Every baseball arbitration decision has a winner and a loser, and when agents succeed on behalf of players, they rightly feel good about the arguments they designed and executed, and they'll do their share of humble-bragging. So will general managers, when they win.
When former union leaders Don Fehr and Gene Orza kicked the owners' asses in court renderings in the spring of 1995, effectively winning that particular labor war, there might have been handshakes or high-fives or champagne, or maybe all of the above. Whatever form the revelry took, it was well-earned.
That's all part of the ongoing business relationship between the players and owners, which is why the union overreaction to a report Friday seems so strange. It has been known for years within the industry that a management championship belt has been awarded to the team deemed most efficient in arbitration, but after The Athletic reported that detail Friday, union chief Tony Clark was moved to issue a statement:
"That clubs make sport of trying to suppress salaries in a process designed to produce fair settlements shows a blatant lack of respect for our players, the game, and the arbitration process itself."
It's true, management tries to suppress salaries in arbitration. It's also true that the union and the player agents work to escalate salaries in arbitration. Each side has its task, its process and preparation. Somebody wins. Somebody loses.
Within that context of business competition, Clark's statement came off like a pitcher whining about a bat flip following a home run. The statement, paraphrased: They act too happy when they win.
Clark's words did not reflect the view of some agents who live this stuff in the trenches. "Noise," one said. "I'm not worrying about that."
"Who gives a s---?" another asked rhetorically. "Do better the next time."
The far more pressing matter for the union is the continued erosion of player salaries, outlined in an Associated Press report Friday. Paul Hembekides, a researcher for ESPN and the show Get Up, compiled this assessment of total player salaries:
For more than a decade, there had been steady growth in players' salaries, and now, in the aftermath of the 2016 collective bargaining agreement, there have been back-to-back years of decline.
The fourfold increase in spring contract extensions negotiated in the Feb. 10-March 31 window -- the vast majority of them seemingly team-friendly -- will probably exacerbate that salary slowdown in the immediate future. Star-level players, including pitchers Aaron Nola, Luis Severino and Blake Snell, seized guaranteed money rather than waiting for free agency and surrendered their best chance to push the collective salaries upward. In a lot of cases, the players' contract extensions seemed like a no-confidence vote in the current situation, and this just perpetuates the loss of financial ground.
What the players need now is a strong set of ideas about how to counterattack, within the constant push-pull between the union and management. How should the issue of tanking be addressed to compel budget-slashing (and win-slashing) teams to spend more money? How can service-time manipulation be legislated out of the game?
If teams aren't going to confidently invest in players when they are older, then what can be done to augment early-career pay -- minimum salary, and perhaps less service time required to reach arbitration and/or free agency?
The conversation about the arbitration belt and Clark's statement might be used as a rallying cry, but it's a momentary distraction, like a brushback pitch in response to a bat flip. Ultimately, that sort of thing has no foundational value, particularly when a lot of folks on the union side don't believe in it.
Marvin Miller, Don Fehr and Gene Orza thrived not because they called The New York Times, but because they won through the law and their inherent leverage as representatives of highly skilled brethren. The players' bedrock can be reached only through imaginative negotiation, with the union leaders and MLB labor lawyers sitting down in the same room to discuss their differences and aims, exploring concepts and ideas, haggling over details.
Every day that this doesn't happen is a missed opportunity to correct the mistakes of the 2016 collective bargaining agreement and get the players' salaries moving in the right direction again.
News from around the major leagues
• Ronald Acuna Jr. was among the front-runners to be the NL Rookie of the Year at the time he hurt his knee last season, but when he came back, he was a very different player en route to winning the award, at least in the eyes of teammate Freddie Freeman.
"He's taking walks," Freeman said Saturday. "That's the biggest thing. He wants to hit, he wants to swing -- I think he gets a little upset when he walks. But once he learned to take his walks in the second half, he became a whole different player.
"That's what's going to put him in the Mike Trout level, in my opinion."
Freeman went through a similar evolution in his career, as opposing pitchers recognized him as a very dangerous hitter and coaxed him to swing at stuff outside the strike zone.
"That's the whole key," Freeman said. "Because they're not going to give in, in the big leagues. With him being 21 years old, they're going to see if he's going to chase, see if he gets frustrated. I still get frustrated. I want to hit too.
"But when you find yourself starting to swing (at pitches outside the zone), that's when you have to reel it back in. If he's going to take his walks, like he did on Opening Day" -- when Acuna drew two walks -- "this league will start to see Ronald Acuna become one of the greatest players.
"I don't know what his ceiling is yet. Every single day, he does something that just wows you."
• When the Mariners were in Japan, Seattle manager Scott Servais encouraged his players to explore Tokyo, to see the sights and learn something about the beautiful and enormous city. Each day, he would have one of his younger players report to the team about an experience.
Then Servais would turn to Ichiro, native of Japan, for a review, and Servais would ask: Is that accurate or is that B.S.?
Sometimes Ichiro would say, "That's true." And sometimes Ichiro would say, "That's [B.S.]"
During one of these seminars, Servais turned to pitcher Yusei Kikuchi, another product of Japan, to assess the accuracy of the report in question.
"That's true," Kikuchi said.
Then Servais turned to Ichiro. "That's [B.S.]" Ichiro replied.
Servais reviewed the apparent quandary for the roomful of players: The two players from Japan disagreed on whether the travel log in question was accurate.
Kikuchi had grown up idolizing Ichiro, and as it turned out, his first game in the majors would be Ichiro's last game.
Servais looked at Kikuchi again, and the pitcher changed his answer, with good humor: "That's B.S."
Kikuchi was never going to disagree with Ichiro.
• In describing his medical history, Braves reliever Jonny Venters says that he has had "3½ Tommy John surgeries." That's the best way for him to explain the last procedure, executed by Dr. David Altchek. After three traditional Tommy John elbow surgeries, the area where the procedures had been done was compromised to the degree that when Venters tore the ligament and flexor tendon off the bone, Altchek had to find a different way to hold the whole thing together. As he explained to Venters, he roughed up bone to make it bleed and create new surfacing, then used a piece of titanium to help tie it all down, and Venters now feels great.
He does not have the turbo sinker he used to throw, relying more on variety than pure stuff. When the Phillies signed Bryce Harper, Venters assumed that his summer would probably be filled with lefty vs. lefty matchups against the slugger, so he reviewed video of the two of them facing each other in the past, to build a plan on how to pitch to Harper. This is what Venters has usually done when pitching against Philadelphia.
"It felt like I faced Ryan Howard and Chase Utley every game when we faced the Phillies," Venters said.
• Dee Gordon's fiancé had asked him when he was going to issue some words on social media about his longtime teammate and friend Ichiro, and these conversations were the genesis of his decision to take a full-page ad in the Seattle Times to thank the Mariners icon. He could have offered a first-person article to some outlet, but instead, he paid a lot of money for that space to detail his admiration for the retired star -- and wrote the words himself, at 4 a.m. on one of the days he was fighting jet lag from the Mariners' trip to Japan.
• The Mariners' staff has been impressed by how Domingo Santana has embraced and used analytics in his first year with the team, and the outfielder is off to a good start, consistently taking the ball to the opposite field.
• One head of baseball operations believes that MLB hitters are not far removed from the day when each will have his own swing coach, like in golf. But there is a functional problem in this arrangement, in the eyes of one AL staffer: The personal coaches are not in the dugouts and clubhouses when the players are coping with struggles, from at-bat to at-bat and game to game. The practical impact of this, the staffer believes, is that a frustrated player might tend to blame the team coaches who are on site, while the suggestions and thoughts of the personal coaches can always have the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.
That dynamic remains a work in progress.