Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1811: How Will the Lockout End?

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Craig Goldstein discuss the owners’ latest CBA counterproposal, why analyzing Competitive Balance Tax surcharges isn’t exactly riveting, where the owners and players are still furthest apart, why the deadlock is about money—and not even that much money—more so than structural change, MLB’s argument for not paying minor […]

When I get all my work done Learning the pros and the cons Of the system that everyone owns I can go outside and am allowed to Play Play I love to play, play. All I want to do is play. Hello and welcome to episode 1811 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. And we are also joined by Craig Goldstein, editor-in-chief of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Craig. Welcome back. Hello. Thank you for having me back. Well, as our friend Emma Batchelory tweeted over the weekend, brutal year for the people who tweet, now it's baseball season after the end of the Super Bowl. And I guess that's true for a few reasons, really.

Where do we start? Last time we heard from Rob Manfred, last Thursday, which we discussed on this podcast, the commissioner said, with respect to the proposal, we're going to make a good faith positive proposal in an effort to move the process forward. Whether or not that happens, it's a product of the process. I just don't know. It's a good faith positive proposal in an effort to move the process forward. Whether or not that happens, it's a product of the process. I just don't know. It's a good proposal. He said that on Thursday when some people were paying attention. And then on Saturday, when probably fewer people were paying attention because it was the day before Super Bowl, that proposal came out. Craig, would you characterize that as a good proposal? came out. Craig, would you characterize that as a good proposal?

No, I wouldn't. I would also say that when you have to clarify that it's going to be a good faith and good proposal, I feel like maybe you're starting from a point of unacknowledged deficit. Maybe that might be how I phrase that. Right. We're trying on this podcast not to just be bemoaning the baseball labor situation every single time out because that wouldn't be fun for us and it wouldn't be fun for anyone. But this time, I think we have to talk about it a bit more because there were some developments and there was some even more Monty Bernsian behavior on behalf of MLB, not just when it came to the CBA, but also the payment of minor leaguers. There's a lot to talk about. And Craig, you were tweeting about much of that over the weekend. So we figured you'd be all warmed up and ready to deliver your takes. Oh, yeah.

My secret is I'm always angry about this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You're a very nice person, and especially in person. But on Twitter, sometimes in comment sections, you can get a bit heated, as Evandrelic always describes the CBA negotiations, heated, contentious, etc. et cetera. So maybe we should step back a bit and just sort of sum up where things stand, which is tough to do because it's really pretty boring to talk about the nitty gritty of the proposals. It's important. And obviously it's determining whether we're going to have Major League Baseball this year and when that might be. But as you put it in a column at BP last week, the lockout is one of the least interesting stories in sports imaginable because it's about nothing happening. And it's also about economics, which is interesting to some people.

But probably we didn't all get into baseball because we wanted to haggle over the competitive balance tax threshold and penalty rates, etc. But that is pretty important now. over the competitive balance tax threshold and penalty rates, et cetera. But that is pretty important now. So we actually have to understand it and have some sort of position on it. But do you want to sort of sum up what the latest offer was and where you see the major sticking points being and how we've gotten to this point? I know that's kind of a lot to encapsulate in a single response. Let me start out by saying that even as someone who got a sport management degree in undergrad, and I have an MBA for grad school, this is not interesting stuff. And not only is it

minutiae and it's very sprawling, it covers a lot of different areas it is intentionally obfuscated by and and twisted uh in some cases by both sides but i would say markedly more by by ownership and so like just the the level of drive it takes to get through all of that to some understanding of truth like i no one should really have that right like it like no Like I, no one should really have that, right? Like, like no one should blame, no one should blame themselves. And I'm not trying to say like the people that do like, cause I care about it or whatever,

like I'm superhuman or any, like, no, I'm deranged is what I'm trying to say. And like, no one normal should actually like be like, should have the level of, of interest to,

to work past all of it because they really intentionally make it very hard. Some of it is just how it is, and then some of it is intentionally made difficult. So yes, I'm happy to kind of get a status update. I do want to say that I am going to reference heavily, I know Jeff Passan had some very significant details in his report, Evan Drellick at The Athletic in his, and Jay Jaffe, which I tweeted at this morning, has a very good summation of the whole thing on fan graphs from the league is the competitive balance tax,

which has largely been unaddressed. Both sides addressed it early on, right around or right before the lockout when they were exchanging proposals, I think. And then the league did make a, I think they reiterated their update, their proposal in an early January offer and updated it here, the PA has been pretty consistent in the same range of where they want it. And that is that when the CBA expired, we were at $210 million as an initial threshold for incurring a tax surcharge, what they call the base tax surcharge. And that was at $210 million. We saw teams go past that, notably the Dodgers, but other teams had over the course of the CBA. And then the league is

offering to raise that to $214 million, which is a very modest bump in line with the last few raises from the prior CBA. And the PA wants that bump to move more into the $245 million range, which would be justified based on the growth of revenues rather than, say, inflation or something like that. So I used all of those words to describe the status of one aspect of this very sprawling proposal. So maybe I was wrong when I said I could give a real status update. Well, I think it is worth underscoring to listeners just how infrequently over the course of the CBA teams, even the wealthiest teams are not just sort of exceeding that first

threshold, but coming close to that first threshold. Like it just doesn't happen very often. And the kind of spending we saw from the Dodgers last offseason where they were clearing multiple thresholds, it's not unprecedented in the history of that CBA by any means, but like it is not it is not business as usual for most teams, even teams that have the resources that the Dodgers do. So I think that, you know, we want to remind people of just how how hard that soft cap seems to be for a lot of teams. And teams manage their payrolls dynamically, and it doesn't mean that they don't manage down below the threshold

so that they can go up in a subsequent year and not incur additional penalties. I don't mean to say that it never happens, but it is very much the sort of exception rather than the rule, even for clubs that presumably have the resources to stomach not only that payroll, but the penalties they would incur for running one. So I just want to say that because we act as if, or rather, some folks on Twitter act as if they are regularly brushing up against the draft pick parts of this structure. And even under the old CBA, that wasn't happening very often. So right. Yeah. I mean, there are three tiers, like three levels of the tax rate structure under the old CBA. It was if you were over 210 in the last year of it, it was 210 million. You had $20

million until you hit the second tier, and then another $20 million until you hit the third tier. And those were graduated taxes. So you were taxed on dollars over that amount at varying tax rates. And if this starts to sound like other tax discussions you have, it's very similar. And then in the third tier of that, you would also be penalized on draft picks, as Meg was talking about. But a very tangible example of this is looking at how, if you want to explain the Yankees of the last few years, you can't do it without understanding what the competitive balance tax is and how desperately they wanted to avoid it. And as Meg said, this is about essentially hardening this relatively soft

but effective cap. And when you're looking at the Yankees trying to solve various on-field problems, they go about it by getting a free Rugnito Dorr to address their second base issue. Now, look, he was okay for them in various parts, but you would understand that in any other situation, they would aim higher, but for the fact that presumably their owner, or it might be happening at the general manager level, but presumably their owner has no interest in paying a tax rate on dollars above the threshold they were at. And that was a very active part of their decision-making process. And so it really does constrain spending in a very tangible way. And that's just one team. We know other teams were also doing the same thing.

Now, granted, a lot of teams don't come close to this level of spending, but it is the case that this thing does guide a lot of macro-level spending decisions from a variety of teams across the league. Yeah, it's sort of like sabermetrics where obviously we're all interested in that and we want to know about the numbers, but there are some fans who don't and they don't see the game that way, and that's fine. And for them, maybe the avalanche of data actually turns them off at times. But if they say, well, why do I need to know about this? One reason is that it affects how the game is played. It affects why players are on the team that you root for and how they're used and how they're paid. And all of the front offices, of course, are using that

information. And so if you want to understand why teams are doing what they do and why front offices sign that guy and not that guy or why the manager is using this guy in that batting order spot and not that one, then you kind of have to understand that stuff. I think that is more interesting than the surcharges that we are discussing currently. But I'm just saying some people feel that way about both. And I don't have an NBA or an MBA. And so to me, it is maybe more opaque than it is to you even. But basically, it seems like the players are trying to get a bump on that threshold. The owners are offering a very meager one. And not only that, not only is it that the threshold increases that they're proposing are not even keeping up with inflation cost of living increases over time, let alone the

increase in revenue in MLB. But they're also proposing steeper penalties, right? Higher tax rates. So it's not just that they're saying, let's keep it the way it was and maybe make an extraordinarily small bump to that threshold. But it's actually more stringent. It is more dissuasive to any team that is thinking of doing things. So it's not just status quo, which is how Rob Manfred initially described it,

right, in his Thursday comments. It was corrected. Yes, it was corrected subsequently by spokespeople talking to Jeff Passanen, Evan Drellick, et cetera. But it's not just that. And so you can see why players would be opposed to that, because not only do they want some loosening in that, MLB is not just saying, let's keep things the way they were. Let's make it even harsher. Let's make tiny bumps on the owner's side. We'll add 2 million here in year five or whatever, but the penalties, the tax rates are not changing at all. And the bumps are nowhere near what the players are asking for, which seems like it's not way out of line with how these bumps used to happen and how they would happen if you kind of tied them to inflation, which obviously is pretty high right now, or just the increase in MLB revenues, et cetera. So that's why that seems to be at a standstill. You can't use the word

impasse, I guess. Everyone wants to say impasse, but that is like a technical legal term when it comes to bargaining. I think people get confused about that because the way that we describe impasse in real life, this could kind of be an impasse in that it seems that the two sides are at loggerheads, but it doesn't beat the legal definition. A chasmous spant, Scott. Yes, you could say that too. It is just one thing I want to touch on. And I want to say like Jay's article

lays this out really, really nicely in the table is, and I've been harping on this a little bit, but I really, truly believe it. Like, we saw in Rob Manfred's original letter to the fans when the league locked out the players that he described what they want is radical change. And, you know, like Ben, on your intro, you said we're kind of like despairing about the state of baseball. And there's reason for that.

There's good reason for that. But the reality is, I think on a structural level, we're not, the players are no longer seeking very much change on a structural level. There is, they want arbitration to happen after two years instead of three. Now that even on a structural level that has occurred before, they allowed it to move back to three years, I think in 87. But that's not even a thing that we've never seen before in the history of CBAs between these two sides. But that is the big structural change that is still in contention. Everything else that's in contention basically falls under the prior structure of the previous CBA. And that means what we're arguing about, and people will say, obviously, this was always the case, we're arguing about money.

And structural change does equate to money down the line. But this is something that I really do believe, like, if both wanted wanted to solve, it could be solved. I wouldn't say just by meeting halfway. I think I think the players have more of a I don't know if you want they have more of a rational basis for their claims. They I think they have more of a righteous basis for their claims and for their their asks. But this is something that isn't a radical change. But when we look at the competitive balance tax penalties that you described as more severe, that is a radical change to that item. And I do think it's worth describing it as that, because if you look at the way it was structured previously was that there

were multiple, there were what they called a repeater penalty. So you could violate it the first time, there were the three tiers I described earlier, and then you could violate the penalty multiple times over the course of five years, right? And so the penalties would grow if you didn't reset under the CBT, a base threshold, and they would escalate. What they have taken is the harshest escalation, the third time plus, the highest percentages, and they've gotten rid of the repeater penalty and said, this is now our standard penalty. And they've not only taken the harshest ones, they've increased them for the second and third tiers. It is a massive, massive shift of how this works. And as Meg said, it is very much hardening what is a moderately soft cap right now.

And we'll link to all of the pieces that you referenced in the show notes so that people can take a peek at this. And I think that you're right that Jay did a nice job here. He'll be so happy to hear that you think that because these took him quite a while to get together. But just to run through this to give people listening a sense of it, if they're not able to look at the table in front of them, the penalties for first-time offenders used to be 20%, 32%, and 62.5% depending on how far over the base payroll you were going. Those first-time penalties are now 50, 75, and 100%. So if you're in that highest bucket, on your first go, you're getting charged dollar for dollar for your overage, right? So it is a very dramatic escalation in the first-time offense, and then those numbers are kept consistent going forward. So as you said, there

isn't an escalating penalty. It's just right off the bat. We are saying, you know, you're going to start at 50% and go from there. So it is a pretty, it is a pretty dramatic change of course for the league. And if you contrast that with the PA's proposal that they sent on January 24th, it isn't as if they are asking to eliminate penalties at all. They're just maintaining the current structure within each band while raising the threshold so that there's more flexibility on the upside there. But it's a good table. People should look at it, and then they'll be like, wow, that's a big difference between those things. By the way, the league also wants to increase the number. There are draft pick

penalties associated with both sides that aren't currently part of most of the penalties that apply. So it is a very big reach from the league. And I think one thing when we discuss the various offers that have been made from the league and from the PA is that one thing the league tends to do, and I don't really want to say to their credit because I think it's kind of despicable, but it's something that they do very well, is they say we make a move towards the PA, but they attach a string to it that either equals or outweighs the quote-unquote concession that they're making. And they do it very effectively. So Rob Manfred gets to say something, and I think Emma Batchelory said this really well

in an SI piece right after his press conference, but he gets to say things that are technically true, but eye-rollingly obviously not true also. And when he gets to say, we've moved on competitive balance tax, we've moved in the player's direction. Yeah, they raised the last three years of the CBT by 2 million per year. It is a minuscule movement. And they've left in these draconian penalties that are a massive escalation from the status quo. And so he gets to say they move in the same direction and move towards the players. But in reality, it's not remotely that, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And some of what you were saying about this being about money more

so than massive structural changes, maybe with the exception of those tax hikes, is something Joshian pointed out in our last episode when we had Hinamon, and then also in a subsequent edition of his newsletter, which I'll just quote here because he's kind of reviewing how the previous work stoppages that cost games, you know, 72, 81, 94, those were about these big issues, or at least what were big issues at the time. And also, they were pretty understandable for anyone who is not an MLB owner or in the Players Association. So the pension, free agency, a salary cap, I'm quoting here, baseball fans weren't happy watching any

of these disputes play out, but even moderately engaged ones could have told you what each of them was about. The players and owners went to war three times over issues that were critical to both sides. That is not the case now. The current dispute isn't about core issues, isn't about league structure, isn't about principles. It's entirely about money. The owners, having established a favorable rule set and business practices to match, want to maintain their advantage in limiting their labor costs while expanding the playoffs to garner more television money. The players, having lost a lot of ground since 1994, didn't come into this negotiation trying to get it all back, trying to change that rule set, but have instead built a platform designed to pick up small gains in a few key areas, the minimum we've been talking about the CBT, the competitive balance tax threshold thus far. There is also the minimum salary issue, right? And the players are asking for a minimum salary of $775,000 and it's at what,

$585,000 now most recently? And it would rise to $875,000 over the life of the deal under their proposal. MLB countered with a proposal that starts at $615,000 for minimum service time players and rises to $700,000 for pre-arb players with at least two years of service time. And the projected difference by Joe's estimation is about $100 million a year, maybe $125 million by 2026. This is another case where it doesn't really even keep pace with inflation probably. If you look at the difference between 585 and 615 during the life of that deal, it's just not really an increase. Nominally, it is. But if you do the adjustment, it's not or it barely is.

And there are a couple of different structures that MLB proposed, neither of which seems all that favorable compared to the current system that's in place. Then there's also the pre-arbitration player bonus pool where the two sides are seemingly agreed on the concept but very, very far apart on the number. And to be clear, that is a structural change. It is. It's one that I've made the point to say there's not contention. There's contention over the money, but not the structure itself. They have seemed to agree on that. So the idea of a bonus pool that would be split among, what, the top 30 pre-arb players based on some stat. It sounds like in the latest proposal,

the idea is that there would be some mutually developed war, MLB, MLBPA war. No comment, man. It sounds like they're not going to use fan graphs for at this point, so that's a relief. I have to say, I'm happy to have my name left out of it for once. Or be ref. Right.

Yeah, like not my monkey, not my circus. That's what I got on that. Right. Yeah, like not my monkey, not my circus. That's what I got on that. Right. And so basically each side is now lopping off $5 million each time, each round of bargaining. And it's like- Yeah, by December we'll have- Right, well, and this is the thing. We're on pace to be ready by 2023.

It's like players are at $100 million for the bonus pool. Owners are at 15, up from 10, players down from 105. It's like at this point, we'll meet in the middle in a year or two. So yeah, I would have, I mean, I still would be quick to point out the issues that I think are present in this proposal if it were coming earlier. But my reaction to what we saw on Saturday would have been pretty different if it had come in December, right? Like part of the problem here is that it's Valentine's Day. Like I'm supposed to be getting ready to be mad about increased traffic in the valley today. And I'm not going to be on track for that for probably at least another month, right? Like

part of this is just, it reads very differently in terms of your commitment to getting a deal done in a way that is fair and reasonable for both sides when you're willing to start negotiations from that point rather than waiting until you're actually at risk of losing exhibition games and then real games, right? It just, we have to interpret it within the context of the broader negotiation and this stinks. Like we're supposed to be getting going today, especially when you tout it as a good offer. Right. Like I think when you preface it with that and to quote to quote Joe Sheehan again, as he said this on Twitter, like this was a December offer in February. That's exactly what he said. And it's exactly right. I would argue it's actually like ideally it's more of like an like an August offer before the CBA expires,

right? This is like, this is an initial, this is an initial offer. And it's, it's because there are so many things still wrong with it. And even just to go back to my point about MLB tying strings to things when when they initially offered their tiered minimum salary bump, it was such that teams could no longer offer above the minimum salary. So it wasn't just a minimum salary, it was a maximum salary for players in that service band range. And they've now said, okay, you can either get a dramatically lower minimum salary as a base with teams having the flexibility to offer more than that in some cases. And if you're wondering an example of that, it's like Pete Alonso, I think, earned more than the minimum even though he was a 0-3 player.

The Mets opted to pay him more based on what he had done. Or you could take this higher base level but with the restricted freedom of teams to offer more than that. And Mark Norman then wrote a really good piece about what MLB seeks to do in these offers. And it's really to limit choice. And you can see that historically, you know, they've put caps on the draft, they've put caps on, you know, they've put hard caps on international spending. And the players accepted all of this in part because all of those things affect directly players who are not part of the union. So it's a lot easier to sell that to your constituency, but also because they thought all that money would end up flowing back

to them through free agency. And it didn't. I mean, we've seen over the last four years that player salaries have stagnated and dropped. And that is kind of the thing driving this wedge between the two sides. I mean, aside from distrust and not liking each other and all of that kind of stuff, that distrust is sown because I think you can very credibly argue that the players entered, you know, they made these horse trades, right? These concessions, they gave up stuff because they thought they, you know, they were making a deal in good faith with a group of people that were going to see the gauntlet of being under team, you know, pure unilateral team controlled salaries, that's zero to three,

and then arbitration, that's three to six, although in often, you know, in some cases, seven years of team control, you get rewarded with these large contracts on the other end. And basically, the owners, after agreeing to the last CBA, said, yeah, we're not actually going to do that last part. And that's the seed of a lot of this mistrust and resentment. And I think it's not unreasonable. Yeah. And on Saturday, John Heyman, who is an MLB Network insider, and we know from the example of former MLB Network insider Ken Rosenthal that you can't be too critical of the league and Rob Manfred in that role or else you will not be invited back. He tweeted, and presumably this is coming from people on the owner's side, MLB understood its proposal carried no hope to facilitate a deal in days. The intention, rather, was to spark talk and trigger more give and take.

MLB clearly has more room for flexibility, but seeks to first see greater movement from the players. So if that's coming in mid-February, two days after Rob Manfred says it's going to be a good and good faith offer, and really it just, we're going to put out this unserious offer in hopes that the players will give something up. And, you know, in the athletic piece that Rosenthal and Evandrelic wrote this weekend, which was about why there's no reason to believe that the season will start on time, they wrote, what is notable from multiple player side sources, including players and agents, is how annoyed annoyed players are there are some who would have preferred that the union had not made its last counter offer at all some of the same sentiment cropped up saturday based on a feeling that mlb is moving too little to consistently warrant counter offers so you can see how if that's the pattern like this is not our

real offer we're just putting it out there to see what you guys say next, then you would not be highly motivated to come back to the table and bargain against yourself, basically. So we're past the time when you should just be sort of putting out these fake offers more or less in hopes of spurring some response. Yeah. And I think the players, you know, I said it at the time when they made their late January proposal, but my concern was exactly that they were negotiating against themselves because I think they're putting this forward in an attempt to say like, you know, we don't actually really trust you, but we're willing to play our part in this process. And when they did that, they dropped

their big structural changes that we talked about. Their time, lowering the time to free agency for some players. This was not even a dramatic shift for, this wasn't lowering it for every player. It was for, it was an age-based free agency for players with five plus years of service. It's a very specific group. They lowered by $70 million the change in revenue sharing that they sought, which is a dramatic figure to drop it by. And look, I think that demonstrates good faith, right? They don't trust this side, but they said, look, this is how it works. This is what we're supposed to do. We're going to take real planks of our platform off the table because you've said you don't want them there. What are you going to do? And then we see what MLB does. And again, it allows them to be technically correct in saying we've made a lot of movements on a lot of fronts, but the magnitude of those movements are very small.

the magnitude of those movements are very small and often tied, again, with these strings that make them essentially no movement at all. Well, and it's troubling too, because the union was in a position where they didn't have, because of how the last CBA negotiation went, because of the state that they found themselves in, when the free agent market shifted the way that it did, in when the free agent market shifted the way that it did, they didn't have as many concessions to give, right? They have very little to bargain with. Right. And so I think that what we will probably end up with is a bonus pool that sits somewhere in between where the two sides are right now and minimum salaries that fall somewhere in between where the two sides are right now. But their ability to really hold owners feet to the fire in terms of concessions within the CBA around stuff like the CBT is pretty limited. Like all the the big chip that they have remaining is expanded playoffs. They've proposed 12 teams. I mean, this is this is to me and I don't mean to

criticize ourselves or well, I do intend to criticize and have other media. Like, I think it does get lost a little bit is that like when people say that the union hasn't moved, they've added two teams to the playoffs in a proposal. They've taken these other planks off the table. That is substantial movement. And we're not seeing, the league has agreed, you know, the draft pick compensation for free agents is, you know, on an individual level,

right? When a singular free agent signs for a certain amount, like there wouldn't, that's real, that's worth something. The bonus pool is real and worth something. What it's worth is going to depend on what money they put into it. Right now, it's very little. So there are some things the league has done. I don't want to say they've done nothing. But compared to the union, it's not close. And then when you put it in context of rational starting points and what actually makes sense, it's not even close. Yeah, the issue of the expanded playoffs, I totally understand why the players are treating that as their biggest bargaining chip. And it is. And obviously they would want to leverage that to get other things that are good for them. That's kind of the case where I think, and Joe talked about this last time, the idea that, oh, the fans have no seat at the table.

Right. And as Joe is saying, like, well, they shouldn't really because they're because they don't own a team and they're not in the union. So they don't actually have a voice in this discussion. And yet all of that revenue ultimately does come from the fans kind of indirectly. And we all wish that we could exert our will in some way. And that's kind of the case where certainly we feel, I think, on this podcast and all of the surveys I've seen, it seems like most fans feel like we don't want more expansion in the playoffs. We don't want more teams there. But there's no way that we're going to get what we want because just the way that negotiation works. And it's kind of like some of the other things that are seen as spectator unfriendly, the trends toward less contact, let's say, in the game. And

I know not everyone agrees that that is actually fan unfriendly, but let's just stipulate that it is for the purposes of this point. That's kind of a case where, well, the team's incentives are, of course, you want to get strikeouts because strikeouts are effective for pitchers. And then you obviously have players whose incentives are to hit for power because that's how they get paid or pitchers who get paid for strikeouts. And so teams are operating in a way that makes sense given their interests. Players are operating in a way that makes sense given their interests. And ultimately what you get is a very three true outcomes heavy style of baseball. And there's nothing that fans can really do about it and

that's where you hope that oh there's some party that steps in and says well you're all operating in a rational way but this is bad for baseball it's bad for everyone in the long term and thus we will step in and do something and you know MLB has made some noises about trying to do that and I should acknowledge that as well but there isn't always a party that is able or willing to step in and say let's just fix it because I'm doing things from the fans perspective yeah I mean I look I I clearly come at this from us from from a point of view of siding with the players but that's because I genuinely believe that the players' demands result in a better game of baseball for fans than the players' vision and the owners' vision.

As portrayed by these offers, the players' side is better for fans. I mean, what the owners want is to insulate themselves from losses and risk to a degree that it doesn't actually matter if they feel competing teams or not. They want profit. Now, the players also want money, but they've kind of tied their pursuit of money to either a level of performance over a period of time or, you know, having the money be dispersed to teams in ways that are distributed to teams based on a level of competition, a level of effort.

And that is just, it's fundamentally not what the owners want. They don't want a more competitive situation if it involves spending money. And that's why like the small, when we talked about all those CBT tax punishments, those are driven by small market teams saying, I want to, I do want to compete, quote unquote, but I don't want to do it with money, right? I don't want to have to fork over money to do it. I want to be able to compete while not spending money. And in this way, we all win by not spending.

And that's just, that's not the league I want. I want leagues where, I want these teams actually trying. And that's, you know, again, the owners really want to insulate themselves from, from that level of spending from that level of risk. And I think, I think what's, what's so frustrating for me is they've largely done it. They're essentially the, the players offer is more expensive for them, but in a structure that maintains that level of insulation for them by and large, and they still won't take it. And not only will they take it, I think you're right, Meg,

they're probably going to meet in the middle or not to these extremes of the current offers, and they won't even move there in a relatively timely way that would avoid infuriating their fan base at the risk of games and all of that stuff. That's what's so frustrating is that they, by accepting the players have, again, by and large, accepted the structure that is favorable for owners. They're seeking to balance it out a little bit on the money aspect of things. And the owners won't even move with any sort of haste to accept a structure that benefits them in a very tangible way. Well, and we see this in other places in their negotiation. Maybe this is a way for us to move on to some of the other aspects of the most recent proposal,

which is like 130 pages long. We won't get to everything here, but you see it even in places where there is obviously an economic component, but it isn't even as straightforwardly economic as like a rigorous tiered schedule with graduated tax rates and you need an accounting degree to understand. But, you know, when we think about how the two sides approach something like service time manipulation, the player's straightforward assumption and assertion is that when players are ready to play major league baseball they should be in the majors

as soon as they're ready as soon as they're one of the best 26 guys that you have they should be on the field and that obviously accrues to them economic benefits because they start their free agency clock sooner and they don't have what happened to chris bryant happened to them and the owners rather than say we agree that the best players should play when they're ready, they say, our solution to trying to get teams to field the next Chris Bryant when he is ready is more cost-controlled talent down the road, right? With no guarantee required, as an aside, that those players' clocks are not monkeyed with, which I think is like kind of a funny part of this, right? And also only if the

player in question meets very specific... Is literally an award winner. Right, right. Which benefits us greatly in their time of... Right. Is an award winner in their period of when we pay them the least. So it's just I'm not indifferent to the idea that there are teams that have different financial resources than other teams. But the idea that we need to constrain spending to this degree in order to let the Rays field a good baseball team is ludicrous. We've seen the counterfactual in action. Yeah. And just to quote Joe again, we don't even have to have him on the show. We can just quote him. Everyone subscribe to the Choshian Baseball Newsletter. But what

you were saying, Craig, about how the gaps just don't seem that huge. I mean, they are huge in some respects, but they're not huge in the sense that they wouldn't actually change the bottom line all that much. Joe writes, if the owners were to accept all of the players' numbers today, and I haven't double checked his math his math here But assuming he has this rice It would cost them perhaps $440 million in 2022 Almost certainly less Given the many free agents

Who have already signed Rising to perhaps $610 million in 2026 It would return overall player pay In 2022 to less than what it was in 2018 When it peaked at $4.55 billion and lock in a rate of rise over the next five years that will almost certainly lag the growth in revenues. The players' current proposals on financial issues are already a win for the owners. They're just carving up marginal dollars right now. The differences between the two sides max

out at about 4% of the league's projected revenue in 2022 and lower percentages than that as the deal wears on and league revenues rise. So I'm not saying that each side shouldn't have its best interests at heart, of course, but the fact that we could potentially lose games over what is ultimately a small amount and would still lead to a situation that is more favorable to the owners than it has been in the past. I think Joe said, you know, we're arguing over like 55-45 versus, you know, 57-43 or something in terms of revenue split potentially. I don't want to lose games over that. And, you know, I don't know if I'm even in the camp that says, oh, this would be a death blow to baseball if we were to lose games again this year. We did an episode last week about how that

hasn't historically been true, really, when it comes to work stoppages that have cost games in MLB and other sports. And the situation may be different now. But regardless, it's not good. It's not going to help baseball grow. It's not going to make people feel any better about baseball. And ultimately, there is something to that just when it translates to revenue. I mean, if you're the owners and you're thinking we want to preserve every possible edge here and not give an inch because this many million are at stake, well, how many millions are at stake long term when you're driving fans away, even if it's just for a year or two or three, but could

potentially be long term. And if there's just this stink surrounding baseball, what does that do to your product? What does that do to your revenues? I know a lot of those revenues are locked in at least for a while, but those big TV deals are not going to last forever as people keep cutting the cord and if fewer people are interested in baseball. And so I don't want to see that happen over things like this, really. And so I want it to be resolved somehow without saying, hey, players, just accept whatever because I want baseball to be played on March 31st. I want the other side to say, hey, we should maybe give a little here or there just so that we could actually have baseball played and everyone can feel good about it because everyone benefits

from a healthier sport that is actually operating as it's supposed to operate. Yeah. I mean, I don't think this will be a death blow even if games are missed, but there's no arguing that it would be a self-inflicted wound. And it's really just a debate of how serious that wound is. But I did want to touch on the service time aspect, because this has been something I focused on for a while now. And I think it's a really interesting thing because you can't legislate against bad faith. And that's essentially what the players union is trying to address and and i've had these arguments over the years where people say it's it's allowed by

the cba which is not true that's why it's called manipulation it's it's not allowed by the cba but it is a gray area in which teams are trafficking and they're allowed to push the envelope and you know i also want to reiterate that like the chris ruling was specific to Chris Bryant and very specifically said it was not ruling on like instances of this in the future. So it does not apply. It's not, it's still not legal, even after the Chris Bryant arbitration ruling. But when teams are willing to operate in those gray areas, you can't, you know, when someone is quote unquote ready for the majors is in some level in the eye of the beholder and requires a level of honesty of the people who make that decision. And that's the people who have proven that they will lie

about when someone is ready for the majors for their own benefit. So it's very difficult to pin that down if you're the PA. So that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of the league's offer in terms of trying to address this problem, but by the way, we're all trying to find the guy who did this, right? We're trying to address this problem. I mean, if the league wanted to, it could tell the the, the, the general managers in front offices, we're going to, to require you to act in good faith. And we're going to investigate this. And if we don't actually think, and this would, again, require the league, to be honest, but, you know, if we don't think you did, we're going to penalize you, right? Like, that's an option they have at basically any given time,

but they're not doing that. They're instead bartering this through a CBA in exchange for, you know, some other trade-off that'll get them more money. But regardless, they are saying we're making a move. We've incentivized teams to stop doing this in this very convoluted way that's not actually helpful and is actually beneficial to us. So we're doing that. this very convoluted way that's not actually helpful and is actually beneficial to us.

So we're doing that. But what they're doing in that process is saying, if teams do not pursue the incentives, there is no punishment. They are codifying that aspect of service time manipulation. And thus, in this future CBA, if this were adopted, it would be legal, right? It would just come with a trade-off that says you don't get a draft pick or two, assuming the player you promoted stays up all year and wins some awards for you, right? They don't offer things that would penalize themselves. They only penalize themselves or their organizations for spending money. But when it comes to something like service time manipulation, where they're gaining a benefit by taking these actions, they only offer a positive incentive to do it. And then in that process,

in so doing legalize it by four teams that don't pursue that option. And it's very crafty and it's very sneaky, but it is an, it is absolutely an entrenchment and expansion of power. And it's very crafty and it's very sneaky, but it is absolutely an entrenchment, an expansion of power. And that's what they do with so many of these offers. And it doesn't take a lot of math for a front office to sit down and decide, where is their breakeven point? What is an extra year of Chris Bryant worth to us versus the slot value of this pick? Which by the way, you still have to pay, right? It's not as if you

get out of paying money, but it's presumably a lot less. How do those balance out against one another? Well, I guess we'd rather take the extra year of this guy who can generate, you know, nine wins in a season and we'll just like eat the pick. That's fine. Right? Like that doesn't, that math isn't hard. Right. Do you guys ever daydream about what it would be like if MLB were well run? Yes. wouldn't it be nice if we would just be, well, doing our season preview series right now and not talking about surcharges, right? And like, sometimes these things come to a head and that's natural and that's bargaining and that's what you get and that's fine. But the fact that so much of this is just almost like comically intractable and there's so much falsehood that goes on. And I kind of think of it in a way it's like, you know, I don't know what I'm looking at as the paragon or the example that I'm envying exactly, because I don't think any earlier era of MLB has been better. There have been times that the sides were getting along a little bit better.

And maybe that was just because one side was acquiescing more, right? But I don't know that there's an earlier era of baseball. I mean, certainly there isn't an earlier era where like labor relations were just great, you know, and all the owners were wonderful people and never told a lie or anything. And, you know, you could look at other sports too. And these things are issues there too. And, you know, there they have weaker unions and the specifics are different, of course, but people complain about Roger Goodell just as much as they complain about Rob Manfred and people complain about Gary Bettman. I mean, there's almost no such thing as a popular commissioner who anyone likes,

maybe because people misunderstand the role of the commissioner, as we discussed last time. So it's almost like, you know, when people in the U.S. will look at Nordic countries, for example, and say, oh, everything works so well there, you know, they've figured out health care and they've figured out the work week and working conditions and all these things. And yeah, that's true. But also the conditions are so different and the population is so much more homogenous and so much smaller and the history is completely different. And is it really analogous? Could we actually have that in the U.S., what they have there?

And that's sort of how I feel about MLB. Like, is there a way that it actually could function smoothly so that we could all just enjoy the actual games? I don't know. Well, Ben, I'm going to use your Nordic analogy, though, because I think it applies to the U.S. and to baseball. I don't know. Let's make some rich people spend money and find out. But Ben, I don't want to put you on the spot, but it's an interesting group that we have here. So I took over as editor-in-chief of BP prior to the 2020 season. So I have not had like a normal season.

Meg, I don't remember the exact timing, but you have not had very many normal. I had, I arguably had one and I was still figuring out like how the phones work. You know, like you don't know how to run a website in your first year. Like you're still figuring it out. I took over in November of 2018. So I had one normal year.

Yeah. And you were learning. And Ben, you were also editor-in-chief of BP at a time when this was, well, there were certainly more complete seasons and fewer pandemics. That is true. And then I changed jobs and everything went to hell. Yeah. So I guess we know who to blame, number one.

But number two, I guess, I don't know, you didn't have to deal with a lot of this stuff at that time, right? I'm not trying to make you feel bad. It is a relevant point of maybe, you did go through some of, you did our job to some degree, but under fairly different circumstances in this, you know, narrow view. Right. Yeah. And, you know, you could argue that we should have been talking about these things more even then, even though they were not so much at the forefront, I suppose. It's kind of like, and, you know, whatever industry you're in or whatever you cover, I think the tone of that coverage has changed and the issues that get covered have changed.

I mean, at The Ringer, in addition to writing about baseball, I write about video games and Star Wars. And so one thing I'm interested in is this upcoming video game called Lego Skywalker Saga, right, which is just a Lego Star Wars version of all of the nine Skywalker movies. And I'm excited for that. It looks great. But you had this moment where the trailer finally came out after numerous delays earlier this year, and we got a few minutes to enjoy the trailer and everyone said, oh, wow, it's all the movies and so many characters and this looks incredible. And then Polygon dropped a report minutes and then you read about, oh, this was the product of extensive crunch. And for anyone who doesn't follow video games closely, crunch is basically the practice of working around the clock more or less in order to actually meet your ship date.

And this is something that's gone on throughout the history of video games, right? And it's only now that it has really become very visible and workers are trying to agitate and organize for better conditions. And there's talk of unionizing and some studios, primarily not in the US, have unionized. And so again, it's not new. This was going on always. And there are some people who say, hey, we're really passionate about making games. We want to work around the clock. This kind of comes into our minor league pay discussion, which maybe we can talk on briefly here. But other people will say, hey, look, it's psychologically and physically unhealthy to do this and their long term effects. And we should have a more humane workplace. And maybe it would be a more productive workplace as well if you had people working fewer hours or fewer days per week, which is something that's kind of catching on. But I'm just saying you can't ignore these things. They may have been ignored for quite a while, but they're there and they complicate how you consume these things. And so when Lego Star Wars, the Skywalker saga comes out, do I play it?

Do I enjoy it? Knowing the work that went into that. And that's a whole separate conversation, right? Well, do you boycott the game because you want to protest the working conditions? Well, if you do that, you are arguably actually hurting the developers who spent all that time doing that because their pay might be tied to how much the game sells or how well it's received. And so you are punishing the wrong people, essentially. And so it's thorny. I guess it's the old, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism kind of saying, right?

About to say, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I said, are you saying there's no ethical consumption? Yeah. Before we move on to the minor league lawsuit, because I don't want to give short shrift to this because I feel like they so often get short shrift. But can I just ask a question to the two of you? Was there like a lot of demand for draft and follow to come back no did i miss a memo are we keen on this again stop outsourcing your work you can't shrink the minor leagues and then bring back draft and follow you're just

outsourcing dev to colleges anyway so this minor league issue that was reported by Evan Drellick on Friday, I think, and this is not directly related to what we've been talking about with the CBA because, of course, the minor leaguers are not in the union and can't legally be in the union as it's currently constituted and may have to organize their own union in order to do some kind of collective action here. But the same law firm that is advising MLB in the lockout and the CBA talks is also advising MLB in this class action lawsuit that was filed by minor leaguers and is finally, like eight years later, scheduled to come to trial in June. And there were some pre-trial hearings late last week. And I'm quoting here from Evan Drellick, who is quoting Elise Bloom, who is a lawyer at this firm, Proskauer Rose. It is the players that obtain the greater benefit from the training opportunities that they are afforded than the clubs who actually just incur the cost of having to provide that training.

So this is about whether minor leaguers should be paid during spring training. The quote continues, during the training season, the players are not employees and would not be subject to either the Fair Labor Standards Act or any state minimum wage act. So MLB, via its law firm, is arguing here that they should not have to pay the players because, in fact, it is the players who are being paid through training and instruction and that that is actually costing the teams that they are not getting anything out of this, that the players are benefiting from their unpaid work. like $800 per hour, who argued that players in spring training get a value of $2,200 weekly from their teams based on what youth and amateur players pay for baseball training. So it was written to the court, this figure is an estimate of the cost plaintiffs would have had to incur had they intended a baseball prospecting camp instead of participating in the minor leagues.

So this is not even like the be paid in exposure argument i guess it's kind of like that but it's like no actually you're not getting paid is the best pay that you could expect and we are just hemorrhaging money here on our unpaid minor leaguers i just have to say i think you have to take this expert very seriously when they call it a baseball prospecting camp i know the i know lots of players who have gone to baseball prospecting camp they have to pack their own lunches it's a whole thing there's a version of this where like mlb is the funniest league in the world right it's almost it's like it sounds like satire it's like the most scroogey like comically miserly argument you

could possibly formulate but it's serious is it the unpaid players who are wrong no i mean like yes actually yeah it's so laughable on so many levels i mean first of all like the players are required to be there for spring training right like this isn't elective training that they are paying out of their pocket for. They do that in the off season, by the way, because you won't actually like, you won't subsidize their training. You don't give them year round stuff. You've told them that they're seasonal apprentices. They do go and pay people to train them in the off season in the hopes of getting better and providing you a massive roi on your return and they do it out of their pocket like i mean we've we've had

conversations but i don't know if i i was on effectively a while but i'm sure that you guys talked about the the what's it big league advance right like there are there have been lawsuits around players going and doing just that i have also heard from players that the training that they receive in spring training is multiple steps behind the time that they actually do pay for. At prospecting camp, right. At prospecting camp, right. The idea that they're actually receiving some $2,200 a week benefit. A week! That's $9,000 a month? A week? That's $9,000 a month?

And the idea that the clubs are only incurring cost here. They're not getting anything from training their own minor leaguers who they hope will develop and become major leaguers for them who are vastly underpaid under the current system relative to their production. Like, that's what the teams are doing this for. They're not just offering instruction to minor leaguers out of the goodness of their hearts. Clearly, they are getting something. They are benefiting enormously from this state of affairs. When I've worked at various places and have had to have on-the-job or job-related training, it happened when I was under employment and paid for it. And I understand that that's not the case. There are there are crappy workplaces that don't do that,

to be clear. But like that is that that should be the expectation that like if you're getting trained at your job, like you're and you're already the employee, like an employee, you're not job seeking, then that's on the employer to cover. And you get paid during that time. Well, and I think that all you have to do is talk to anyone who works in player development to understand this is understood on their part as work. This is understood on the part of teams as necessary work, both the work that players do on their own dime in the off season and the work that they do in spring training. And your, you know, the output in those moments affects your standing in the organization. It affects how you are viewed in terms of your, not only your actual skill and production on the

fields, but your makeup as a player, whether they want you as one of their guys in the organization, right? And it is not as if a player who decides, I'm not going to go to spring training, can then go seek employment from the 29 other teams, right? These are players whose rights are controlled for years, for years. So the idea that this isn't work is just it's just ludicrous and this is where and you know we talked about joe making the point of about how little money as a

as a part of overall league revenue you know the difference between the players association and the owners is when we talk about the cba negotiations the scale of money we are talking about here if i were them i would be so embarrassed that i was going to the mat to insult the future potential face of my franchise or just the guy who helps the face of my franchise get better over this kind of money it is just not a lot of money and the fact that this is a place where they will not say it is worth it to us like money. And the fact that this is a place where they will not say it is worth it to us, like just full stop. We think that workers should be paid for work and that that is like a principle we should uphold. But even if we don't care about that and we want to take the more cynical view, we acknowledge that this results in better baseball for us.

So it is worth it to pay this much money to make sure that these guys have a paycheck during spring training and then throughout the season, it's just embarrassing. And I know that they are embarrassed proof. If you're making this argument in court, you're clearly above embarrassment, but it's so little to ask. And the reward that they get is so fantastic that I just can't believe we're still doing this. Yeah. And Russell Carlton tried to calculate that cost in August at your website, Greg, and he found that even if you try to address every area, not just living conditions, but utilities and also food and nutrition and travel and training and all of these things that it would maybe come out to a few million per year per team which is not nothing but compared to these teams

revenues or what they'll spend on a middle reliever or something i mean it's just really just kind of a drop in the bucket that you would think they would probably make back and maybe more than make back in the long run if they do a better job of developing players and are able to get better players who are productive during those pre-arb years, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just not a lot compared to the overall amounts of money that are at stake here. Yeah, there's two things to that. One is that, as you said, they could just shift money around, right? And basically not even just look like horrible villains, right? Like you said, if it's a few million dollars, you could not sign a reliever. Most people aren't going to know that, right? Like, notice that

opportunity cost. But the other part of it is, and this goes to what Meg was speaking to, was like, you know, most players do show up earlier than required for spring training because it's the expectation. There's a power dynamic there. Even veterans, right? Zach Granke famously shows up late, or not even late. He shows up at the mandatory date, right? And that's like three weeks later than most players. Now you're talking about the power dynamic as applied to minor leaguers. And that gets to what Meg was saying. So I don't want to repeat that. But then you also factor in a lot of teams have taken to doing these like, you know, like these prospect, not I shouldn't say prospecting camps, mini camps, right? Like with special invitations for top prospects or guys that they're essentially tipping, you know, tipping their hand and saying,

you're one of the guys we really like, or we're expecting to get something out of this year, some combination of that, right? And if you as a player refuse that, that's a really tough position to put yourself in. But that is all at the cost of the player. And it's just like the power. I don't want people to overlook the dynamic at play. And I think, you know, Meg described it really well, but just it's not only spring training. It's stuff that happens before that too. A couple last things before we let you go, Craig. You wrote last week a fiery column, an impassioned column.

He did. Yes, exactly. Called Call It What It Is, which is about the way some of these issues are covered, particularly the CBA talks. And you have been outspoken and critical at times of other reporters framing of these issues on Twitter. And I think your argument, I mean, it's very much in line with other arguments that have gone on about media objectivity and how do you cover politics, for example, and the hand-wringing about do you say Donald Trump lied or do you say he made a false statement or what do you do when one side is insisting that the election was stolen and it wasn't? Do you just both sides that and say, well, this party is saying this and that

party is saying that? Is it incumbent on the reporter, the writer, to point out which side is actually adhering to reality right now? So you kind of made that point about baseball. have been covering the game for a long time don't seem to grasp these issues or seem to have a slant that is kind of uncoupled from the facts, whether you think it is about access and about trying to curry favor with one side or whether it's about ignorance or a lack of curiosity. I mean, you would think that there'd be some incentive to curry favor with ownership or with the league because you might have some sources there. On the other hand, you have to talk to players, right? And you'd think you might want to curry favor with players if you're currying favor with anyone. So why do you think this happens? of pick and you know end up going to various people i think there are a lot fewer owners and and only one commissioner in league office so i think that that there's a dynamic a power dynamic issue there at play too i i do think some of it's the curry favor i don't think that applies to

everybody uh i think some people i tweeted one today i'll i'll leave it on name but some people take just particularly dim-witted views of of this of stuff. They just buy it, I think. But other people, I think, pick and choose their spots. I think they do put out slanted statements because I wouldn't say it's a tit-for-tat agreement. There's not a spoken arrangement or written arrangement, but it's just kind of an understood part of the process of, you know, this will pay off for me down the line in future, you know, breaking news or details or scoops. And I think that's understandable to a degree. I think, you know, it's nice to us, it would be nice if we assumed everyone would righteously stand on their

beliefs or various, you know, ethical perspectives. But I think, you know, a lot of people do live in that gray area and are willing to make that change. And I'm not even really trying to ask them to change, but I guess I think that they should get taken to task when they do. And, you know, when you were giving the political examples, and I do think in even in those circles, there are some particularly thorny or complicated and nuanced things to untangle. And those can be really hard. The things that I'm mad about that I wrote that article about, I don't think are even that hard. You know, when the league provides a statement about the PA turning down a very blatant PR move to get a federal mediator involved and ends that statement with, you know, I'm going off memory, so let's say this is paraphrasing, but ends it with,

you know, we remain willing to come to the table and offer solutions. Literally, as they decided they're not going to come to the table with an offer that they had said they would, I think that's really disingenuous. And I don't think, you know, I saw reporters post that full statement from the league with the preface statement from the league, and they did not provide, look, they took a screenshot. They have 280 characters to provide some context for that screenshot. I don't have a problem with providing the league's statement to your readers, but I do have a problem with not putting it into kind of relief for them. That's part of your job. uh you know i i can have a tape recorder say what someone else said i i don't need you to do that for me the league can post their own pr statements they don't need to send it to you what you are there to do as a consumer you know for me as a consumer of media is to tell me you know whether what they what they said stands up or or put it into context of some sort. And so often, I think the League, and it's true of other

situations as you described, but these organizations rely on people to merely pass along the statement that they have intentionally crafted to be obfuscatory or deceiving in a specific way. And again, this goes back to Manfred's like technically true, but obviously false kind of things. They craft them to pass along that statement and it gives the media that do pass it along this same plausible deniability kind of thing where it's like, well, hey,

I'm just passing along what they said and that's not taking a point of view. And I guess what I'm saying is I And that's not taking a point of view. And I guess what I'm saying is I really think it is taking a point of view. And I think it's a disservice to your readers. Last thing, and I think Joe tweeted Aaron Sorkin last time. I will tweet Aaron Sorkin as well. This reminds me of the Sam Seaborn line about there are times when we are absolutely nowhere because players are supposed to be reporting for spring training right now.

And we don't really see a way to a deal, but we know that there will be a deal, right? The lockout will end at some point and there will be a new CBA. And so I wanted to ask you how you see that happening, particularly, I suppose, as it relates to some of the sticking points that we were talking about at the start of the episode. Presumably, one side is not going to cave completely. So how do you think this does get resolved and that we do get an agreement? And I don't mean what the agreement should be or what would be fair or right or just, but just what will the two sides eventually decide that they can live with and possibly both be unhappy about the way that parties often are at the end of a successful

negotiation? How do you think we will resolve these issues with minimum salary, with the CBT, et cetera? I think it's tough because it's hard for me to get out of what should be is probably just what the players, broadly speaking, have offered.'s I'm not going to say that but I I think what I've kind of tossed out there and this might be closer to what's fair than what I what might actually happen but it's kind of all I can think of is I think the players will drop their request or you know trade their request for arbitration after two years instead of three. I think that's a bargaining chip. I think their willingness to accept the rest of the structure of the prior CBA leads me to believe that they will accept that prior structure. So I think that will be a bargaining chip for

an expanded or a higher pool, bonus pool for those zero to three players. Something in the 40 to 60 million range seems reasonable to me. And then minimum salary, I'm going to guess something around $700 to $710,000. And I think a CBT of something in the range of $230 to $240 million, I'd like to say, I really would like to say no escalation of penalties, but I don't know. I don't know how hard owners are going to stick to that or not. It seems like they're just kind of making a play for it more than it actually makes sense to do, but maybe minimal escalations of penalties. I think that's broadly a deal that's good. I mean, I would like to see the players get more, but given the

circumstances, I think that's not a bad overall structure. And I don't think it'll be too, too different on the other side of it when we get there. And I won't ask you to predict the day that the lockout will be lifted or the CPA will be signed or anything. But I know that sometimes these things can go from looking hopeless to suddenly something cracks, right? And you get a deal done. That was a true thing Manfred said. That was a really true thing he said. It can go very quickly.

And again, they are both miles apart and in a lot of ways not that far apart. Right. And they are both very much incentivized to actually get a deal done, which I think was what led to a lot of the optimism that we would get a new CBA by December 1st, or at least that we would not get a lockout that lasted past opening day or into the spring training schedule. I think people figured out, hey, look, yeah, right. I kind of felt that way too, just going with the general sentiment of people who report on these issues, which seemed to be, hey, this is resolvable.

And I think both sides know that there's so much at stake here and the pandemic, etc., etc. They can't do this and there isn't really a reason to. And now they are on the verge of doing that. So I can only hope that we will just wake up one of these days and suddenly there will be more movement and things will go from looking hopeless to hopeful. I just don't know exactly when that will happen or how fast it will happen, but it has to happen soon if it's going to happen in time for there to be a season that starts on time. This is just a thing I stumbled across when I was looking at the ESPN, the new ESPN deal that's going to take place this year, assuming there are games for broadcast stuff. I was looking at a Forbes article by Maury Brown, and there's a note in there that said, so ESPN, just for context, has the rights to an expanded playoff wildcard round as they did in 2020 season. And they secured the rights that

if expanded playoffs does come to fruition, they will have the rights to that. Now, in this column from Maury Brown it says should the sides not reach a deal for expanded teams and it stays in the current wildcard format ESPN will continue to exclusively televise one of the two MLB wildcard games and will receive eight additional exclusive regular season game telecasts each year. So that that's not I was looking for a dollar value of that round but there is a translation of eight games for the wildcard round. And I do wonder if that can't translate into like how much, how many games they're willing to miss in pursuit of that round. If that makes any sense.

Yeah. I think it's a little fanciful. I don't think it's the case, but it was a little insight into where they value the round versus regular season games. And we are in some level talking about how many games we might end up missing. Well, I feel like I always end these things by saying on that note, who knows, maybe next time we won't talk about bargaining and the CBA and the standstill. Maybe there will not be a standstill next time. We can hope. Maybe there will be a deal and we can talk about the slow mental collapse I anticipate when I have to confront just how much work I'm going to have to do between now and opening day. It is a weird

thing that my reward for there not being a season is going to be the busiest six-week stretch of my entire tenure at VanGrafts. I guess that is the proverbial good problem to have or at least the better problem than the current problem so yeah there will be lots to discuss sometime soon hopefully in the meantime you can read craig's work and everyone's wonderful work at baseball prospectus you can listen to him on the five and Dive podcast at BP. You can follow him on Twitter at CDGoldstein, where you can have a hand in determining his display name, which,

as we speak, is currently Craig, C-R-E-G-G, although that may have changed by the time people hear this. Thank you, Craig. Thank you for having me, guys. It was a pleasure. Well, when Dylan Higgins sent me today's edited episode, he said, sorry, I wasn't able to quite get it done before the owners did another awful thing. Really thought I might be able to post this one before there was some additional negative news. But no, not quite. ESPN's Jeff Passan reported on Monday evening, Major League Baseball asked for the ability to eliminate hundreds of minor league playing jobs in its latest labor proposal. Sources told ESPN the

league would not be allowed to implement the plan until after 2022. Currently, Jeff continued, teams can roster 180 domestic minor league players. The league is seeking the ability for the commissioner's office to reduce it to below 150. Evidently, two teams currently have fewer than 150, while five teams have more than 180. So this is just more downsizing of the minors. We have discussed that topic previously, but it seems like MLB is not done. So not only are they balking at paying minor leaguers for spring training, but they want fewer minor leaguers to have to pay in the first place. So Craig Goldstein just tweeted, I recorded an episode of Effectively Wild with Meg Rowley and Ben Lindbergh, and it was, you know, pretty

depressing all told. It turns out not really depressing enough for reality, though. He also tweeted, MLB, football is over. It's our time to shine. And then in brackets, head rotates 360 degrees as it vomits out the worst bile-soaked news possible every day for a full week. You know, it's interesting. In the absence of good news or any news at all, really,

in terms of transactions or actual games, negative news really rises to the top. And as Meg tweeted in response to Jeff's report, you have to be really sure you know who is good to keep doing this crap, and I think most player dev folks would tell you the error bars lend themselves to bigger rosters and systems, not smaller ones. This all just stinks. Today's players are so, so good. They don't all turn into big leaguers, let alone all-stars, but focusing on the margins rather than celebrating the sport is such a missed opportunity. And of course, I don't know whether the Players Association

is in the position to be the advocates for minor leaguers in these negotiations. They really haven't been before. So it's just more of what we were talking about today. And I'll end this addendum with a quote that Alec Lewis of The Athletic just resurfaced, something Dayton Moore, the Royals GM, said in 2020. Understand this, the minor league players, the players you'll never know about, the players that never get out of rookie ball or high A, those players have as much impact on the growth of our game as 10-year or 15-year veteran players. They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as those individuals who played for a long time because those individuals

go back into their communities and teach the game, work in academies, are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches, and pro ball. They're growing the game constantly because they're passionate about it. So we felt it was really, really important not to release one minor league player during this time, a time we needed to stand behind them. Right now, it seems like Rob Manfred is more interested in trimming payrolls and trimming rosters than growing the game. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Thank you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. We will probably get to some emails later this week. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. You can browse the Effectively Wild subreddit at

r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. Thanks to all of you for pairing with us during an off-season with very little baseball content currently and a lockout to boot, we are doing our best to inform and entertain you and each other for that matter. And we thank you for

listening along and we look forward to better days ahead. Maybe one of those days will be later this week when we will talk to you in exchange for thrills. I surface cause withdrawal kills. I can smell fresh blood from miles away. I can't be locked up this way. I can't be locked up this way. I can't be locked up like this. Oh, no, I can't be locked up this way.