Rob Manfred trying to iron out minor league discord, issues with union

SAN DIEGO -- The 2019 winter meetings have come and gone. For the first time in a couple of years, the echo of baseball's annual gathering is not one of silence. This year stuff happened, and not just in terms of transactions.

We had some those of course, with the top three free agents in this year's marketplace all coming off the board. However, on the non-transaction front, there were signs of a gathering storm as baseball enters a new decade. Not that it was all bad news, but there might be some bumpy months and years ahead as the rate of change in the industry begins to accelerate. People who love the planet's best game fret over what it might look like for future generations. Those are gaudy words, to be sure, but they are not exaggerations -- such chatter was in the air.

After a few days at the southern tip of California, here are the lingering thoughts I have about the meetings.

1. There is a schism in professional baseball.

Look, it's not like I didn't know that Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball were different entities. They are, in essence, competing associations of teams, though that easy classification is muddied because some big league clubs own affiliates. Still, I had never gotten such a stark sense of just how separate these two entities actually are as I did this week.

The two sides are ticked off at each other. You could hear it in the furor of Pat O'Conner when MiLB's president and CEO delivered his annual opening address to kick off the minor league side of the winter meetings. You could hear it in the irritation and the pointed responses during Rob Manfred's news conference a couple of days later. Neither side likes each other much right now. And what's more, neither side seems to trust the other. That is not good.

At root of the discord is the reported proposal by MLB that would, among other things, kill 42 minor league teams. But from the standpoint of Manfred, the problem is that the details of the notion, floated during one of three negotiating sessions between the sides thus far, were made public despite assurances of confidentiality. The fires were further fanned when O'Conner went to Washington, D.C., in a pretty successful effort to lobby for congressional support. And thus an air of distrust was born.

Understandably, O'Conner, the owners of minor league teams and the cities that they represent see all of this as an existential threat. The effects are already being felt. Construction projects are being delayed, marketing agreements have fallen into limbo and so on, all from the mere notion of a contraction.

The current Professional Baseball Agreement expires on Sept. 15, so both sides are on the clock. There will be changes, and the most likely result is that we land somewhere in the middle between Manfred's supposed desire for sweeping change and O'Conner's desire for more or less the status quo.

Will the minors contract by 42 teams or any number approaching that? My guess is no, they won't, but we can't take that for granted. Ultimately, the congressional support that MiLB seems to wield means that the ever-present, seldom-discussed antitrust exemption that MLB has enjoyed for nearly a century will keep the negotiations from getting to the point of actually cutting teams. (The "Dream League" scenario floated to compensate for the possible void opened by contracted teams is a non-starter.) Baseball doesn't want to mess with that exemption, which has been lorded over them several times over the decades.

Still, change is coming. At the very least, I'd be shocked if we don't see a significant realignment of the minor leagues. That should be a good thing; it has never really been clear to me how we ended up with just two Triple-A leagues, for example. But I also think we'll see some kind of controls in place to make sure any slacking MiLB owners who aren't keeping their facilities up to snuff have to pull their weight. The changes don't have to be apocalyptic.

That said, the public rhetoric between the two sides needs to calm down sooner than later. Right now, it's being portrayed as an "us versus them" showdown. Sorry folks. You might all have your own interests to watch out for, but that's not what this is. This is about all of us -- anyone who loves baseball. The majors might dominate the industry in terms of national eyeballs, top-line revenue and talent on the field. But the minors set the stage for all of it, serving as an essential conduit to professional baseball across huge swaths of America where ready access to a big league team does not exist. These sides have to get this right, and Sept. 15 is not that far away.

2. The enmity between the majors and minors was much more prevalent on the minor league side of the meetings, held about eight-tenths of a mile down the road from where the MLB meetings took place. On the MLB side, other than the several questions Manfred fielded about the contraction proposal during his news conference, it was mostly business as usual. And because of the signings of Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon for a combined total value of more than $800 million, the buzz about looming problems between MLB and the players' association was pretty muted, at least in comparison to last year.

Along those lines, MLB and the MLBPA produced a joint agreement on changes to the drug-testing policies that adds opioids to the program, focuses more on treatment rather than punishment, and eliminates the penalties for marijuana use. These changes have been and should be applauded, and it's a good sign the sides were able to pull this off in a seamless fashion.

However, there is a lot of work to be done before we can rest easy in advance of the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement on Dec. 1, 2021. Manfred continues to tout what he sees as a robust marketplace in terms of free agency, while the players continue to make noise about wanting to make changes that get more players into free agency sooner. Still, in essence, this will boil down to what the two sides see as a fair split of baseball's exploding revenue. The final solution could take on any number of forms, and it doesn't feel like we are seeing many concrete ideas of what form that might take.

There also is the lingering issue of rules changes that have been championed by Manfred and his office. When asked about some of those changes -- the three-batter minimum, an increase in the minimum number of days a pitcher can be on the injured list, how many pitchers a club can have its roster at once -- Manfred said that he "expects them to be operational in 2020." But that's not quite declaring them as done deals, even though owners have signed off on them and MLB already has reached an agreement with the players about its right to implement said changes.

There is a reason Manfred still is couching his words about these things, and it's likely related to the MLBPA. The combined statement put out regarding the drug program? It's probable that MLB would like to do something similar with the rule changes, even though everyone pretty much already assumes that the changes will take place whether the players want them to or not.

Compared to discussions about the fundamental structure of baseball's economic model, the rules stuff is small potatoes. So this is another layer of discord that we should be able to avoid. In the meantime, even though the rule changes are being reported and discussed as a done deal, we have yet to see that news release actually come out.

3. Well, the report about the performance of the ball was unsatisfying in that there still are so many questions remaining. My hope was that the researchers working on the problem would have been able to offer concrete solutions for how to better regulate the way the ball plays, within a reasonable range of variation. Apparently, we're just not there yet. And the message that was repeatedly floated during the Q&A session about the report -- that we have to accept the variability -- is not going to fly.

Fortunately, it also was made clear that more work is to be done, and so we go on. For now, we need to control what we can control, which is how balls are rubbed up before games and how they are stored. The recommendation to implement a better tracking system for the balls used in games, presumably so that specific balls can be matched to specific results, is a no-brainer.

Eventually, we've got to get to the point where we can have an ironclad specification on the expected drag coefficient of each ball. We have to get to the point where we know that all-or-nothing approaches aren't so obviously the most efficient path to run scoring. Until we do, given what teams and players have come to understand about the game right now, baseball will remain out of balance.

4. While the top of the free-agent market dominated the winter meetings, the trade market remained mostly quiet, save for the Chicago White Sox's acquisition of Texas Rangers powerhouse Nomar Mazara in exchange for the sublimely named outfield prospect Steele Walker, along with the San Francisco Giants' deal to bring in Zack Cozart in a salary dump. Expect that to change soon.