Editor's note: From rising strikeout totals and unwritten rules debates to connecting with a new generation of fans and a looming labor battle, baseball is at a crossroads. As MLB faces these challenges, we are embarking on a season-long look at The State of Baseball, examining the storylines that will determine how the game looks in 2021 and far beyond.
ASK THOSE IN positions of power around Major League Baseball how they would characterize the state of labor relations in the sport, and the answers connote chaos.
"Dysfunctional."
"Unfortunate."
"Complicated."
"Tense."
"Unnecessary."
And yet for all of the pessimism, the invocation of doomsday rhetoric that portends the sort of labor strife that for decades cleaved the sport, there is a counterintuitive consensus beginning to form: that despite the issues between MLB and the MLB Players Association, the mud-slinging and posturing and failed negotiations, a work stoppage that ends with lost games feels less and less likely.
This is not to discount the possibility of one. The animus between players and the league is real, the relationship fractured, the communication noxious -- and the state of affairs fragile, with the specter of a $500 million grievance filed by the union hanging over the proceedings. Even so, conversations in recent weeks with dozens of people around the game -- officials with MLB and the MLBPA, players, owners, high-ranking team executives and other power brokers -- offered ESPN a portrait of a sport willing to bend itself past the point of comfort but not to one of brokenness.
"If the state of labor in baseball is only judged by is there or is there not a work stoppage that causes games to be missed, I think this will have a good ending," one longtime official said. "I don't think any baseball games in 2022 are going to be missed."
Nearly everyone with whom ESPN spoke -- all of whom requested anonymity to discuss negotiations the parties have pledged to keep behind closed doors -- agreed with the official's sentiment. As frustrated as they are with a relationship that has deteriorated since the sides agreed to a five-year deal in 2016, the expiration of the agreement on Dec. 1 is not causing alarm or panic even with the short window to shape the sport's future.
The rosiness is as much a product of what the sides have to lose as what they hope to gain. It's not just 26 years without a work stoppage, the longest period of labor peace since the formation of the MLBPA and a stretch longer than the NFL, NBA and NHL. Nor the realization, seen in the early discussions that sources told ESPN have been ongoing, that a prospective collective bargaining agreement will not constitute some grand reimagining of the sport's economic structure -- even if many believe one would behoove the game.
Mostly, as is usually the case in labor talks, it's a simple matter of dollars and sense. In 1994, when the owners' insistence on a salary cap prompted players to strike and forced the cancellation of the World Series, the league estimated industrywide revenues of around $1.7 billion. The teams' losses were in the hundreds of millions. Should 2022 revenues rebound to pre-COVID-19 levels, MLB would be an $11 billion-a-year business, and teams would stand to bleed billions with a similar stoppage. Players would miss out on around $1.5 billion. Mutual assured destruction might be what saves baseball from a labor war.
"It's not as dire as I think the public perception is," another official said. "I'm a big believer that the principles of liking or trusting each other are not ultimately as important as the fundamentals, which is that there's objectively no reason we should have labor conflict. It might be a painful process of getting there, but I think ultimately that will win out."
Complications do exist -- ones that threaten to derail progress and prompt the owners to lock the players out. Divergent priorities between the sides are baked into the relationship, too. Owners, whose tenures are best measured in decades, can afford emphasizing the long view more easily than players, whose average career length has dipped to fewer than four years. A majority of players won't be in the game when the new deal expires.
Still, for the inherent divide, past labor conflict has germinated from disagreement over seemingly untenable issues, whether the salary cap in 1994 or free-agent compensation in 1981. As of yet, sources say, no such red-line issues have presented themselves, though with five months to go until the expiration of the basic agreement -- and four more months from then before 2022 regular-season games begin -- plenty of time exists for one to materialize.
At the heart of the talks are two entities trying to redefine themselves. The union, stung by an economic sea change that has cut into player salaries in recent years, wants to establish itself again as a powerhouse that for decades was considered the most successful union in America. MLB, fearful of its inability to capture the zeitgeist, sees an overhaul of its on-field product as imperative to relevance in the era of short attention spans.
The parties, cognizant of the post-strike reverberations that could have sunk the sport in 1995, appreciate that a labor stoppage would imperil both missions. The question that will remain from now until the ink dries on an agreement is whether that's enough to stop one.
OF ALL THE embarrassing moments in baseball's three-month-long effort to start its season in the teeth of the pandemic last season, none illustrated the chasm between the league and the players quite like the day Rob Manfred and Tony Clark couldn't agree whether they'd reached an agreement.
It was June 17. MLB had postponed its season three months earlier as the coronavirus shuttered the sports world. The league's first proposal to restart the season, on May 26, offered an 82-game season with massive pay cuts. The union countered five days later with a 114-game schedule at full salaries. Back and forth they went, talking not with one another but past each other. The previous week had been particularly ugly. On June 10, Manfred, the commissioner since 2014, guaranteed there would be a season. Five days later, he said he was "not confident" there would be one. The day after that, he flew to Arizona to meet with Clark, the union executive director since 2013, in hopes of forging a deal.
Manfred left the meeting believing he and Clark had reached a framework for a season. Clark did not concur. And after a third round of rejected proposals and counterproposals, of sniping and accusations of negotiating in bad faith, Manfred on June 22 unilaterally imposed a 60-game season.
The power to do so came from the agreement between the sides struck March 23. Arguments over the language of that deal consumed the coming months and soiled what was supposed to be baseball's triumphant return. Advisors to then-President Donald Trump, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, discussed with officials from the league and representatives on the players' side the source of the rift at the president's behest, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations.
"The only thing more dysfunctional than this place," a White House official told ESPN in the midst of the failed talks, "is baseball."
The detritus of last year is strewn about baseball's landscape today. Union leadership regards the contretemps as a victory. It refused to accept the pay cuts MLB offered. It adhered by the longtime union slogan: a day's work for a day's pay. After years of rolling over in labor talks, the MLBPA fought. It was an unnecessary fight, some players and powerful agents believe, that cost the rank and file. Had the union approached negotiations with less of an antagonistic posture, perhaps the season could have been longer, the cuts tolerable, the overall pot of money for players larger than what they wound up receiving in a 60-game season. Union leaders disagree, saying MLB intended all along to play only 60, the basis for the grievance the MLBPA filed this year seeking half a billion dollars for lost wages. An arbitrator will determine the validity of that premise.
"All of us took a torch to the industry last year at this time," one player involved in the negotiations said. "We all played a hand in it. We didn't come up with a deal with the whole world watching."
It happened again this spring. MLB wanted to postpone the regular season by a month, hopeful the extra time would allow for the vaccination of players and personnel. The league offered 162 games' pay for 154 games played and the designated hitter in the National League -- and asked for expanded playoffs in return. The players didn't want to delay the season. They didn't see much benefit in a new DH rule months after free agency started. And they weren't going to give away a bargaining chip like more postseason. The union rejected MLB's entreaties. It didn't counter an offer it found insulting. Baseball started on time. Widespread vaccination happened in April. Today teams are playing in front of full stadiums. Only 10 teams will make the postseason this fall.
"I have to believe that the experience we had trying to work together in 2020 has at least given us a better perspective on each other's priorities, on how we work, how we talk," another veteran player representative said. "It's like going on a first date. You go on one. And then a second date. It feels like this CBA is the third date. We can get rid of the small talk. What do we want? What do we need? Is this gonna work?"
It's an optimistic perspective, certainly, but the notion that pandemic negotiations could be even trickier than a basic agreement, officials said, has some merit. In collective bargaining, there is an outline in place -- a document that runs hundreds of pages already and serves as the sport's constitution. From last March to early this year especially, there was no road map. Everyone was losing money. Nerves were frayed. Today, with the country recovering -- with normalcy on the horizon -- there are fewer excuses for discord.
"We need to talk to each other," the first player said. "When's the last time we had a reasonable dialogue? I'm not saying anyone's an angel and anyone is at fault. The product is what we all have in common. That's the game. What we put out there."
WHAT'S OUT THERE, these days, is in conflict almost as much the league and the union. There is the wondrous Shohei Ohtani, doing something baseball hasn't seen in a century. And then there is a league that has 2,200 more strikeouts than hits. There is the indomitable Jacob deGrom, turning in a pitching season so brilliant it sounds fictitious. And then there is the average time for a nine-inning game: 3 hours, 8 minutes, longer than it's ever been. There are the Three Juniors -- Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Ronald Acuña Jr. -- all appointment television. And then there is a sport that has gotten so good at solving problems it created an entirely new one.
The individuals playing baseball are objectively better than they've ever been. The game itself is not. The incongruity of that is palpable. It angers many inside baseball, who don't like the game they're watching -- a festival of strikeouts, walks and home runs, a font of knuckleheaded baserunning, a sport languid enough for a sloth to offer its endorsement -- but also don't believe it's beyond repair.
It's one of the things that makes the collective bargaining agreement so vital. New CBAs allow sports to assess and prioritize and create. They encourage the players and league not to be adversaries but partners in puppeteering, writing rules that steer the game in a direction upon which they agree. It might be problematic, then, when the union seemingly enters these negotiations focused on one thing (economics) and the league something different (on-field product).
Here's the thing: Money and the game are inextricably linked. Almost everything that has something to do with money has to do with the game, and almost everything that has to do with the game has something to do with money. And the greatest barrier to an agreement is an imbalance between the two, because it's also true that the owners very much care about economics and the players very much care about the on-field product.
It's in this sweet spot that policy wins the day, and the specifics of what the league and union have discussed is lock-and-key stuff, not just because it's too early to know what's real and what's a red herring but because deep down both sides want to believe that the other does not leak information -- that whatever the ugliness of the past, this time around they really do need to be able to trust one another.
But the broad strokes that sources revealed are worth discussing because some iteration of them is coming, and when they do, the game will change.
Nothing typifies the intersection of on-field activity and money as well as the influx of young talent in the game. It is not a chicken-and-egg situation, either. There is better young talent in baseball today because organizations know more about the game than they ever have thanks to analytics, and that knowledge has aided in, among other areas, the rapid development of young players. Having a rich base of young talent is essential because of another thing analytics taught front offices: free agency offers the worst return on investment in baseball.
Is it obvious why salaries have plummeted? It's not just the pandemic. It started a decade ago, and it wasn't fixed in the 2016 negotiations: the aging veteran free agent is practically an anachronism. He has been replaced by the young player. And if that's how teams have decided to conduct business, there is little, under this system, the union can do to change that. So the most basic response is: Pay younger players more. And that, sources said, is exactly what the union wants to do. Whether it's a higher minimum, salary arbitration after two years or free agency after five, getting a bigger cut of the pie to younger players is a goal. It would be great to fix service-time manipulation as well, but the limitations of a system based on how long a player has been in the big leagues make it a far tougher solve.
What's clear, upon a not-even-that-close examination, is that the real puppeteers of the game are the front offices that have almost perfected the concept of efficiency. Baseball's knowledge base runs deep, and the lion's share of that knowledge flows through the front office. They are why older free agents don't typically get jobs, and they're why shifts exist, and they're why pitchers are taught to throw with lots of spin, and they're why hitters swing with uppercuts, and you can go on ad infinitum. The unintended consequence of their excellence in efficiency is a mechanized version of the sport. It's like the Best and the Brightest met baseball and the game forgot what it was.
It's why MLB rolled out a suite of rules experiments across the minor leagues this season: to figure out if any of them might help solve the action problem in the big leagues. Baseball doesn't necessarily have to collectively bargain on-field changes, but doing so is an exercise in good faith -- an ode to partnership. MLB will fight against raising the competitive-balance tax as high as the union wants, and it will push for an international draft that further consolidates its power in the amateur space, and it will do so at the behest of the consortium of billionaires who laughably cried poor during the pandemic. Misguided tends to be the owners' jam.
It's how the game ends up with utterly backward incentives, like the one where losing is profitable and sets a team up for the future. Slash payroll, hoard money, tank, get higher draft picks that have better rates of success, win. Or don't! Nothing in baseball forces an organization to try to win, something the union has pointed out is rather antithetical to the purpose of the game, which is, you know, winning games.
"Everyone has underachieved in the last decade in really understanding what we do," one agent said. "The reason people love this when they're kids is it's fun to take a bat and hit a ball or throw it by somebody. I'm all for the advancements in technology and information we've had in this game. It's really, really cool. At a certain point it shifts from entertainment, though. This isn't an exercise in finding truth, right? This is a f---ing entertainment product."
EVERY DAY, MLB and the MLBPA make agreements. They're about suspensions for drug use and domestic violence and on-field discipline and contract issues and transactions and getting players to participate in the Home Run Derby. Maybe it's not the big-ticket items like mapping out a pandemic season or negotiating a new basic agreement, but that doesn't lessen the reality of their working relationship: It's not fundamentally broken.
The union and league are, in the end, pragmatic, and it is that pragmatism on which those who are looking forward to Opening Day 2022 can hang their hope. If all goes according to plan, the next few months will be quiet. Silence means no snippy statements, no public angling, no repeat of last year. Silence is the greatest sign of labor peace.
It allows the principles to answer the questions most important to them. Is Manfred still the dealmaker he was when he was negotiating labor agreements? Is Clark so confident in the unanimity of his 1,200 members that he'd risk a work stoppage? Are Bruce Meyer, the union's negotiator, and Dan Halem, his counterpart at the league, capable of hammering out terms in advance, or will this be another 11th-hour mad dash?
Do owners want to break the union?
Do players invite that, craving the competition, the tussle?
"It has felt like we've been prepared for a fight," one of the players said. "Does that make you see more fights everywhere? I need to find the color blue. Do I start noticing blue more?"
It's easy, one official said this week, to not make a deal when you don't have to. There should've been a deal last year, but the lack of one didn't preclude the season. There could've been a deal this year, but the lack of one kept only four teams out of the playoffs. There might've been a deal this week, but the lack of one meant the entire responsibility for policing foreign substances fell on the league. If there isn't a new basic agreement, there isn't a season, and the consequences of that are devastating.
So they'll talk about money and the game, about wants and desires. They'll be in Zoom calls filled with players and owners and lawyers and economists and strategists. They'll yell, they'll fight, they'll compromise. They'll shape baseball, aware that the responsibility of the game is in their hands and theirs only. Sure, the state of labor relations is dysfunctional and unfortunate and complicated and tense and unnecessary. There's also a better word than any of those.
Fascinating.