Ongoing MLB Negotitations

In completely non-shocking news, there’s a storm brewing between the MLB and the MLBPA on the negotiations of the partial season. A few days ago, the first proposal went from the MLB Owners over to MLBPA - and as you can imagine in the first round of any large negotiation, was no where near meeting the expectations of the player’s union. Here is Jeff Passan’s tweet providing an overview of the proposal:

As you can imagine, the MLB Players’ Association announced that they planned to reject it and found it “disappointing”. The MLBPA has requested financial data to provide back-up to the MLB’s claims in regards to revenue loss without fans, which reportedly they have been denied access to.

On a side note, there is discussion of a 14 team play-offs and the owners have proposed a higher share of play off earnings.

There was already a storm brewing between the MLB and union, as salaries have not kept pace with the revenue growth within the MLB. This has inevitably only added fuel the fire.

My Opinion:

I have always understood that baseball is a business. It’s something that I feel gets lost on a lot of people. I understand both sides of most business situations and why both sides are upset or make the decisions they do. But I will be honest, the MLB has continued to disappoint me. It’s easy to just blame the commissioner, but these proposals were voted on and approved by the owners prior to going into action.

To be honest, I’m actually not really reacting to these proposed salaries. It’s been the owners’ recent trend. They’ve made such disheartening decisions: the shortening of the draft, the elimination of minor league teams, hell even the fact that they lobbied congress to continue paying minor league players less than minimum wage.

All of it just seems so short sighted. Revenues may be growing through TV contracts, but baseball as a whole is a dying sport. They’re not attracting young fans, which is why you’ve seen so many radical changes proposed under Manfred.

I guess, like the MLBPA, I’m just disappointed.