Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1548: MLB’s Blown Save

Episode Date: May 30, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the results of a survey of sports fans about fake crowd noise on telecasts, then discuss a difficult, frustrating week for baseball, touching on ownership overreach and intransigence, widespread releases of minor league players, teams and players that have made more commendable choices, baseball’s lost opportunity to lead, […]

🎵 I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I shouldn't be alone. Hello and welcome to episode 1548 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of, I was about to say of The Ringer. That'd be nice. Of Fangraphs. I work for Fangraphs. I know my name and what day it is. I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg who does work for The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I mean, it hasn't been the best week

to be a lover of baseball. So we will discuss that shortly and why it hasn't been the best week. And I know that you agree because we've been chit-chatting about it. So later in this episode, we are going to have an interview with Eugene Friedman, who is a longtime labor lawyer and a contributor to Baseball Perspectives, who has been tweeting up a storm about the ongoing MLB negotiations. So we will ask him to come on and convert his tweet threads into spoken sentences, and that will be fun. But we have a lot to get to before that. I did just want to follow up on one thing we talked about previously before we talk about the carnage that was this week. We talked about baseball broadcasts and the idea of pumping in crowd sounds and artificial noise. And I think we were both sort of skeptical about the idea of essentially pretending that there are fans somewhere when we all know that there aren't fans somewhere.

And Morning Consult did a poll this week of sports fans and kind of asked them about their thoughts on what they would want broadcasts to look like if we get baseball and other sports back. And I think similar to what we were saying, there are a lot of people who don't like the that artificial crowd noise would make the experience of watching live sports from an empty stadium on television less enjoyable. By contrast, just 16% of fans said they believe the addition of canned cheering would make

telecasts more enjoyable. The good news, I guess, is that about the same number of people said they would watch the games, so most people, or a lot of people, said that they think they would enjoy these telecasts less without fans, but just about as many said that they would still watch, which I agree with. I would still watch. And yes, I might expect it to be a little less enjoyable. But

on the whole, people are against fake crowd noise and also against the idea of virtual fans in the stands making it look like there are actually fans there. There's a quote in this article from an ESPN person that says, like Fox Sports, which has been broadcasting some soccer with fake crowd noise, ESPN has also experimented with artificial crowd noise on its telecast of Korean baseball. all. Mark Gross, senior vice president of production and remote events at ESPN, said that while he did not anticipate being a proponent of adding in crowd noise, he quickly decided that having it at a low level is the best option. We want things to feel authentic, and I didn't think having a sort of fake crowd noise would feel authentic, Gross said, but I think that at the level it's at, you can just hear it enough so it doesn't feel incredibly hollow inside a 25,000 seat stadium. He added, I don't think we'll get to a position where somebody's at the plate in a Major League Baseball game and he hits a home run and we have somebody bringing the audio up on the

crowd noise. I don't think we're going in that direction. 40% is lower than I would have anticipated. I would have thought that the number would be stronger. I think there's a difference between sort of a low-level hum and trying to mimic the natural reactions that a crowd would have based on events on the field. I don't know that I would be necessarily super bothered by a low-level hum, although it has had sort of an uncanny valley effect on KBO broadcasts. It might be strange, though, the moments on the KBO broadcast where I've noticed that the most have been when there has been like a big moment in the game and it has not matched, the level has not matched. So I don't know what the right answer is. Yeah, I mean, under normal circumstances,

if there were fake crowd noise, and I didn't even realize it or something, it wouldn't bother me that much. Or if there were a real crowd, but they somehow juiced it a little, that I wouldn't mind as much. But just under these circumstances, when I'm hyper aware that there's no crowd, I feel like it's even more dissonant with the experience. And so it would bother me more. It also asked fans of different sports how much they would care about this or how much the absence of fans would affect their enjoyment. And it seems like football fans think this is worse. So pro football, college football, then pro basketball, college basketball, then baseball, and then hockey, soccer, combat sports, and evidently auto racing, tennis, and golf fans actually think it's better not to have fans there

and that they'll enjoy it more. So I don't know exactly why that is, but it seems like basketball and football fans care more about not having fans than baseball fans. I think that that doesn't surprise me just based on my experience as a football fan. And granted, I root for an NFL franchise that, you know, tries to make a way that they think actually influences the outcome, both of the play on the field and sort of how responsive the officials are going to be to their cause. offensive you're you're robbing us of the thing that we do whereas baseball fans who uh at least in the states are sort of used to being quieter on balance probably are a little less committed to it because i bet they don't view their participation as as influential i don't know i say that but then you know we we yell at umpires. So maybe I'm overstating things a bit. It could be true.

Yeah. Apparently there are some companies that pump in crowd noise into the broadcast from people watching at home. And so broadcasters are talking to them about doing that, which sounds very strange to me. Like the idea that it would be a natural sort of sound from people just watching at home. I don't know about you and the noises you make when you're watching telecasts by yourself at home, but I don't make many. I'm in attendance physically, but still just the idea of broadcast playing the noises that people are making at home, unless there's a performative aspect to it where because you know that you're being picked up. I don't even know how this works. I guess you have an app on your phone or something and you just let people listen to you.

It says about one in three sports fans said they would be interested in trying a desktop or mobile app that inserts their cheers into a live sports broadcast. I think no thanks for me. I think I'd be one of the two out of three who said they were not interested in that. But yeah, like unless you're watching at home with a group of friends or something, which under these circumstances, you're probably not. Then I don't like it would just be people sitting by themselves yelling at the TV or something. I guess that could be entertaining in a way, but weird. I have two thoughts on this. The first of which is that it seems incredibly risky to me.

The odds that we hear something just profane or problematic or or even just boring right it can be something that's more uh innocent and less offensive than some of the possibilities but so it seems very risky to me i think it will come probably not as a surprise to you or any of the the folks who don't seem to care for my participation in Effectively Wild in our iTunes reviews, but I am quite vocal when I watch stuff. I talk to the TV. So I can imagine that there would be sufficient fodder for it to replicate some part of a fan experience, but I think that the odds that it does so in a way that

ends up bringing shame and dishonor to probably entire states of human beings it's just really high really high i would watch the meg monologue broadcast where it's just you in your living room like not knowing anyone is overhearing you just what you say to the tv when you're by yourself in your natural habitat i would listen to that but yeah i don't know that it would be particularly interesting but yes there's i just i'm a i'm a person who lives out loud true to my italian roots i there's a lot of gesticulating and exclamations. And I don't know how entertaining they would be. Some of them might be career-limiting because they're just goofy and sometimes frustrated.

Yeah, on the topic of things that might be picked up that we wouldn't normally hear, it does present the possibility of hearing more noises in the stadium and in the game that we normally wouldn't be able to hear. And most people see that as a positive, which I would too. It says presented with the reality of crowdless sports nearly half, 48% of sports fans said being able to more clearly hear the natural sounds of a particular sport, whether it be sneakers or squeaking in basketball or a baseball hitting the inside of an infielder's mitt would improve their enjoyment of watching sporting events played in empty facilities.

Another 42% of fans said they would appreciate additional microphones to pick up on what players and coaches are saying during a game, something ESPN carried out earlier this year in its broadcast of the now-defunct XFL. SFL gross said ESPN would like to provide as much access as possible by having players wear microphones during MLB telecasts it hopes take place this summer but raised some concerns about doing so in a sanitary way given the risk of COVID-19 oh yeah I didn't even think about that part yeah kind of crops up no matter what we're talking about but everything is so terrible yeah i i think that there are times when being able to hear from unfiltered from coaches and players is really interesting i think it highlights often just how in so many ways ball players are very different from us and in other ways they are the same and that most people when presented with the opportunity to give their unfiltered thoughts on what they're observing are mostly just pretty boring

yeah so i think that there's a lot of that i think there are guys who you learn are deeply charismatic and uh funny you learn that some guys are pretty cerebral in the way that they experience what they're watching and so i think can offer interesting insights into the game. But often I think it would probably be pretty boring. And then we would end up with a lot of, I imagine, the sort of people's mileage varies on this. So I want to acknowledge that comedy is hard and everyone's experience of it is different. But I think that we would end up also with a lot of the sort of pre-canned stuff that like Bregman and the Astros did where they stared at the camera after a home run which is very funny now in hindsight but

we'd end up with a lot of that kind of stuff and I think that another way that ballplayers are similar to the rest of us is that they probably think they're funnier than they actually are so some of that wouldn't play quite as well as they would want it to or we would hope it would. But I would be more interested in hearing all of that, even when some of it would be frightfully dull, than I would in hearing what Stanley in Rhode Island thinks about the Red Sox game he's watching, just to pick a random human being, you know, a random name in a random place for a random team. So I think that that's kind of my take on it. Yeah. Well, the whole possibility of potentially piping in fake crowd noise presupposes that there will be baseball broadcasts and that presupposes that there will be baseball games. And this week, I don't know if it took us further away from that possibility, but it

certainly didn't get us closer. if it took us further away from that possibility, but it certainly didn't get us closer. And in addition to the stalemate in the MLB negotiations, we had some pretty terrible news when it came to minor leaguers and other baseball employees too. So should we summarize what went wrong this week, and then we can talk about how it could have gone right? Sure. So I guess we can take MLB's proposal first, right? They introduced a pay proposal that would include sliding scale cuts to major leaguers with the biggest salaried players taking the deepest cuts and then progressively moving down. And when Craig Edwards analyzed sort of the economics of that proposal for us at Fangraphs, his conclusion was that from a dollar's perspective, this isn't

all that different than the 50-50 revenue split they were proposing before, even when you account for the playoff bonuses that it included. And the proposal, among other things, inspired Max Scherzer to sound unenthusiastic about playing baseball, which I literally didn't think was possible. Yeah, some wild things were happening. Buster Posey tweeted this week. That's how serious things have gotten.

Buster Posey weighed in. So yeah, and Max Herzer essentially called the owners on their lack of transparency when it came to releasing important documents and said that the players didn't intend to really acknowledge or counter the owner's financial proposal. And we're still waiting to see if the players will counter or make a proposal of their own. Thus far, as we speak, there has been no official response, but sure seems as if the players will counter or make a proposal of their own. Thus far, as we speak, there has been no official response, but sure seems as if the players are pretty united on not going for this proposal as the initial conception of it by the owners. Yeah, it's interesting.

I don't think that you need to be looking for conspiracies to view this as an attempt on the part of the owners to drive a wedge between players like Eric Cole and Mike Trout and those making lower salaries, especially those making the major league minimum. It seems like they pretty dramatically miscalculated here in some ways practically and in some ways in terms of the amount of solidarity that already existed among the playing base. that already existed among the playing base. When Craig did his analysis, he noted that when you factor in the $170 million that was already advanced to the players and that they will keep, regardless of whether or not there's a season, the amount more that players will be paid, especially lower salaried players, should this proposal be accepted, is actually small. It is not insignificant. It's a couple hundred thousand dollars depending on the player, but they are already in a position to sort of get by

without a season. And so I think presented with that and what was a pretty obvious attempt to split the union, they told the owners to screw off. And I think that you've seen additional signs of solidarity in the last couple of days, some of which have been major leaguers saying that they're going to stick together, some of which have been moves like David Price's where he is offering to pay $1,000 a month stipend to minor leaguers in the Dodgers organization, hasn't thrown a regular season pitch for that organization, but is stepping up to try to help minor leaguers. And I don't say that to diminish, you know, some of the moments in the past where the players association has sort of traded away things that the minor leaguers would benefit from in order to protect their own membership. But like,

I think that I've been very impressed with the degree to which the public grumbling and sort of public discord that we were maybe expecting in light of this proposal has not materialized. And it does seem to have galvanized the union to kind of call the owner's bluff and say, if you don't want a season and you don't want postseason TV revenue and you don't want national TV revenue and you don't want a season and you don't want postseason TV revenue and you don't want national TV revenue and you don't want to actualize the revenues that you are not counting in the presentation that you gave to the union, then we can do that. It very much had a vibe of like, those are some nice national TV contracts you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to them. Yeah. Those are some nice national TV contracts you have there.

It would be a shame if anything happened to them. Yeah, it seems like the owners were kind of banking on there being like an eat-the-rich type of division within the ranks of the union where the less paid players would say, oh, well, these higher paid players should take a hit for us essentially. And maybe that there would be some envy or jealousy there between players who are making the league minimum and players who are making dozens of millions of dollars. But it seems like players, you know, I'm sure there's some resentment here and there about this guy makes this much and I make this much. But for the most part, it seems like players want other players to make a lot of money because it pulls the market up for all of them. And it's also just kind of like the pot at the end of the rainbow, right? It's like everyone hopes that they one day will be the $30 million a year player if they're not. So I don't think that they want to see the other and the lesser paid players would want to save themselves at the expense of the elite MLB players, it seems like, if anything, the opposite has happened. And they've kind of closed ranks and said, no, we've already agreed to prorated salaries in our March agreement. And there's no reason for us to agree to further pay cuts here. And I wonder if part of the calculus here on the part of the players is that next year's free agent market, I imagine Mookie Betts is going to do just fine,

but I think that we already know based on some of the anonymous quotes that have come out of teams that next year's market, and by next year's I mean this winter's market, is likely to be quite frigid. And some of these losses will probably be made up, for lack of a better term, in a lack of spending. And these contracts are already agreed to. So I think that there is probably on the part of players an understanding that they should

try to maximize earnings as much as they can this year, because for the guys who are going to be hitting the free agent market, they may well have to accept a pretty diminished level of spending where they otherwise might have been slightly optimistic after the contracts that came out this past off season. So I think that they are pretty realistic about what the future holds, especially going into what I would imagine. I mean, I know we're going to ask this question in our interview with Eugene later, but what I imagine will be an even more contentious CBA negotiation. And so I think that there is probably a desire to maximize what they can now in a year where they have already agreed to reduce pay. Yeah. So I don't think anything that happened this week precludes the possibility of baseball.

It all seems very contentious. Clearly, the owners, it doesn't seem like they're really negotiating in good faith here, and the players are not making any steps toward conceding to them. And so I wouldn't say this week was encouraging if you want baseball to be back, but at the same time, it wouldn't shock me if next week goes differently and a week from now there has been some real movement or even an agreement and maybe the owners say, okay, well, we tried, it didn't work, and now we will kind of cave here. That is kind of how negotiating works. Often one side makes a proposal and the other side says no. And in this case, they may not even make a

counterproposal or at least may not engage on those economic terms. And so maybe that means there's less of a chance that the two sides get together quickly, which would have to happen for there to be a second spring training and for the season to start in early July. But all I'm saying is there is going to inevitably be some tension in any negotiation of this kind, and the early stages may not look very friendly, and there may not be a lot of initial movement. So it doesn't mean that we might not still see progress in a season, but it was kind of a wasted week, at least when it comes to trying to come up with some workable agreement here. week, at least, when it comes to trying to come up with some workable agreement here. And at the same time, of course, there was other negative news, which is that hundreds of minor leaguers lost their jobs and were released by their organizations. And it's not clear exactly how many, but it seems like several hundred at least and maybe

more on the way. And on our previous episode, Sam and I talked about the difference between teams and how they had responded to minor leaguers. And we talked about how the Oakland A's decided to stop paying their minor leaguers their stipend, their 400-a-week stipend at the end of May, whereas other organizations had guaranteed that they would keep paying that through the rest of the season or through June at least. And yet, even after some of those teams said, yes, we will continue to pay that stipend, then within a day or so it came out that many of those very same teams had released dozens of players. So it was like, yes, we will keep paying our players these stipends,

but suddenly we have a lot fewer players because we just released a lot of them. So that was sad and dismaying to see teams treat their employees that way, to see many players' careers possibly come to an end and to be kind of cast adrift in this economy. And we should make clear that there are always releases of minor league players and that there had been fewer releases of minor league players over the past couple months than there are in releases of minor league players and that there had been fewer releases of minor league players over the past couple months than there are in a typical season. So to some extent, this was kind of the backlog of unreleased players getting released all at once. And Baseball America ran the numbers here, and they found that from March through May this year, And they found that from March through May this year, there had only been 131 players released before this mass cut.

Whereas last year, over the same period, there had been 755. The previous year, over the same period, there had been 668. So that's a difference of several hundred players. So it's likely that the majority of players who lost their jobs this week probably would have lost their jobs over the past couple months if this had been a regular season and a regular situation. And there will be more cuts presumably coming. And Baseball America also said that in June 2018, 171 minor league players were released. In June 2019, 233 minor league players were released. So again, it's not unusual for that to happen, but it also makes it more cruel that this would happen because these players are not getting released in the typical environment where they could catch on with some other team, where the economy is not tanking, where 40 million plus other people are not also unemployed, but it's right in the middle of the pandemic and the

recession that seems to be developing here. So this is not a good time to be out of work. I think we talked about this a little bit before we recorded. I think that baseball writ large had a real opportunity in this environment to make good on the messaging that it has leaned into since I have been alive. Yeah. That baseball is a family, right? Baseball had an opportunity here to say, we get it. This is an unprecedented time.

We're a multi-billion dollar industry. These salaries are so small as to be rounding errors in a typical year's profits. And we, you know, a lot of these guys, they don't have major league futures. Not every front office analyst is going to be a GM. Not every scout is going to be a scouting director, but these are our folks. These are our people and we're going to take care of them. And even though in a normal year, we would let hundreds of these guys go and try to, you know, catch on with a new organization or go overseas or go to Indy Ball. Indy Ball, right. Something that they can't do right now.

That they can't do right now. Even though not all of these players are going to be part of baseball's family forever, they're part of it right now. And we're going to take care of these folks. And I think that if they had said that, if they had gotten all 30 teams to commit to retaining their minor leaguers, to keeping their front office staff, to keeping their scouting staffs, if they had said, you know what, we know that our day of game employees are being hit particularly hard. We're going to take care of them too.

It would have cost them a lot of money. And so I don't mean to downplay the amount of money that it would have cost, but it would have made good on this claim that baseball is a family. We're going to take care of our family. Some of that family is going to move on to other stuff in the future. But right now in the middle of a crisis, when they need health insurance and they need a paycheck, they're going to get it from us. And I think that if they had done that, as an aside, they would have been able to ask for. Now, I'm not saying this is fair.

I'm not saying it's not icky. So I want to preface that. I think they would have been able to ask for a lot more from current major leaguers if they had taken that stance from the beginning, because I think that a lot of fans would have looked at it and said, well, if this is, you know, if Garrett Cole has to give up a couple million this year so that a scout and a minor leaguer and an analyst don't lose their job in the middle of one of the worst economies in any of our lifetimes, that's fine. Garrett can take that loss. And that wouldn't have been quite right, right? But I think that people would have been sympathetic to that argument. And I think that people would have looked at Major League Baseball and said, a lot has been wrong with this for a long time. And the labor picture has been contentious. And the way that they've treated minor leaguers has not been good. And some of the international stuff has been really yucky. But this they did right. And I think that the groundswell of support that the league and its teams would have enjoyed in the face of that we haven't in a while. And, Twins, who, according to reporting, have agreed not to release any of their minor leaguers and to keep paying them stipends and also not to lay off or furlough their front office people. And also, according to reports,

the Royals have done the same and made the same promises. And the Twins and the Royals are not the Yankees or the Dodgers. I mean, if they can do it, then I don't see why most organizations couldn't do it. It's a choice that they could make, a blanket thing. It could have been a league-wide initiative safety and things that MLB was, you know, taking up tests. And does that mean that they're depriving anyone else of tests? And I know testing is much more available now than it has been before. And you could make a case that they're making new tests that wouldn't have been available to anyone anyway. But I'm just saying, you know, you would have had to consider those things regardless. But if that had been the only problem, then I think we could have felt reasonably good about baseball coming back. And also it would have been a big opportunity for the sport because baseball could have been and I guess might still be the first sport back and playing meaningful games and having a big share of the sports spotlight to itself. And that could only be good.

And now you're facing this sort of nightmare scenario where not only does baseball potentially not come back, but it fails to come back, not because of safety concerns, but because of financial issues. And at the same time, the league and many of the teams have been very cutthroat about downsizing non-essential employees that they've deemed non-essential. And there's also the possibility that other sports come back and baseball doesn't, which I think would be pretty devastating. I mean, if all of the major sports are back and baseball is the only one that couldn't get its act together, and not because of some principled stand about not endangering its players or something, but just because the owners were trying to grab as much money as they could and take advantage of this circumstance.

That looks terrible. I mean, I think baseball could survive a year of being absent if everyone else were also absent or if it was absent for a good reason. But if it's absent because of this and if other sports come back and make it look even worse, that's really pretty disastrous. I don't know if it's 1994 strike level disastrous because obviously there are extenuating circumstances here, but it's pretty bad. And it could have been a positive. They could have made the best of the situation. And so far, at least it seems like they're doing their best to make the worst of it. Yeah. I can't decide if it is a, it's always tricky to read intention into other people's actions, but it's not impossible.

into other people's actions, but it's not impossible. Yeah. And I have struggled in the last day to decide which of the following things I think is more likely, that they know all of the ways in which they are jeopardizing the reputation and enjoyment of the sport, that they are diminishing the future quality of it by shortening the draft and attracting the miners and don't care. Or if they have miscalculated and think that this is a normal negotiation in normal circumstances,

and that they naively think that it will work out because it always, with a couple of exceptions, has in the past. And I don't know which of those is better or worse. I think they're both pretty lousy. But it is surprising to me, you know, you said that negotiations are contentious and that you often get sort of less good offers in the beginning as a way to bring, you know, the parties closer to one another. And I think that that assessment is true. But these are not usual circumstances.

We just have very little time to salvage a season if we want the season to fit into anything resembling the normal sort of flow of the year that we're used to, which I think given the likelihood that we see a resurgence of COVID-19 in the fall is probably in everyone's best interest if they want to have something resembling a postseason. So I don't know if it is naive to think that on balance, they should still prioritize playing games over the temptation to break the union, which I think it's probably clear that I think that's a bad idea, but I think I should say it. Like, don't. We're an anti-union busting podcast. I feel comfortable speaking for all three of us. Yeah, I'm okay with that.

Yeah. Opposed. It's the official editorial stance of Effectively Wild that we are anti-union busting. And so I don't know which of the two it is it might be some combination but i think that it's incredibly disheartening i think that we will enjoy baseball if it comes back it has a way of making you enjoy it even when you're feeling pretty lousy about it but it will not be what it could have been. I think it'll still be for many people a bomb in a really hard time.

But it will not be the kind of healing force that I think it could have been for a lot of people. And that's pretty disappointing because I think its capacity to have served that role is pretty incredible. Yeah, I think so too. As Sam was saying on the previous episode, the number of people who are kind of keeping a scorecard and know, okay, this team is continuing to pay its minor leaguers or not releasing its minor leaguers and this team is not furloughing or laying off front office employees. for lowing or laying off front office employees. I don't know that your average fan necessarily pays attention to that stuff, and that's probably part of the reason why minor leaguers have been so poorly paid for years and years because they're just not nearly as visible, and the average fan is probably just going to enjoy baseball coming back

and getting to watch Major League Baseball again and may not really have their enjoyment tainted all that much by how MLB is treating its less visible employees. And I think that will bother us and maybe our listeners more than your typical fan. But still, I think it's hard for this sense of just kind of dirtiness not to trickle down and start to affect your enthusiasm for the sport or at least your boosterism of baseball. It's hard to really feel like an enthusiastic advocate for the league when the league operates this way. The sport, yeah, we love the sport. We love the history and all of that.

But it's hard to go out there and kind of like do PR for, do PR for baseball, essentially, when baseball is operating in this way. And you see a lot of calls this week for like, well, they've got to figure this out. You know, it's too important. The stakes are too high. They have to come to an agreement here. And I feel that myself, like I am thinking that on some level too. Like you can't screw this up. This is just too potentially disastrous. But I think a lot of the times those calls kind of presuppose that like the players and the owners are equally culpable here or equally responsible for bringing baseball back. That they both should make some concession or something and should meet in the middle or whatever. should make some concession or something and should meet in the middle or whatever. And it just, that doesn't really seem fair in this circumstance to kind of put the onus on the players to get things going. Because it's the owners really who it seems like are making the more unreasonable demands here.

And the players are just kind of sticking up for themselves. And it's possible that that might have the effect of doing away with this baseball season, but that doesn't mean that the blame for that should be equally distributed. So if you're saying, yeah, they should figure this out, yeah, I agree, they should figure this out, but really, I think more of the weight of that falls on the ownership side, at least to this point. So I am kind of wary of putting that message out there without caveating it in that way, because I absolutely feel that, like I'm watching this potentially possibly slip away, hoping that it doesn't, and thinking the owners can't possibly be this short-sighted. And yet they have been many times in the past, and it would not be at all unprecedented. And it's hard, as you said, to untangle the motivations here because, as you said, like some of the things that are happening here are things that were sort of in motion already.

of naturally suspicious because you know that MLB and the teams want to downsize the minors anyway, and we're proceeding toward that and maybe trying to cut a quarter of the minor league teams. And so now, obviously, circumstances have changed, and there's almost certainly not going to be a minor league season, and the draft is shortened too. And what do you do with these players if you didn't release them it's not like they would be playing somewhere and so in that sense yeah you can kind of see why there's just less need for minor leaguers than there would have been under normal circumstances but at the same time this is clearly what rob manfred wanted and was trying to bring about already at least to some extent and so you have to wonder well how much of this is a response to the fact that the minor league season will almost certainly be canceled and how much of it is, well, this is what we wanted to do that, you have to fundamentally misunderstand

the facts of the negotiation that took place in March and the relative ease with which owners can access credit and other forms of financing to figure their way through potential losses. And baseball players just can't. They can't do it from a monetary perspective. Their careers are short. And so the onus really has to be on the owners to figure their way through this. So that's one thing. I think you are also right to say that like a lot of fans, they not great at at keeping track of who's paying what to whom but baseball people remember yeah right and so there are two groups of people who will remember very clearly and those two groups are players and the people who work for

teams and you have a draft coming up in two weeks where undrafted free agents are going to be capped at 20k for their signing bonuses and if i'm one of those players and i'm looking around this week i would think to myself gosh seems great to work for the minnesota twins seems really cool to work for the royals they take care of their. If I'm one of those undrafted free agents, you couldn't get me to sign in Oakland. You just couldn't do it. And I know that there will be fewer minor league teams going forward. And so some of that attrition is baked into the draft model,

but they are making a very clear statement about how they prioritize minor leaguers and player development. And if I'm a scout right now, I'm looking around and saying, I don't want to work for the Angels. had those conversations. I mean, I think it's bad that there are going to be fewer minor league teams at the same time. Like the number of minor league teams has expanded and contracted and expanded and contracted over time. And I don't think that you necessarily have to have the number of affiliates frozen forever at what it was at a particular time. Like certain things change and if the needs change and there are fewer teams, then I think that's a shame for the people in those communities who may not have easy access to baseball.

But on the other hand, like, you know, nothing stays the same forever. And I get it to some extent, but it's just, you know, and scouting the same way, like technology comes in and you hire people into other positions maybe instead of scouting and and that just happens but i think it's still something that you can be sorry for the people involved obviously and especially when it happens at a time like this so you know and we could do a version of this podcast for many other industries i'm sure because like you know equally disturbing things are happening

all over the country and the world because of the pandemic and because of other things. But this is a baseball podcast, so we're talking about the baseball aspects. Yeah, I think that it's, to be clear, Oakland could afford to pay their minor leaguers for the whole season if they wanted to. So what I'm about to say is not meant to argue against that point.

And as an aside, I might regret being so sassy about this later, but I'm going to do it now. If you can't pay your minor leaders a million dollars of salary, you don't deserve to own a major league baseball team. You shouldn't be in this business. Right, yeah. It's so little money. It's such a small amount of money.

And if you can't pay a million dollars in payroll, as a billionaire owning a baseball team, you don't pay a million dollars in payroll as a billionaire owning a baseball team you don't deserve to own a baseball team so i'm going to say that sorry the royals the royals are not a high revenue or high franchise value team in a relative sense and yet they're doing it so it's a choice that other organizations could make so yes but sorry so oakland could afford to pay its minor leaguers and Oakland system not being very good doesn't diminish this fact. But it is not surprising to me that some of the organizations that have committed to extending minor league pay,

granted in many cases with some cuts. So, you know, it's not a perfect scenario, but it is not surprising that some of the organizations that have committed to continuing these stipends and keeping their minor leaguers on are among the systems that are the better ones in baseball. It is not surprising to me that the Padres and the Rays are going to keep paying their minor leaguers. The Padres and the Rays minor league systems are worth in terms of the value of those players, many multiples of what they will pay those guys in payroll this year. Many multiples. They are getting a tremendous bargain by developing these players, being able to control their contracts for so long, benefiting from their play, sometimes benefiting from sending them to play for other organizations. And that isn't to say that, you know, the worst system in baseball doesn't also accrue tremendous

value from their minor leagues, even beyond what they pay in salary, many multiples of that, or that salary is the only expense to running a minor league system. That's not true either. league system. That's not true either. But it is just, if you want to be a dollars per war kind of analyst, this is tremendously cheap value. Right. Yeah. It's not like this was the area where teams were not getting their money's worth or something. One minor leaguer makes the majors and does well at league minimum for a few years, and it subsidizes a whole lot of other minor leaguers who are not making that much to begin with. So it's almost like, you know, when the Red Sox traded Mookie Betts, and it's like, yeah, Mookie Betts is making a lot of money relative to other players on your roster, but he's still worth way more than he's making. So it's not like you're really helping yourself that much. And that goes even more so for minor leaguers. And yeah, I kind of hope in a way that like some minor leaguer who got cut this week by some short-sighted or miserly organization will get picked up by some other team and will go on to be very good and

very valuable for that team and will come back to haunt the team that cut him. I know that most of the players who were cut this week were not prospects, obviously, and most of them would not have and will not ever make the majors or have a significant career, but maybe someone will. Maybe there will be some story who, when we talk about some star in the future he will be one of the players who was just caught during this pandemic by some team that could not see what he would be worth in the future so that would be kind of a just ending to the story i think yeah i know that our listeners are probably thinking gosh meg sounds so agitated and I am because you just look at the situation and I think it inspires a

really hard question, which is who is baseball for right now? And by baseball, I mean, major league baseball, because as you said, major league baseball is not baseball, right? It is the version of baseball with which we are the most familiar and have the closest relationship here in the States, but it is not baseball. But who is Major League Baseball for right now? And the number of groups that we sort of think about and prioritize, none of them are being catered to right now. This isn't for the fans because this dispute that the owners are insisting on might rob us of a season. It's not for baseball people.

And by that, I mean front office employees, scouts, because they're not being taken care of. It's not for the players. So who is it for? Because if the answer is the owners, that's not a product a lot of people are interested in. I don't care about them. They don't add to my enjoyment of baseball. And so I think that when that's the question that you're asking in the middle of a pandemic, you've gone very radically in the wrong direction. Because as you said, it would be one thing if the determination was it is just fundamentally unsafe

in the middle of this pandemic to play baseball, no matter how many provisions and rules and measures we put in place, it's just fundamentally unsafe. I could live with that. It would suck. I think it would mean really bad things for the website I work for.

It would mean bad things for our friends who work in sports media. It would mean bad things for these players, but it would be a thing we could live with because it's about people living. If this is why we don't have baseball, it is unacceptable. And the blame for me will be firmly at ownership's feet. So that's me being sassy and agitated it's been a bad week ben and on top of everything else they're inflicting a 64-hour derrick cheater marathon on mlb network look i grew up watching derrick cheater i'm sure i've watched more than 64 hours of derrick cheater in my life but even i am not interested in a 64-hour derrick cheater marathon like i know he's a popular player the yankees are a popular team.

I guess that's a way to get ratings. But boy, I don't know that there's any player I would want to watch a 64-hour marathon of, but it's certainly not Derek Jeter much as I enjoyed watching him during his career. I just... There are like 15 people on the planet I love more than baseball.

There are like 15 people on the planet I love more than baseball. There are like 15. I am so angry, Ben. I'm so angry and frustrated about all of this. And that's not Derek Jeter's fault. Well, he is kind of an owner now. Yeah. You know the only good thing to come out of this? I'm going to do that thing that everyone loves where I talk about a tweet I did.

Everyone's favorite practice. But because so much of ownership consternation seems to be focused around debt service, in a roundabout sort of partial way, we get to blame Jeffrey Loria for this. And I love being able to blame him for stuff because that's just good comedy. So I guess that's just good comedy so i guess that's the one tiny silver lining to come all of this but come out of all of this but yes my preference would be that we decide on an equitable pay solution that does not ask the the players to take a further pay cut from the one that they already agreed to and then if we can't play

baseball safely we're all gonna live with that but get it together guys yep and to end this discussion on one positive note shohei otani's on instagram now so that's one positive thing that happened this week greater access to shohei otani i miss shohei otani ben me too yeah if and when baseball back, we should have a fully operational two-way Otani you before the break with the words of Royals GM Dayton Moore, explaining why the Royals decided not to release any minor leaguers. Quote, understand this, the minor league players, the players you'll never know about, the players that never get out of rookie ball or high A,

those players have as much impact on the growth of our game as 10-year or 15-year veteran players. They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as 10-year or 15-year veteran players. They have as much opportunity to influence the growth of our game as those individuals who played for a long time because those individuals go back into their communities and teach the game. Work in academies are JUCO coaches, college coaches, scouts, coaches, and pro baseball. They're growing the game constantly because they're so passionate about it. So we felt it was really, really important not to release one minor league player during this time, a time we needed to stand behind them.

Be right back. I can't see how it can be Anything for me What's mine is yours What's yours is yours That's how you want it to be And you want me to wait for you Till you decide to care? Don't you think that's a little unfair?

All right, as promised, we are joined now by Eugene Friedman. He is a longtime union lawyer and a counsel to the president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. He has also written for Baseball Prospectus about baseball's labor issues, starting under my time there. Hi, Eugene. How are you? You are much in demand this week, including by us. Well, thanks for having me on. Well, we wanted to start, I think, by asking how a baseball labor negotiation differs from a typical labor negotiation or from the labor negotiations you've been involved in, differs from a typical labor negotiation or from the labor negotiations you've been involved in, whether because of MLB's antitrust exemption or the player's public salary information or just the emotional attachment that many people have to baseball as an institution?

So, yeah, I would say primarily the main difference is that it plays out in public. There are reporters who are assigned full-time to baseball from various news outlets, whether they are sports or otherwise. And so they, when there are labor negotiations, they report on those as well. Of course, they don't really have the background in labor law or negotiations. So that makes it a little bit tricky. And, you know, normally in negotiations, the parties keep everything behind closed doors. They don't engage in a lot of public statements. Although I have been involved in some negotiations, which have played out in public, and those haven't gone as well. We didn't reach a good

result in those negotiations on either side. So this whole dispute is sort of predicated on the owner's contention that the March agreement between MLB and the MLBPA to pay players a prorated salary left the matter of pay in the event of fanless games sort of undetermined. the matter of pay in the event of fanless games, sort of undetermined. And the owners even recently leaked an email that they say shows, and we can dispute how much this actually does, but shows that the player side was aware that payment could be renegotiated if the season proceeded under those circumstances. How defensible do you find the owner's position? Well, you know, one of the things that we have to look at just in terms of structure of negotiations, and Major League Baseball falls under the National Labor Relations Act because they are private sector, non-transportation employees. So the National Labor Relations Act provides that there are specific mandatory subjects of bargaining. And there's a lot of case law behind

those establishing what they are, but in the statute, it refers to them as wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment. So when the parties negotiate, those are the things that are mandatory. Those are the things that they're required to negotiate. There are certain things that are permissive subjects of bargaining, and those things can only be negotiated at the election of both parties. One party or the other can say, no, we don't want to negotiate over that. And, you know, permissive subjects include things like benefits for retirees that are included in the contract. So, you know, those things are not mandatory. And then, of course, there are things that are illegal subjects of

bargaining, such as, you know, providing benefits based on race, for example. There were a lot of cases initially where, you know, unions were not allowing their black members to get seniority to bid on the better positions. Those things were deemed illegal if they were negotiated. So you have those three categories, mandatory, permissive and illegal. In this case, what you have to look at as the baseline is what is in the CBA itself, the collective bargaining agreement. And I believe there's a provision in the collective bargaining agreement that essentially says that if for some act of God or other major reason that affects the length of the season, that salaries will be prorated based on the number of games compared to a normal 162-game schedule.

So that's kind of the baseline of where they started. And I think by agreeing in the March Memorandum of Understanding, I'm just going to call it an MOU, and I don't even know if that's the specific term that they use within baseball, but that's a common term within labor relations, that they agreed to something almost identical to that language. And I haven't seen the actual agreement. I'm not an insider, so I haven't seen it. seen it. So I believe that they basically agreed, if we can outplay games under what is frequently referred to as force majeure, something that's an act of God, it's outside the control of either party, that players will be paid on a prorated basis. And on the other side, in order to secure that agreement, the players also agreed that the commissioner would have the unilateral authority. And this is, I believe, how the Athletic phrased it in an article

two days ago or two nights ago, that it was exclusively within the commissioner's discretion to set the start of the season and whether there would be a season at all. And that's really what has been discussed in terms of the economic feasibility clause in the March agreement. So when you have this situation now where you have a leaked document and it's an email between three attorneys. So, you know, one thing that I thought immediately was this was intentionally released. The attorneys have both attorney-client privilege and attorney-client confidentiality rules within the bar that they have to follow. And those confidentiality rules mean that any of their work product cannot be released without authorization. So, you know, they did this on purpose. Now, I also looked at to whom they leaked it, and it's somebody who works for Major League Baseball Network.

So I see that as, you know, they're giving it to one of their own agents to put it into the media. as, you know, they're giving it to one of their own agents to put it into the media. So, you know, I think that document itself and the theory behind what it contains just seems awkward, at least, and suspicious at worst. So as a result of that, you've argued that the players shouldn't even acknowledge or counter the owner's proposal for further pay cuts on a sliding scale. And as we speak, I suppose they haven't. So why is that? And how do you think they've handled things so far? agree over a mandatory subject and it's contained in their collective bargaining agreement or an MOU, which essentially is an extension of the party's term CBA because it either adds to the agreement or it modifies a provision of the agreement. That becomes an enforceable agreement between the parties, no different than their collective bargaining agreement itself. And so in order to reopen a closed article, something that has been agreed upon between both parties, it has to be mutual consent of both parties.

So as long as the players take the position, we have an agreement on this, we're not reopening it, they can seek to enforce that agreement. But once they consent to reopen it, they can no longer enforce it. They've agreed to reopen it, it's back on the table, whatever they agree to next is the agreement that's enforceable. And in this case, it's interesting because there was a lot of banter back and forth when the owners were floating a 50-50 revenue split in the press. And there was some banter back and forth where someone from the commissioner's office, and I don't recall if it was attributed or if it was an unnamed source, said, well, we're not going to send that to the players until they agree

that we're going to negotiate over it. And the players said, well, we're not negotiating over it because they recognized that once they agreed to negotiate over it, they were voiding that clause in the March agreement. And I think that that is the correct position from a labor law perspective. They don't want to reopen something that they are comfortable with that is jointly agreed, unless obviously they get something in return. And I think what they did with their response yesterday with regard to the timing of reopening the games and playing 100 games instead of 81, I think that flips the equation. They didn't respond on the pro rata pay. They said specifically, we're not responding on that. But what they did say was, we'll reopen the clause

that gave you discretion on how long the season would be. And so I believe management's going to say, no, we're not going to negotiate that. We have an agreement on that, that it's within our discretion, which basically puts us back in the position of where we were. The parties have a march agreement. They should leave that alone and just deal with the issues that are presenting right now, which is how to get back on the field and deal with the health and safety of players, because that's the real issue that has to be resolved in the next week or two or how long we have to bargain before we reopen spring training and then ultimately get back

onto the field. And for the folks who are listening who are less familiar with the way that these things proceed, if those sides, whether it's around the schedule or pro rata pay, if neither side elects to reopen those questions for further negotiation, What is the recourse if they're sort of at loggerheads and can't decide how to proceed with the season as they had originally bargained in March? Well, I mean, if the language regarding economic feasibility is, as I've read the interpretations of it, the commissioner does have that unilateral authority not to proceed. The commissioner can say, we're not playing a season. And that is his discretion, and it is

his decision to do that. But if the parties, if baseball were to say, we're reopening, we're going back to play without an agreement on health and safety for the players and somehow were to say we're imposing a pay cut for players, then in terms of the imposition of pay, they would have a remedy under the collective bargaining agreement, which is through the grievance procedure. The players can file grievances for violations of the CBA individually or collectively. In this case, it would be a union grievance on behalf of all of the employees to enforce the agreement. So it wouldn't go to court. It would go to baseball's grievance arbitrator, and that

arbitrator would hold a hearing. It could be expedited. I don't know exactly what their grievance procedure is. Most collective bargaining agreements do have a process for expedited arbitration. So it happens quickly and then the arbitrator renders a decision relatively quickly. So in terms of pay, that's how that would play out if management decided that they were going to walk away from the deal but still open games. That said, I don't think the players would return if management decided that they were unilaterally imposing, because under that circumstance, it would be very similar to what played out in 1994 and 1995. It would constitute an unfair labor practice to unilaterally impose over the health and safety issues, a mandatory subject, without reaching impasse and bargaining. There is the ability to unilaterally impose, but it can't be done until the parties reach an impasse. In 1994, when the players went on strike, and then in 1995, when management announced that it was going to

play with replacement players and implement the CBA, that converted the strike into what's called an unfair labor practice strike. It was no longer what's called under the law an economic strike. And when there is an unfair labor practice strike, the players can't be permanently replaced. It's illegal to permanently replace unfair labor practice strikers. And so what happened there was the union filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB general counsel issued a complaint. It went before an administrative law judge. The judge agreed with the NLRB general counsel, who serves as the prosecutor of that charge,

and ruled that Major League Baseball had violated sections 881 and 885 of the National Labor Relations Act. Similar here, if management were to unilaterally implement without reaching impasse in bargaining over the health and safety issues, that would allow the union to go out on an unfair labor practice strike. They couldn't be replaced. I think that that's what they would likely do, although they may have some no-strike provisions in their CBA. Generally, an unfair labor practice strike is not precluded by contract. And so, I think that ultimately, it's really going to fall on that economic feasibility question, Ultimately, it's really going to fall on that economic feasibility question, whether the commissioner will exercise that discretion to cancel the season rather than get to a point of impasse on health and safety. I don't think the Players Association will fall into the trap of reaching impasse over that question.

And so it would force the hand of management to declare impasse improperly and unilaterally imposed. And that's when it would play out similar to 94 and 95. So we might have another future Supreme Court justice just waiting to weigh in on this. I guess we'll see. So some people I've seen have suggested that the players make salary concessions now in exchange for changes to the sports economic structure that would take effect in the future. But as you've noted on Twitter, it's pretty tough to negotiate sweeping financial measures and changes to the sports economic structure on a tight timeframe, especially while you're working out these other complex health and safety protocols and issues related to rosters and schedules. So what do you think is actually achievable within a window that would allow the season to start? Do you have to pretty much stick to the basics at this point? That's exactly right. I think that, you know, if they were to try to hammer out a deal on health and safety and the other related issues of restarting,

where the players are going to stay, what they're allowed to do in their non-work-related time, those type of things would have to be pretty detailed in terms of what the parties negotiate. I think that could be achieved within the next few weeks and they can get back on the field relatively quickly. But as you said, if they were to negotiate the entire economic structure of the game, that's something that really has to take place over a long course of time. You know, normally teams spend two to three months preparing for term negotiations. Obviously, if we're going to hammer out a deal over the entire economic structure of the game, starting June 1st, you're talking about maybe September, the parties would actually get

back to the table on that question. And then it might take six to nine months of negotiating. And I'd also like to point out that a lot of the things that have been mentioned as reframing the economics of baseball are the things that Major League Baseball has proposed to the Players Association in each of the last half dozen negotiations, and they've gone nowhere because Major League Baseball Players Association does not want a revenue split. And there are lots of reasons for that, but they see it as a de facto salary cap, which they don't want. And so wages being a mandatory subject of bargaining, they're not going to agree to that. And, you know, the parties would quickly be at impasse over pay.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, the reports were that before the owners proposed this sliding scale that they were going to suggest some, you know, fixed division of revenue, which is not uncommon in the other North American sports. You've mentioned the reality of a salary cap. What are some of the other reasons that major league players and the MLBPA have resisted the imposition of a predetermined revenue split in the past? Well, I think one of the major factors is trust. The other sports have very concentrated revenue streams. And I'm not an expert on the economics of sports, although I have read a few books on it. I would definitely say it's outside my area of great knowledge. That said, the owners in the NFL, for example,

receive the vast majority of their income through joint revenue streams, whether that. Whereas in baseball, the largest driver of income is local television. It's not the national television contracts. And so because the revenue is not evenly distributed, in fact, there's significant differences between clubs in terms of what they do make on their local television. That drives quite a disparity in club or franchise income. But it also is true that a lot of the teams are owned by media companies or the teams themselves own a media company that does the broadcast. So it's not arm's length negotiations. The players association doesn't know exactly what the value of team income is from these non-arm's length deals.

And then you have all of the associated revenue that's not direct baseball-related income, where some of the clubs own the parking near the ballpark. But the parking is not owned by the club itself. It's owned by the ownership group through a different organization or corporation that it is set up. The same is true for concessions at ballparks. And so you have all this associated revenue. Not only would they have to agree which revenue is to be split, but they'd also have to agree on the auditing of the valuation of the revenue, because the owners don't share that information with each other. So why would they share it with the players association? It creates all kinds of trust issues. And to just say, just split it 50-50 kind of forgets the fact that you don't even know what

100 is. So how can you accept 50? Right. And baseball's resident super agent, Scott Boris, who I think represents more clients than anyone else and also represents many of the top earning clients, sent a letter to everyone he represents this week in which he urged them to reject MLB's proposal. And Trevor Bauer tweeted that Boris should keep his, quote, damn personal agenda out of union business. Of course, Trevor Bauer tweets a lot of things. But do you think union leadership would welcome or resent Boris's influence? And is there any way in which you think Boris's personal agenda wouldn't be aligned with the union's agenda? Well, it's a very odd relationship, actually.

I mean, in most unions, the union negotiates a pay scale, and it applies to all bargaining unit employees. In baseball's situation and in all of the professional sports, they've negotiated a floor, and in some sports, they've negotiated a ceiling, but there is no ceiling in baseball for individual players. And then the agents negotiate directly with the clubs once certified by the players association to represent players. And they, they reach the agreement on the individual player contracts. So, you know, Boris does have some individual interests here that may not be

directly aligned with the players association but in terms of the march agreement and enforcing the march agreement i think they're in total alignment they both want pro rata salaries based on the number of games played and that makes sense from both the the association's perspective as i explained and from boris boris's perspective, as I explained, and from Boris's perspective. And I don't know what his contracts are with his individual clients, but it would seem that, you know, he receives a percentage of their contract. And obviously if they're not getting paid, he may not be getting paid either. So obviously he would not want them to be paid less and less than based on, you know, the number of games they

play. So from that perspective, I don't know that they would be divergent on this particular issue. And, you know, in terms of who speaks for the players, I think to an extent, although Boris doesn't get to vote in union meetings, he and the other agents have been acknowledged as agents of the players to speak for them and on their behalf with regard to their salaries, not for their other terms and conditions of employment. The union is the exclusive representative for the other issues. So, you know, I think that they're on parallel tracks. I know that to some people, Boris represents all that is wrong with baseball, or, you know, and agents represent all that is wrong with sports. But, you know, realistically,

players are not lawyers. Players do not have experience negotiating on their own behalf. Some of them do it successfully. Many of them don't when they decide to do it on their own. And I think Boris has done an incredible job on behalf of his clients. Some of those contracts may not have worked out the best for some teams, but those teams have experts on their staff for scouting and projections of players going into the future. And they do their due diligence on all of those things, plus the health of the player. And those teams go into those contracts with eyes wide open. So I don't know that it's Boris's fault that he's very good at his job.

Yeah. So you've laid out some of the ways that this could play out. Do you have any predictions about how it will play out? So I've been in a lot of collective bargaining, probably about 10 term contracts and hundreds of midterm agreements. Only one of them, as I mentioned earlier, was played out in the media. I think that, you know, it's always best when these things are done between the parties behind closed doors, including the membership to make sure that, you know, the union is making its decisions at the table in the best interest of the membership and in the direction the membership wishes to go. I don't mean micromanagement by the membership, but I mean in terms of the general direction. You don't want to

be going in a different direction than the members want you to go. And I think the union has that solidarity here. I think Max Scherzer's statement really reinforced that. I know he is a Boris client, but he's also on the executive board of the union. He's listed on their labor management disclosure reports with the Department of Labor as a player representative. disclosure reports with the Department of Labor as a player representative. And I think he's been involved in these decisions along with the other players who are officers of the union. They seem to be keeping the players involved and abreast of the direction they're going. And it sounds like the players are fully behind the direction the union leadership has gone. So I think from that perspective,

that's a positive because I think it means that the players are retaining their leverage in the negotiations. They're not being split. Management's proposal was essentially an attempt to pit the highest paid players against the vast majority of the bargaining unit who make at or closer to the minimum. And so I think that the fact that they're not being split actually bodes well for negotiations. I would also say that, you know, the union's proposal to put the commissioner's office on the defensive a bit by saying, well, it says we're not going to reopen on pay. We have an agreement on that. We know you're not going to reopen on who has authority to set the schedule and whether or not games are played at all. And so why don't we just take those issues off the table like they should have been from the beginning? And so why don't we just take those issues off the table like they should have been from the beginning, and let's move forward on the health and safety issues? Because I think those, the parties have mutual interests. And if you focus on the mutual interests rather than trying to take advantage of a party in a crisis, you're going to reach agreement.

Now that that preliminary posturing has passed us, I hope, that they do have an opportunity to reach agreement on the issues that actually stand before them. And, you know, it obviously takes whatever the rules are behind closed doors among the baseball clubs themselves about how to authorize the commissioner to make an agreement. And on the same token, the union has its rules on what the negotiators on their side are allowed to agree to. But as long as their interests are aligned or at least overlapping, they should be able to reach agreement. And so let's say there is an agreement to start the season, but that some players still have concerns about the safety aspects of it. Could you tell us about the legal and practical considerations that would go into a player deciding to opt out of reporting to play? Sure. So, you know, it actually becomes pretty complicated. And I would assume the parties are looking at that from a collective bargaining perspective in terms of what rights the players have to elect not to participate. allows employees to have reasonable accommodations if they have a disability or medical condition that restricts a major life activity. In this case, the major life activity would be working.

If you are a player who is immunocompromised, there might not be any health and safety protocols that the parties can put in place that would keep you safe in this circumstance. And so players who have or are currently receiving cancer treatments, players who have had organs removed, things like that, they may fall under the ADA's protections. And so the parties should contemplate that in their negotiations and figuring out a way to allow those employees to opt out of playing without losing anything, whether that's service time, obviously something that the players want to protect, whereas management won't want to pay people for not working. And so figuring out those issues would be part of the

collective bargaining process. Then, of course, you have things like the Family Medical Leave Act, which allow people to take unpaid time off up to, I believe it's 12 weeks, in the event of a serious health condition for themselves or a member of their family. So if a player has someone at home who is ill or pregnant, a lot of players have pregnant wives, and they may not want to play for that reason. So they could take Family Medical Leave Act time and take unpaid leave from work in order to care for that ill spouse or spouse who has a medical condition related to pregnancy. So those are things that I think the parties need to contemplate while they're at the table, because those are things that they know are, they're in the known universe.

They're not something that should surprise anybody. And I think they could deal with those things through collective bargaining to ensure that those employees have their rights under the various statutes, while at the same time dealing with all of the specific issues that relate to baseball, like service time, salary, etc. So we're watching this play out and it's contentious enough, but it is in some ways a prologue to the upcoming CBA negotiations, which just in case we thought we were going to get out from under labor discord are coming up. How do you think that this very contentious short-term negotiation is going to affect

those negotiations, if at all? Well, you know, the odd thing to me about baseball negotiations is that every time there seems to be some kind of struggle between the parties. I know that there's been relative labor peace since 1995, and I credit the parties for that. But there are always these issues behind the scenes that seem to be playing out very negatively. And I think in terms of the 2022 negotiations, I think that management, again, will try to move forward with some kind of revenue sharing agreement. They should probably realize coming out of this that that's a non-starter. I think that's the exact words that Tony Clark used publicly, but it seems they don't learn that. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because of the

turnover among ownership. Perhaps it's because that's their long-term goal and they're never going to give up on it. You know, I think that there are always things that the parties need to change in a contract because they're not working. They're not working for one side or the other, for the employees or for management. And, you know, those are the things that should be back on the table in any term contract negotiation. But the things that do work between the parties shouldn't be an issue. You shouldn't try to fix something if it is working. And I know from the player's perspective that they're upset about service time manipulation. They lost the Chris Bryant grievance over that issue. I know that there are a lot of concerns about tanking and what that means with relation

to, are there going to be teams that pay their full roster of players, the league minimum, teams that pay their full roster of players the league minimum for a number of years and therefore not engage in free agent market because that's not at least what the players contemplated with the free agent market when it was established and through its initial probably 30 to 40 years of history. And I think the players are also concerned about the arbitration process. When is it triggered? How effective is it? Do they have to make changes to it? And I'm sure there are other things that aren't reported in the media that each party is concerned about. But, you know, I would say that they did well working jointly on the updates. Once the parties decided jointly to work on the question

of drug testing, that was something that they were very successful at and have updated several times. I think with the domestic violence policy, they have amended that several times successfully. They have amended that several times successfully. And I think part of that is they have mutual interest there on both issues. And so finding their mutual interest is a way to achieve some kind of stability in the bargaining relationship. different than negotiating a car deal. When you buy a car, you're going in and you're negotiating with the dealer over a number of things. They bring in that backroom manager who's supposed to be scary and they try to upsell you on all kinds of extended warranties and treatments and different things. And once you get out of there, you're not bound to that dealer anymore. You have the car, they have your money, and that's that. You're done. The relationship's over. In collective bargaining, not only are you negotiating an agreement that's going to last three or five

years or however long it does, but then you're going to be back renegotiating that deal again. And you have to live with each other through the entirety of the deal. And then you have to live with each other into the next deal and the agreement after that. It's not something that is one and done. So even if you win a negotiation and you achieve everything you wanted, and maybe even you make it a bad deal for the other party, you have to live with their unhappiness for the term of the agreement. And that's not necessarily going to be a good thing because you have to work together for that entire time. And then you have to get back together and you know that they're going to be upset and you know what things they're going to be upset about. So really, because it's a long-term relationship, I mean, it's labor

relations. It's not, you know, a short-term contract on a sale of a car. You know, they should be able to anticipate what the other party is seeking and figure out in their own back room as they're preparing for negotiations, should we present this? Should we realize that they're not going to accept it no matter what argument we make? And should we present something that's more reasonable and more attractive and something that gets us closer to a deal at the offset. I know that a lot of people go into negotiations with a bad offer because they think, oh, if I give a bad offer that's completely one-sided, they're going to have to come to me. Well, no, I think ultimately you're going to reach the same solution no matter what. It's just a question of how you get there and whether

you ruin the relationship in the process. Right. So if we can close with a couple of questions about the minor leagues, you tweeted that there may have been a specific financial reason that so many minor leaguers were released all at once this week. Just to quote you, you said under the Paycheck Protection Program of the CARES Act, the teams received forgivable loans to carry them and all employees for 60 days, meaning as soon as the grants expired, they stopped paying the players.

So maybe that had something to do with the timing, but of course the sort of systemic underpayment of minor leaguers is partly a product of the fact that they are not unionized, that they don't have someone representing them. So I wonder whether you think the MLBPA has any obligation or incentive to look after minor leaguers and amateur players instead of using them as essentially a bargaining chip to extract concessions for themselves. So under the law, unions have a duty of fair representation

to employees in their bargaining unit. They have no duty to those employees who are outside of their bargaining unit. And the Players Association is only certified by the National Labor Relations Board to represent the employees on the 40-man roster. So anyone not on the 40-man roster is outside their duty of fair representation. So from their legal perspective, they don't have to do anything for the minor leaguers. And in fact, the commissioner's office has no duty to bargain with the Players Association over the rights and benefits for minor league players. And if the Players Association started negotiating on behalf of them without being their certified exclusive representative, that would be a different problem for both parties, both the union and management.

both the union and management. Now, in terms of general labor, should the Players Association allow the minor leaguers to be taken advantage of? I think there's a couple of difficult issues there because, and I understand the Players Association says there may be a conflict of interest between the major league players and minor league players with respect to dividing up the pie and other factors. But as a trade unionist, I would say you don't want to benefit yourselves by stepping on another employee. So I think that the minor leaguers should be organized into a union. I think they would be better served that way. I think what happened with the Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuit was despicable, where Major League Baseball went to Congress and had a provision slipped into the appropriations bill that made them exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act for minimum wage, and had there been a union representing minor league players, I don't think that would have occurred. So, you know, I see the treatment of minor leaguers as wholly problematic. That said, I think it's very difficult to organize them under the National

Labor Relations Act because they are employees who change employers so frequently. And I think that even if you file for an election of, let's say, players in rookie ball, by the time you get to an election, those players are no longer employees of those clubs, for example. And, you know, if you did that in low A, if you did that in high A, if you did that in double A, or any particular league, whether it be the Texas League or the International League, the players may not be employees of their employer anymore by the time you get to an election, which could potentially void the election. And I think the other issue there is how broad a bargaining unit are you going to seek? Because you need to have a 30 percent showing of interest under the National Labor Relations Act to even get an election, if you were to seek all minor leaguers who are not represented by the

Major League Players Association under their certification, you're looking at a really large group of employees and in diverse physical locations. So it makes it very difficult to get a petition or a card signed by all of those players to ask for an election. If you did it more on a league basis, let's say you went to organize the International League, you know, you might have people demoted back to AA. You might have people promoted onto a 40-man roster. And even within that more finite group that you're organizing, you might have some difficulty getting to an election just because the turnover at all of the levels is so profound over the course of a six-month period. Well, you anticipated what was going to be our last question, which was about the obstacles to unionizing minor leaguers. So I think we can end there very thorough. And you can find Eugene, as many people have, on Twitter this week, at Eugene Friedman.

And you can count on his continuing coverage and insights there as these negotiations proceed. as these negotiations proceed. So thank you very much for being a voice that is well-informed on a lot of these issues that some of us are not so well-informed on, and thank you for coming on today. Thank you both. One more sad baseball-related loss of this week was Foley's, a pub in New York on West 33rd Street in Manhattan. It's a sports bar, but it's really a baseball bar. Literally, it's full of signed baseballs, baseballball memorabilia everywhere. Baseball's always on. I'm not a big drinker or much of a bar fly, but I've still had some good times in Foley's. We had some baseball prospectus events there when Travis and I launched the MVP machine last June. We had an opening night event at Foley's where we signed books and answered questions. And I know that some of our

listeners in the New York area have had effectively wild meetups at Foley's. But for now, it looks like it's going to have to close. It hasn't been open, but even if it were to open now, there's no sports at the moment. There aren't many office workers. There are no tourists. And it sounds like their lease situation just makes it untenable to stay there.

So maybe they'll be able to open up in some other space. But for New York area people who love baseball and love congregating with baseball fans it's quite a loss and i'm sure that even if you're not in new york and even if you've never been to foley's there's probably somewhere in your neighborhood that might be in a sort of similar spot it's pretty tough to be a baseball bar without baseball and i also wanted to read an email that we got from listener and patreon supporter henry who was responding to my discussion with Sam on the last episode about porting hockey's three stars system over to baseball. So picking three stars of the game, regardless of whether they were on the winning team or the losing team, and just recognizing their contributions, which you can do and vote

on at Fangraphs. And Henry writes, with due respect to your good discussion of the statistical validity of the three star stat, I think you missed the benefit to the in-stadium fan experience of hockey and the possible value to the in-stadium experience of baseball. At the end of a hockey game, the three stars are announced and each one steps back onto the ice for a little curtain call. It remains, after 30-plus years of hockey fandom, one of my favorite parts of the game. It's a nice little coda to the action, an immediate chance to remember some of the good stuff, and it occurs in victory or defeat, so even in a loss, you can applaud a good performance. And because there are three, there's room to highlight a player of less renown and

raise fan awareness. You clap, you turn to your friend and say, yeah, he played a good game or great assist in the second period, and then you know it's time to go home. In baseball, the game winning batter is often asked to make some awkward stadium announcement yielding too many, I couldn't have done it without the best fans in the world, hyperbole. But the three stars with three mini curtain calls, helmet waggles, rolling a ball over to the dugout to a kid, whatever, might be a fun, small, easy way to build fan relationships with less high-profile players. The guy who threw one and two-thirds big innings could get his moment, along with the three-run homer dude. For a sport whose players can't seem to build profile, it might be a tiny boost.

Good stat? No. Fun? Yup. That's a good point. That sounds like a really nice post-game ritual. So thanks to Henry for sharing his hockey fan expertise. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have signed up already to help keep the podcast going while getting themselves access to some perks. Frank Grafe, Randy Ackerman, Joel, Kelly, and Mitchell Dixon. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group

at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes or your podcast platform of choice. Keep your questions for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins, as always, for his editing assistance. We hope you have a swell weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. Thank you.