Baseball has chance to repair broken relationships with lockout now over

TORONTO – Baseball makes a lot of people happy. In a dark world, one delicately navigating the perils of reckless tyranny in Ukraine, struggling to cope with the ongoing complications of COVID-19, drowning in disinformation-driven culture wars, every little bit of joy matters. The daily distraction of nine innings on pristine fields against blue skies can be a soulful ritual. There is majesty in watching those 108 stitches fly.

The yearn for some simple goodness is perhaps why the 99-day Major League Baseball lockout, which ended Thursday when players agreed to a new five-year collective bargaining agreement ratified unanimously by owners, generated so much visceral reaction.

There’s optimism in the emergence from winter and spring training is symbolic of that, even if you’re the Baltimore Orioles. Ripping the images of batting practice with palm-tree backdrops from fans, especially given the current global realities, when the owners already largely had the players under their thumbs structurally was, frankly, vulgar. Sure, we could be on the brink of a Third World War, but someone’s got to rein in Steve Cohen’s spending on the New York Mets.

Further, whatever societal ill you’re concerned about — the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer hands; exploitive labour practices; the use of media to distort reality; inequitable wage scales; senseless greed — could be found reflected in how the lockout played out.

That dynamic made this lockout different for the owners, as did the sea change in discourse around players. In previous disputes, notably during the 1994 strike that led to the cancellation of the World Series, owners had an easy time painting players as greedy to fans all too ready to be appalled by salaries that dwarfed their own to live the dream.

A better understanding of owners’ finances, the lack of a relationship between payrolls and ticket prices, the scourge of tanking — made consequence-free in small markets by the bounties of revenue sharing — have been exposed time and again in recent years.

Some players make lots of money, but most don’t. And even if they do, that’s simply a function of the revenue they help generate. Remember that clubs seek to sign contracts in which they create surplus value, underlining how hard it can be for players to get a fair shake.

While that’s good business for the owners, it only fuels a relationship that is adversarial with their players at every step — promotion, 0-3 service time salary renewals, arbitration, free agency. When you factor in how hard they’ve had to fight for even basic gains over the game’s history, you can understand why there’s so much distrust.

That everything nearly blew up over technicalities Tuesday — the sides couldn’t decide on a framework for connecting the international draft to compensatory draft picks in free agency ahead of a 6 p.m. deadline — is both par for the course and opportunity for change.

One official, describing the day’s back and forth, said the sides really need to figure out how to better talk to each other once the CBA was settled. Commissioner Rob Manfred echoed the sentiment after announcing the deal, acknowledging he had “not been successful” in building “a good relationship with our players.”

Later, he added: “I hope that the players will see the effort we made to address their concerns in this agreement as an olive branch in terms of building a better relationship. We built some processes into this agreement where we're going to be interacting more regularly with players on topics like the international draft and rule changes. I think those opportunities for positive interaction help to build a better relationship.”

Sounds ideal, but only action beyond conciliatory words following the exhaustion of the past couple weeks of talks will demonstrate real change.

The sides got to an agreement after Manfred lopped another week from the season Wednesday evening. They re-engaged, decided to pick talks up Thursday morning and settled on a four-month period to negotiate an international draft that if implemented, would lead to the elimination of the loss of picks for signing qualified free agents.

That led to the owners presenting a full counteroffer, one players had expected a day earlier, that further closed some economic gaps. The players voted in favour of it, notably against the recommendation of their executive subcommittee which voted, according to reports by Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic and Jon Heyman of MLB Network, 8-0 against ratification. A 30-0 vote from owners followed and the off-season was on.

Business resumed in a new world, one in which the Competitive Balance Tax, or CBT, threshold will rise from $210 million last year to $230 million this year, rising up to $244 million in the final year of the deal. Minimum salaries will start at $700,000 and increase $20,000 a season over the five-year agreement. A new $50 million bonus pool will be disbursed among 100 pre-arbitration eligible players. A draft lottery covering six picks is meant to deter tanking while draft-pick incentives and service-time credits are intended to reduce service-time manipulation.

The DH is now universal. The post-season now includes 12 teams, an adjustment that would have come in handy for the Toronto Blue Jays one year ago. Players will be part of a competition committee to examine rule changes that can be instituted on an accelerated timeframe.

“Our union endured the second-longest work stoppage in its history to achieve significant progress in key areas that will improve not just current players’ rights and benefits, but those of generations to come,” players association director Tony Clark said in a statement. “Players remained engaged and unified from beginning to end, and in the process re-energized our fraternity.”

Whether the progress holds or teams manage to exploit new loopholes to restrict payroll spending is a key question. We’ll see if there’s a repeat of this lockout in five years.

Manfred tried to play off the three-plus months of acrimony as an inherent part of the CBA process, saying negotiations are “really driven by two things — time and economic leverage. No agreement comes together before those two things play out in a way that you find common ground.” MLB’s floating deadlines for a 162-game season, which players wisely scoffed at three times, were used “effectively to move the process at points in time when it needed to move.”

He said he called Clark after the ratification and pledged to work together. “It’s going to be a priority of mine moving forward to try to make good on the commitment that I made to him on the phone.”

That’s a start.

Then there is the sport’s wider commitment to its dedicated fans, those who make the game a daily part of their lives and drive the wealth the industry so often fights over.

Manfred began his comments with an apology to them, and then noting the even bigger picture, added, “there was a lot of uncertainty at a point in time when there's a lot of uncertainty in the world — sort of the way the process of collective bargaining works sometimes — but I do apologize for it.”

Qualifying the apology probably wasn’t necessary but it’s no time to quibble. Baseball is back and it’s time for it to start giving people a little bit of happy again.