CARLSBAD, Calif. -- Here in paradise, a place where the sun shines every hour available, a cloak of darkness was omnipresent this week. Almost every substantive conversation at Major League Baseball's GM meetings touched on -- or, quite often, centered around -- the Dec. 1 expiration of the collective bargaining agreement, which would be followed by a lockout of the players and an indefinite shutdown of the sport. Even if there remains optimism in most corners that no one would be myopic enough for games to be lost to the first labor stoppage in more than a quarter-century, the prospect of a gloomy winter nevertheless colored the proceedings and already is shaping baseball in unexpected ways.
While the meetings produced two signings for a combined $10.5 million and zero trades, the villas and suites at the Omni La Costa resort bustled with activity -- the sorts of conversations typically reserved for December's winter meetings, which were treated as if they're not happening. The looming threat of a lockout, seen by most as an inevitability at this point, is creating a dynamic that underpinned talks all week. Words were spoken, ideas bandied about, groundwork for deals laid. And everyone looked at everyone else thinking the same thing, though no one dared say it aloud.
How much of this is real, and how much of it is posturing?
In the coming days, weeks, months, the answers of what was genuine at the GM meetings will reveal themselves. The most interesting twist, certainly, occurred on the free-agent side. Teams essentially suggested players have a choice: Sign before the lockout or wait until February, when most everyone expects the labor discord to end, and have fun navigating the frenzy of signings and trades that will ensue. Agents for some of the highest-profile free agents this winter, in the meantime, inverted the posture: If you want a player, step up financially, because the February stampede is going to be so different, so unfamiliar, that it's worth paying more for certainty now than having to overpay or be left empty-handed on the eve of the season.
The fallout is a sense that Corey Seager, the magnificent Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop, and Marcus Semien, the dynamic Toronto infielder, are increasingly likely to sign before Dec. 1, executives interested in the players told ESPN. Both are clients of Scott Boras, who two winter meetings ago fetched more than $800 million guaranteed for Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon over three days. With the rhetoric that the sides treated this week like that time of year, teams and players making surgical free-agent strikes -- even on projected nine-figure deals -- feels like more of a possibility, though not a certainty, than it did even a week ago. It's not just Boras' clients, either. The starting pitching market, sources said, is expected to have multiple big-name pitchers get pre-lockout deals.
Such supposition, of course, could be nothing more than high-level strategy -- trying to extract leverage by using the lockout as a cudgel, something not necessarily limited to one party. The tack with Seager and Semien left executives wondering whether they really do want to sign early or it's a play to draw out teams like the New York Yankees, who need a shortstop and, three sources said, have shown interest in both. Likewise, just because players are unfamiliar with the NFL- and NBA-type free-agent period -- pure chaos -- doesn't make the prospect of going through one necessarily bad.
A divided market might then be the result, with aggressive teams that have shown a desire to spend -- Detroit, Texas, maybe Seattle and Toronto -- among those executing a flurry of deals in the days leading up to, and perhaps even on, Dec. 1. Should the clock turn from 11:59 p.m. to midnight heading into Dec. 2 with no deal, the lockout would end all major league transactions until a deal is struck, and dozens of executives and agents this week pegged the same time period for that: somewhere in the two-week span between Feb. 1 and 15, 2022.
The ravine between MLB and the MLB Players Association continued to reveal itself Wednesday at an in-person bargaining session during which the league outlined in detail an economic proposal it had delivered with broad strokes earlier in discussions: the overhaul of the arbitration system.
Arbitration is the process by which players with at least three years of service in the major leagues receive the right to negotiate their salaries. The system relies on past comparable players to establish a narrow range of around what they should receive in compensation. If a gap exists between what the player and team believe he is worth, each side asks for a specific salary number, presents a case supporting it to a three-judge panel, and wins or loses. It is, in many ways, inefficient, tedious, imprudent and capable of fomenting bad feelings from players who, during a case, must listen to their team talk about all of their negative attributes. It is, MLB argued in its presentation, precisely the sort of system worth changing.
After years of the league wrangling labor power, however, the players are fundamentally skeptical of its intentions. Mistrust has grown to be a foundational element of the relationship between the league and union, and after months of treadmill bargaining -- walking for miles only to remain in the same place -- the arbitration proposal may have appealed to the pragmatic side of some players but missed capturing hearts and minds.
Here's how it would work, per sources: Players with less than six years of service would be paid based on a formula agreed upon by both sides. For purposes of the presentation, the league chose wins above replacement as calculated by FanGraphs. A player with more than three years would multiply his career fWAR by $580,000, and the resulting number would be his salary that season. The multiplier for a second-time eligible player would be $770,000, and a third-time player would receive $910,000 for each fWAR gathered in all his big league time. There would be slight adjustments to salaries based on how the player fared in the previous season, but generally the system would pay players based on the fWAR formula.
Beyond that, the minimum salaries would jump to $600,000 for first-year players, $700,000 in their second seasons and $825,000 for their third. Gone would be Super 2 players -- those with the most service time in any given class who receive an extra year in the arbitration system -- replaced with an "Elite 2" plan, in which players who earned All-MLB honors would get a third-year salary bump from $825,000 to $2.5 million.
The league touted that it would spend as much on arbitration as it had before -- and perhaps more in years with high-WAR classes. Veteran players especially scoffed at the idea, seeing arbitration as essential to the union's existence. Players spend years in the minor leagues scraping by. Their salaries already are predetermined for their first three seasons. Adding another three calculated by a computer would take most players into their 30s -- or retirement -- without having once negotiated a deal.
And while negotiations -- especially ones over often-minuscule gaps between teams and players -- are admittedly inefficient, they're an inefficiency the players by and large believe to be worth saving. The game's evolution in so many ways already can be described as a paean to efficiency. Players resisting that is part of a larger strategy the union sees as ideological solidarity and the league sees as obstructionism.
Public mudslinging has not been part of these talks, and the revelation by The Athletic of the WAR-based proposal lent insight into a negotiation that has made strides in some areas but remains far apart on the issue everyone considers most important: economics. It makes the response to the arbitration proposal -- which was a response to the union proposing that all players reach arbitration after two seasons -- incredibly telling.
There were little sweeteners in the proposal for the players. Instead of using numbers from the shortened 2020 season, they would extrapolate them out to a full-season equivalent. Further, after a standard arbitration system this winter, players who already have been through arbitration in the past would have a choice to remain in the old system or opt into the new one. The argument continued: A player knowing what he's going to make at the beginning of the winter is beneficial -- and could give teams clarity on how to proceed into free agency earlier. Players, of course, have a reasonable sense of around where their salary will wind up because arbitration already is a relatively paint-by-numbers system.
In trying to propose a system that lessens acrimony, the result was, impressively, general acrimony. It wasn't the inclusion of WAR, per se; WAR is used consistently in cases settled and in ones that go to trial. The pricing of it bothered players. FanGraphs itself values a marginal win above replacement at about $8 million; some teams see wins worth less, but typically not under $6 million. Arbitration-eligible players, in the proposed system, would see their wins worth below $1 million.
The formula would benefit some. Superstars could easily exceed $30 million arbitration salaries, whereas the maximum rewarded under the current system was $27 million. Other positions, like relief pitcher, would get thrashed. What the league sees as a redistribution, the union considers a cap on potential earnings -- just like how, in past basic agreements, MLB limited potential earnings in the domestic and international amateur markets. The notion of limiting the earning ceiling of a player in every area except free agency left players asking: How much longer before they want us to cap major league payrolls, too?
The mistrust fills the union with those thoughts, and that sort of skepticism leaves the league asking where it can find compromise, and the world is round and the sky is blue and the grass is green and the union and league are stuck. One side speaks French and the other Spanish; the languages have the same roots, but they do not make complete sense to the other side -- and they certainly aren't romantic.
The folly of a proposal that in many ways tried to achieve pragmatism was the lack of pragmatism in not recognizing how quickly this could get railroaded. As autonomous as some players are, for labor issues, hundreds in the union rely on their agents to serve as sounding boards. For the league to suggest a plan that would outsource the agents' jobs to a formula and leave them without any ability to negotiate until free agency did a poor job of understanding the sanctity of the player-agent relationship and how potentially rendering commissions obsolete might have the unintended consequence of some very angered, even more skeptical union members.
It's easy -- when tension is high, when stakes are present -- to read a lot into a little, to think something like the reason the trade market hasn't gotten hot yet is that teams plan to discuss deals during the lockout and, when it's all over, spring them and disrupt leftover free agents' plans for how to traverse the market. Years of labor discord tend to provoke paranoia.
How much of MLB's proposal is real? How much is posturing? How about the teams' lockout approach? Or the players'? There are lots of questions and theories and no definitive answers, not yet, not in this environment that's calling for the canniest people to take advantage of an unfamiliar terrain. It has been two decades since baseball came close to a labor stoppage and more than 25 years since it actually went through with one, and now a clock is ticking. The clock -- the one that matters -- hasn't started yet, though it looks as if it will soon enough. The darkness doesn't stop swallowing the light by itself.