represent their side in some way or another.

Some people might just feel that, you know, it's good to have these things talked about publicly. I mean, in the most credulous read. But I also think there's a sense of trust that, like, you know, you show it. Why do people get to break anything in any thing what in any line of work well you've kind of you demonstrate with your work and the questions you ask and your approach to people that you are going to handle something competently and you know that's how you really build trust as as a reporter so it's a lot of acrimony it's not always fun to cover i do find the discussions generally interesting but it can be a pain in the ass, too. Let me put it that way.

I think one of the things that can make these proposals difficult for laypeople to assess is that we don't have much insight into the particulars of team or league finances, right? We see what the post-season deals are worth from a television perspective, and there are teams that have some portion of their books exposed by virtue of their ownership structure. But I'm curious what data is actually being exchanged in the course of these negotiations, because I imagine that, for instance, when it comes to something like the competitive balance tax threshold, part of the justification that ownership might offer in terms of wanting to reduce it is that it is a fair reflection of current revenue. But of course, they don't disclose revenue in any kind of a granular way. So what are they required to share with the Players Association? And how much sort of independent vetting and modeling do you know of the PA doing to try to accurately assess those numbers? The PA has economists on staff as well as outside contract workers at the firms that they work with.

In a collective bargaining situation, a management group has to provide certain information and respond to certain information requests from the workers. So the Players Association every year gets audited financial statements from MLB. The argument can start to veer into, well, what don't those financial statements include? Should the ancillary businesses, the ballpark villages that you're seeing crop up? businesses, the ballpark villages that you're seeing crop up, that is, I can't think of when that would be reported in the Ernst & Young or whatever accounting firm does the statement. So even though they get the numbers, it's not as though the players get the numbers and go, well, all right, that's everything. And we're just going to leave it at that. And there has been occasion where some of those financial statements have come out. Deadspin had them a few years ago,

you know, but they don't capture franchise value. It is murky and it's something that at The Athletic, I know in my stories, my editor, Emma Spann and I, you know, we've kind of made a point of noting, look, these numbers are virtually impossible to independently verify. When we do have the numbers, right? When MLB says, well, we had revenues of 10 point whatever billion in X year. I think it's important to contextualize what you can and cannot say and can and cannot

vet about that information. And we are, as reporters, limited in that because they don't have to disclose it to us. And the numbers that go to the union are to be kept confidential. So it's hard to come by. You mentioned how much homework you have to do and how much history there is that factors into these labor issues. And part of it is just that there's a perception across the industry that the owners have kind of cleaned the clocks of the PA in not just the last round of bargaining, but perhaps also some previous rounds. And you just wrote a piece about that, how we got here inside the decades that brought players and owners to a

looming labor fight. So to what extent do you think that narrative is true? And as you note, also, there is a perception that the players kind of brought this on themselves by focusing on the wrong issues. And you kind of interrogated that perception and talked to a lot of people about it. So what did you learn about how we got here and what mistakes were made? Yeah, that was a piece I'd wanted to do for quite some time, kind of looking back at the last two CBAs and trying to dissect after the fact what happened to get us to the point where everything is so contentious and that we are talking about a lockout. The notion that the players in 2016, the last time there was a negotiation, so the talks that produced the current deal that's in force, the notion that they were too focused on creature comforts, I assume you both would agree, that's been very oft repeated.

And it's interesting that there are people who maintain on both sides that that did and did not happen. There are people who were close to it, involved with it, who say, no, yeah, absolutely, the players didn't know what to focus on. There are people involved with it who say it's total BS, that it's just BS, that it's just a narrative that ran away. And the conclusion I think can kind of factually be drawn is the players did make proposals for economic changes in 16, but they didn't achieve them. They didn't

fight for them. They weren't ready to go out. And the reality in bargaining is that unless you're willing, your leverage at the end of the day is really your willingness to show up to work on either side. If there's an issue that you don't like it, well, okay, do you not like it to the point that you're going to stop working? So it can be very easy to cherry pick individual issues that either side should have done a better job on, particularly the players in recent years. But it's not quite as simple as, well, they should have fought further. Okay, are you willing to take that fight to the point that you're losing paychecks

and you're shutting down the industry? Certainly the players now today posit that they are ready for that. It was my finding that, with the people I talked to, that in 2016 they really weren't, and maybe they should have been. But there's a lot of factors that went into the last few years right there's an argument that it's it's really the rise of analytics and teams being able to more precisely value players than they had in the past that brings us to where we are i think that is in many ways true but what teams can and cannot do is ultimately dictated by the cba and and so the way the CBA has always been designed,

where players get to free agency later in their careers, it was ripe for teams to leverage. It just so happens that what the numbers have shown is that, oh, young players are just as valuable as some of the free agents you were paying millions of dollars to, and you can have those young players for $500,000. And so the owners, the teams, seem to more quickly realize what that CBA allowed them to do. And the players probably didn't act quickly enough.

I think that's the way I would look at it. But you go back to 16, you talk to people on the players' side, and they were looking at it like, look, yes, the Astros were tanking. Yes, the Cubs are tanking. But the industry is overall in a healthy place. And, you know, we don't need to fight for it without kind of seeing how it could be exacerbated and what boundaries owners and GMs were going to try to continue to push. You know, I think if you were to design a CBA today, just scrap the whole thing. I don't think it looks, it certainly doesn't look exactly like this from a player perspective. You know, it was not optimally designed and one group figured out how to leverage that quicker than the other. And it was better positioned to be leveraged by one side than the other. And there was also a perception, I think, that the PA was kind of outclassed from a negotiating perspective, whether in terms of the specialized knowledge that goes into

that or just the experience, the institutional memory, because there had been a lot of turnover on the union side and it had been decades now since the last strike and a lot has changed. And on the MLB side, you have, you know, from Manfred and Hallam on down, you have people who have been involved in several negotiations now, rounds of bargaining going back decades, and there wasn't that same kind of continuity on the PA side. And of course, they've brought in Bruce Meyer, who was with the NHLPA previously, to sort of staff up in that area. So is there a perception that the sides are more evenly matched now? Or is it even fair to suggest that MLB was just bringing more bargaining brainpower to the table?

I don't think it's unfair. It certainly has been suggested. When I was still in Boston, so the previous outlet, I did a story talking to Gene Orza, who used to be one of the top lawyers at the MLBPA. And he certainly believed that what had changed at the union and at the league was institutional recall, that the union for years, they went from Marvin Miller to Don Feer, that they had had the same people involved. or Don fear that they had had the same people involved. And whereas now that's flipped. You know, Rob Manford got involved as outside counsel in the late 80s. Dan Halem's been around since the mid 2000s, at least. I can't say I know exactly when he started as outside counsel, but he came in full time.

I think it was like 2007. So he's been around for a while, you know, and the union, Michael Weiner sadly passes away. Tony Clark comes in. It is a period of transition and that can bring certain pressures and certain inexperiences. So I think there's some of that, but that is still contested, right? There are people who will say, well, you know, it's kind of wishy-washy myth-making of the people in the past. You can sit there and go, well, who allowed arbitration to go from two years to three? Don Feer. It was in 85, I believe. It was in the 80s when the players gave up an extra year before you could get to ARP. So it's not like the prior group was perfect either. And there is this broad historical context of once the players win free agency, everything since then has been the owners trying to claw back bits and pieces of that you come out of the one thing that really struck me and i and i don't know that it strikes people elsewhere that they would think about it but you come out of the 1994-95 strike the players successfully i think most people would

say the players won the strike right you know You know, the Sonia Sotomayor ruling, the league had its wrists slapped quite publicly and powerfully. You avoid a salary cap if you're the players, but you still end up conceding on a luxury tax and revenue sharing between the clubs. And it strikes me that intuitively I would think, well, if a group wins a strike, and this might be the sports writer in me you know if you win a strike the other side doesn't get anything you don't get anything you you didn't want to give up they lose but some of the mechanisms that you've seen evolve over time came out of that strike so you know in a way it's a little unfair to kind of put anything on one

deal you know there was one agent who said to to me, you really got to go back years and years and see what Bud Selig was trying to do and his interest in swinging things in the favor of the small market owners. But the other anecdote I'd offer is when I was covering the Astros, there were certainly issues that I looked at and said, going into that 16 deal. I used to, when Tony Clark, when the union would come to spring training, and I remember, I'd always ask questions about it. And then that 16 deal came and I felt like, well, they didn't address any of it. You know, all the same things that we were seeing were probably just going to continue. And it's not because they were totally ignorant to it.

I think it's because they didn't quite see the importance of the fight in the immediate. You know, it's not that they didn't see it. It's that they didn't see the urgency to it. So we have all of these really big issues that feel kind of foundational to the sport. And we are expecting this contentious negotiation and a lockout and a potential delay. But I guess how different do you expect baseball's economic environment to look after a deal is eventually finalized? My gut tells me not that different. And it's just speculative.

There's so much money on the line. I think even relative to 94, 95, and again, somebody with an economics background smarter than me could do this with adjusting for inflation. But I think there's more money on the line now than there's ever been. And both sides do ultimately make a lot of money. Certainly the players are the ones advocating for gains on their side,

but the losses without work would be substantial. The players are not going to go for a salary cap. At least I would be stunned. And it hasn't been formally directly introduced this go-around. There were shades of it in the league's first proposal, kind of mechanisms that would function as one in some way. But it seems to me that in 94-95, you had the salary cap as the issue, right? The revenue sharing was important. Luxury tax was important, as we've seen. But it's really a collection of

issues this time around for the players. And I've never done PR. I don't ever intend to. But I think that's a harder sell publicly, that it's not about one thing. It's about how these different three, four, five things fit together. I think it that without a single issue to this point that they can point to and say, we have to have this. And same for the owners. Well, doesn't that lead you to believe that there's light at the end of the tunnel that makes us go away with relatively minimal pain? I could be wrong. There are certain milestones in the off season that happen no matter what else is going on. So you have to offer or not offer qualifying offers by a certain date and free agency starts on a certain date regardless but of course we've seen some recent off seasons have proceeded slowly without the backdrop of the cpa negotiations

so given this given all the uncertainty about whether and when and how this will be resolved, would you expect much or any activity to take place prior to, well, let's say the CBA expiring, and then if there is no deal immediately, prior to a deal getting done? Or are we just in for a few months of next to no free agent activity? Well, the owners, it would be illegal, as I understand it, for the owners to collectively halt free agency this month. So there's got to be some action this month, lest the owners want to open themselves up to accusations of collusion. The GM meetings, once they get fully underway here, you're going to hear the GMs talk about it. I'm sure the quotes will be bland and boring, as most of the GMs have tended toward these days. But I'm sure they will express some caution over, well, we don't know what the system will look like and want to see that shake out.

I don't think that would be unfair of them to say. And that's a natural sentiment that they're going to have. And then you can get more cynical, as we discussed earlier. Do the owners want to see free agency kind of delayed, right? Is there a little bit of a groupthink collective consensus that, you know what, let's see what that does? We don't know that, right? But it's not too far fetched to think that some people could be thinking that way. So I think this month will be lukewarm. It's not the first time we've seen a lukewarm start to the offseason anyway, but I would imagine the juicy stuff waits until

we have a deal, whether that's 2024 or 2021. Is there any sort of cap and floor kind of structure that might make sense for Major League Baseball and I guess make sense to whom I guess is the question but for the betterment of the sport in a framework that both sides would accept or be pleased with just because you know it's been bandied about and I think a lot of fans look at other sports and say well they have something like that why can't MLB have something like that and maybe it's just because it's not beneficial to have something like that for the players. And MLB has historically had this strong union. And that was always a bright line that Marvin Miller wouldn't cross. But are we getting to the point where the union would entertain such a structure?

Not this leadership of the union, not this group, as far as everything I've seen and understand. Certainly, the players would not object to having a percentage of revenues go their way. They also would not object to a floor. It is the case in the other leagues that when you get that floor and you get that percentage of revenues, the tradeoff is a cap. And one of the arguments that owners will make for a cap is it provides a level of peace that, well, everybody knows what they're getting. And so, you know, you can kind of grow the game better. In the other leagues, and there are news stories to this extent, that's not really the case. They're always fighting over what actually goes into the

definition of revenue. So it's this kind of a kumbaya notion with a cap that it would create better harmony between these two sides. And I don't think that's necessarily true. You know, there is a reason owners have always wanted a cap, and that is because it is economically beneficial to them. That's a hard baseline to get around. It's not because it's better for the players. Now, there could be a short-term gain for the players. You can put in a given year a percentage split that the players effectively get. And you can argue about what should go into that. Different people can have different calculations than they do.

But let's just say the players get 45% of MLB revenues right now. Well, I'm sure MLB would be willing to offer, I don't know, 50%, right? You're going to get more money. You take this cap system, you are definitively getting more money right now? Well, I'm sure MLB would be willing to offer, I don't know, 50%, right? You're going to get more money. You take this cap system, you are definitively getting more money right now. The problem from a player's side is, well, what is the league going to push for every single time the CBA is up? They're going to push for that percentage to go down and down and down. You're never getting it back. You're never getting that opportunity to have it closer to an open market again. You know, what would LeBron James make if he was in a baseball economic system? But, you know,

there are people who argue that the revenue split's only going to keep going down, that the owners are never going to return to a place where they're spending or spending exorbitantly, and they're just going to keep, you know, pushing toward younger players. And, you know, so there are some people who think that, well, the players should make a switch for that reason. But then the argument is, well, that's the owners bringing the water to the fire they started, if you go that route. So the union clearly, and the players at this point, don't think that they would be better off economically in a cap. The league has always wanted it, will always want it. It always lurks

in the background. Even two years ago, I had a story that still never run, kind of explaining both sides of it. And maybe someday that story will make sense to run, but it's not in the discussion at this point. Well, thank you. We appreciate the primer on where things stand currently, and maybe we can have you back on if and when a deal gets done for a postmortem about how it all went down, hopefully. And in the meantime, people can also hear Evan talking about baseball labor issues

on The Athletic Baseball Show, which is a podcast that we would recommend under any circumstances, but also for the next month or so, or maybe longer, depending on how long things take to sort out, Evan will be doing weekly shows about the labor talks and where things are going. So tune in there to catch him as well as our friend Grant Brisby, as usual, and other greats. let you go we have a business of baseball reporter here on the podcast wanted to take an opportunity to ask you about another topic while i was just recently on leave there was a little bit of movement on two of the most frustrating and seemingly intractable topics in baseball minor

league housing and pay and then also mlb blackout issues and broadcasting. And there seems to be some movement on the former that teams will be obligated to provide some sort of housing next season, at least to some minor leaguers, although the details are still sort of TBD. And then there also seems to be some movement or at least some effort toward providing some in-market streaming options, something that would allow fans to circumvent the blackouts that everyone hates that prevents people from watching games that often aren't actually even in their own markets. You have written and reported about both of these issues in recent months. of these issues in recent months. So if you can take them one at a time, how do you expect these things to get resolved? Or do you? Are we still sort of waiting to see whether there will actually

be solutions to these problems? Well, you know, there's still a lawsuit that's been ongoing since either 2013 or 2014 over minor league pay. So yeah, the owners have decided that they're going to provide housing for at least some minor leaguers if they've updated or provided some announcement of what that group of minor leaguers actually is. I haven't seen it. Assume that, let's just say it's most. I think it reflects what public pressure can do. And there's been a lot of discussion about minor league working conditions, living conditions, housing in the last couple of years. And part of that is owed to groups like Advocates for Minor Leaguers and More Than Baseball that are trying to bring attention to it. And so the owners seem to have been forced to respond.

But, you know, so even if there's housing provided, it's not going to eliminate the discussion of, well, are they being paid like interns or are they being given living wages? And there's a lawsuit ongoing with that. So it's kind of one domino, I think, in the minor league discussion. I don't see any way it's not considered a victory for those advocating for the players. The blackouts is immensely complicated. I did do a long story trying to explain to both myself and to people how this worked. That's one of those stories that ends up being a good learning experience. There's a lot of individual contracts that restrict everything. So the team has a contract with the RSN. The RSN has a contract with the provider. So it's virtually impossible, as I understand it, for MLB to wake up tomorrow and say everything is blackout free because if

you do that a bunch of people are getting sued because the exclusivity of like you know if you're Time Warner Cable you're paying a lot of money to be able to carry that that game and you don't want other people to to be able to get it elsewhere because you want someone to have to subscribe to your service right that's that's kind of the crux of the whole thing mlb is steadily trying to get to a place where they have better ability to offer in-market streaming like the whole rsn model is changing the cord cord cutting is changing everything so over time it's possible mlb will start its own in-market streaming service where you pay a certain amount of money and you can watch. You know, me as a YouTube TV subscriber in New York City, I can't watch Yankees games, you know.

And so eventually there could be a solution for that where, you know, more fans could be served. But, you know, that's not a this winter type of thing. I think it's going to be a pretty slow burn. So last thing, you have a book coming out next year. It's called Winning Fixes Everything, and it is about the Houston Astros and more broadly about how the Astros culture kind of created and or reflected larger cultural changes across Major League Baseball and maybe across all sports. And this week actually marks two years since you and Ken Rosenthal broke the sign-stealing story at The Athletic. And I wonder whether enough time has elapsed that you can talk

at all about how that story came together. It's obviously a story that changed your career, I would imagine, and certainly changed the sport and conversations about the sport over the last couple of years. And I guess the big break was maybe Mike Fiers going on the record for that. And I don't know whether you can talk at all about how that came about. But I just wonder how long you were working on that, how it came together, whether you had a sense that it was going to be as big as it was. I said to Ken when it came out, I think the day it came out, we're never going to have a bigger story in our lives. And he didn't quite believe me at that point. He's written a lot of stories. He's written a lot of stories. He eventually came around on the

idea that, yes, that was it. It took a very long time. There was a large reporting process that led up to the publishing of that investigation. And part of the book will explain more of that. Ken and I have been very quiet about it, frankly, because we didn't want to grandstand or come off as grandstanding. You know, we really haven't talked much about it at all. I'm inviting you to grandstand. I also don't want to scoop your own book. I'm inviting you to grandstand. I also don't want to scoop your own book. Yeah, the time is coming for that, for at least a little bit more of an explanation of how we did it. It really required a combination of two ex-beat writers, people who have a certain kind of mode of reporting. And I built trust with a lot of people over time to pool our resources together and get it to a point where it was ready to go.

And so Ken was immensely important in that. But the reporting process, I'll put it this way. I think if people knew how long I had known about it and was trying to get to it, it was a painful period of time, knowing it and kind of waiting for it to be in a place where I felt ready, it was ready and we were ready collectively to publish it. And I'm excited to explain the story,

not just of the reporting, which is only a small part of the book, but also of that franchise over the last decade plus. All right. Well, we can pencil in another future podcast appearance to talk about that at some point next year. And you and Ken have kind of become the dynamic duo. I mean, I know that Ken has collaborated with a lot of writers at The Athletic, but you two have been a formidable tag team, I guess, dating back to the sign-stealing saga and now about the Cba and and many other issues there have been a lot of co-bylined evandrelic and ken rosenthal pieces in the last couple years and i wonder how that works too because i have some experience with co-writing things which can be wonderful it can also be difficult and i'd imagine that uh if you have the chance to team up with someone who has the experience and the contacts of ken rosenthal, that is probably a pretty appealing prospect. And in my limited experience with Ken, he has always been very gracious. So I imagine he is fairly easy to work with as well. But

in what ways has that been advantageous, I guess, for the both of you to team up from time to time? Well, we have different, I think, connections and approaches, right? The pool of people we might talk to could be sometimes different. Ken really is a unicorn. You know, if you talk to people at The Athletic who kind of see him up close and deal with him, his motor is absurd.

He doesn't stop. He does a national telecast. He'll write a column at 3 a.m., get up the next day, break some sort of trait. And, you know, and he's able to dip in and out of these topics of going to labor. It's really – I haven't really encountered somebody like that. And then you add in on top of that with Ken, he's incredibly kind and well – and he cares and he'll check on you just from a – he's almost like another editor at times. And he's the top of our staff at The Athletic and it's a large staff.

And he's really a special reporter uh in person and i you know this might not come across in my in my reporting in a way i kind of hope it does i'm not the most flowery guy you know rob manford and i probably have that similar to each other you know we're not the most effusive ponies and rainbows type of people have you ever called it a hunk of metal though? I have not done that. But, you know, I, so I guess I mentioned that to say, I really do think Ken is special in that regard. And it's not just because I work with him. It's because I've seen the process up close

and I've talked to him through it and I see what he goes through and I see what he does. And I sit there and, you know, I, I don't, I just, I don't know where I'm getting dinner tonight and that's my problem. And you, you know, you're doing a million things and I don't know where I'm getting dinner tonight And that's my problem And you're doing a million things And I don't know how you do it Well we look forward to hearing more

From you about the CBA And also about the Astros Next year So you can follow Evan on Twitter At his name You can hear him In the short term On the Athletic Baseball Show Talking about the CBA negotiations. You can preorder his book right now. Again, it's called Winning Fixes Everything, currently scheduled for release next summer. And we will stay tuned to the author page of Evendrelic in the next few weeks because I imagine it'll be a busy few weeks or months for you.

So thanks for staying on top of it. Thanks, Meg. Thanks, Ben. Okay, that will do it for today. Speak of the newsbreaker, as we were recording that episode, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Dodgers had signed Andrew Heaney. So hey, it's true. Ken never rests, and teams actually can sign some free agents in November.

As noted earlier, we will get into free agency and hot stove stuff tomorrow, and we will just proceed with that as planned, as if this is just going to be a normal off-season. We also will be starting our watch-along of the Korean TV baseball drama Stove League next week, as we mentioned last week. So we would urge everyone to get started watching. We will be talking about at least the first four episodes of that show at some point next week, and I will include on the show page links to multiple places where you can stream it.

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