Will Players Be Willing to Stand Up For Themselves?

So much is being written and debated concerning MLB ownership’s unwillingness to spend on free agency, whether the big ticket guys like Machado and Harper, or more middle of the pack veterans.

The players’ union obviously got completely dominated in the last couple of rounds of negotiations over the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Limits on amatuer player signing bonuses, limits on international player bonuses and a completely ineffective policy on artificially restricting service time are all evidence of just how impotent the MLBPA has been.

Now, everyone talks about how baseball is broken, because clubs “tank” and justify it with fans as an effective way to “rebuild.”

But can anyone really expect things to change? Given the history of players failing to agree to act in a unified manner, can we really expect to see much change in the next round of CBA negotiations? In fact, it may already be too late for players to get their acts together by the time the current agreement expires following the 2021 season. Players can’t just wait until parties are sitting at the negotiating table. If they do, they’ve already lost.

There’s a terrific article by Michael Baumann over at The Ringer that describes just how difficult it will be for the players to make any progress in the next CBA and why a work stoppage might be their only recourse. He argues that players need to immediately start publicly calling out their ownerships for non-competititve practices. Putting their case in front of the fans, however, is just the start.

“But it’s not enough for players to win over the fans—they have to present a united front within the union as well. Whether deliberately or through extremely fortuitous coincidence, MLB teams have put financial solidarity above the desire to compete. But players are routinely encouraged to go above and beyond the strict call of duty in order to gain an edge over their competitors. Being the self-motivated, hypercompetitive folks that they are, athletes usually oblige, by accepting team-friendly contracts, putting in extra hours training, or agreeing to wear biometric monitors and trading privacy for a perceived competitive edge.”

Similarly, ESPN’s Buster Olney published a New Years Eve article (behind ESPN paywall) that disclosed content of a memo that Buster Posey’s agent, Jeff Berry, has been distributing that outlines some actions that players should consider taking to bring attention to the players’ issues and prepare themselves (and fans) for the upcoming labor battle.

Among the suggestions are what are known as “work to rule” actions, including:

  • Players refusing to report earlier for Spring Training than the contractually mandated day of February 23.
  • Players refusing to participate in non-contractually mandated team events such as fan fests.
  • Players and agents not attending MLB’s Winter Meetings.
  • Players boycotting MLB-owned media outlets, such as MLB.com and the MLB Network.

Berry’s memo also proposes that players take a page out of the front offices’ playbook, by funding, “a comprehensive study that analytically supports recommended guidelines for player usage for the stated purpose of maximizing health and performance, maintaining/improving tools and athleticism, and mitigating age- and usage-related decline. Basically, a reverse-engineering of the aging curves and usage rates that teams are currently weaponizing against the players.”

In other words, stop letting teams get all the benefit of statistical analysis, especially when the result includes practices detrimental to the players, such as the service time maninpulation that the Minnesota Twins did with Byron Buxton in September when they decided not to promote him, thereby assuring they would benefit from an extra year of his services before he becomes a free agent.

Berry argued that, “Front offices are praised as ‘smart’ when working within the rules to extract maximum performance value for minimal monetary cost. Shouldn’t players also be ‘smart’ and likewise make calculated decisions within the rules to maintain and extend their maximum performance levels at maximum monetary values?”

Obviously Berry and the authors of these articles are right. The only way the owners and front offices will discontinue the offending practices will be if they are forced to. And they won’t be forced to by the players politely asking for change at the negotiating table in 2021.

The question is, will players unify enough between now and then to take actions such as those being suggested?

Would players ever follow one agent’s suggest to avoid events like off-season fan fests and caravans? (Photo by Steve Buhr)

Can you imagine your favorite Twins players staying away from Twins Fest? The established players already no longer participate in the Twins Caravan, but what happens to the caravans if NO players agree to participate?

Would minor league players also agree to stand with their MLB counterparts and not participate in Twins Fest and the Caravans… even though the union they’d be asked to support has done absolutely nothing to improve the plight of minor leaguers (in fact, often giving away concessions on minor league pay and bonuses in order to get more favorable terms for big league players)?

In the past, it has been almost impossible to get superstars making $20 million a year, veterans trying to get a couple extra million dollars and young players still under club control to agree on any unified strategy. They fight amonst themselves and, even when they can agree, they’ve failed miserably at getting the fans behind them. (Hard to imagine boycotting fan fests would help in that area unless, as Berry suggests, they get together to hold similar player-organized events.)

If players can’t – or won’t – do what’s necessary between now and 2021 to lay the groundwork for a more balanced negotiation with owners, it’s difficult to imagine the next CBA being anything significantly more competition-encouraging than the current version.

But if the players won’t do what’s obviously necessary to improve their situations, it will be hard to feel too sorry for them when they end up stuck with another half-decade or more of similarly one-sided business practices by owners.

The players have themselves to blame for the ownership practices they find offensive because they allowed their union to be steamrolled. If they allow it again, it will just reinforce how individually selfish and short-sighted they are and they’ll deserve exactly what they get.

4 Replies to “Will Players Be Willing to Stand Up For Themselves?”

  1. Good article, thanks. To me, your most intriguing question is “Would minor league players also agree to stand with their MLB counterparts and not participate in Twins Fest and the Caravans?” Obviously I don’t know the answer and it probably varies by person, but I can certainly imagine a front office saying that minor leaguers participating will get an invite to the major league camp.

  2. Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.

    That would be one motivation FOR the minor leaguer to participate.

    But it would also potentially put them at odds with future teammates once they get promoted to the big leagues. Would they be viewed as a less dramatic form of ‘scab’? True, they wouldn’t be doing anything as objectionable as crossing a picket line, but they would have made appearances on behalf of the team that union members were intentionally not participating in as a part of a labor disagreement.

    Dicey stuff, potentially, for a young guy to deal with.

  3. I have no issue with what the owners are doing. These long term deals and opt outs are not good for the game. A player strike? The players are too greedy to pass up a paycheck or two. I think history has shown the MLB players care only about themselves and don’t give a hoot about the players that came before them nor the up and coming minor league players.

  4. I think you’re probably right, John. It’s hard to imagine a majority of the players getting behind a strike. If I were running the union, though, I might look at some of the “work to rule” actions to get an idea of how players would react.