In this game of stubbornness, Atlanta Braves fans lose.
‘Just tell us when to report’ is essentially the only message delivered this weekend, so barring a last-minute stunning miracle, it appears the talking is done and we’ll so be able to see our Atlanta Braves on a field within the next month.
We’ll have baseball, but nobody is going to be particularly happy about how we got there. The MLB Players Association was unable to get the league and its owners to budge on their position of multiplying various numbers of games vs. pro-rated percentage reductions.
Meanwhile, the MLB was unable to break the union’s resolve in holding fast to a demand for 100% pro-rated pay for each game played.
As a result, the battle lines are now drawn for what inevitably will be a grievance filing that will go to an arbitrator… and that game could take years before an outcome is decided.
My own position all along has been that the owners have been holding all of the cards here: the March 26 agreement put the ball firmly in their court, allowing both health and financial “out clauses” to allow them to re-open the debate on this 100% pro-rated pay that both sides did agree to at the time.
However, I believe I overlooked something, and there may have been a long-term plan by the union that they will now try to exploit in a hearing room.
A part of this may be a union assertion that MLB never intended to honor the 100% pro-ration provision. Ever since that was agreed to, MLB has been arguing that this clause was based on the best of all possible scenarios for fans-in-the-stands and an essentially perfect health-and-safety scenario – conditions that clearly weren’t possible even as the ink was drying on the March agreement.
Subsequent offers of 82, 76, and 50 games (with various percentages tied to the payroll) also suggests that MLB failed to live up to the intended desire to play as many games as possible.
I think owners would have difficult time defending a 48- game implemented season to an arbitrator considering this clause agreed to in the March 26th document: "MLB will propose a schedule “using best efforts to play as many games as possible…” Propose 72..then implement 48?
— Jim Bowden⚾️🏈 (@JimBowdenGM) June 12, 2020
Thus, the union will make a claim that MLB was never negotiating in good faith. But that’s not the ultimate goal here from their perspective.
What the union wants is something they have been demanding for decades: the open books.
Sure – there are various aspects of team finances that they do have access to. But the belief has always been that there’s more that they want to see and can’t get… the full transparency that has been denied countless times.
The Players Association wants now to demand that the owners back up their claims of financial hardship and game-by-game losses by proving it in front of an arbitrator. This is their end-game: to demand the numbers they’ve been unable to see.
The initial proposal was for an 82-game season with that draconian ‘sliding scale’ tax that punished the top earners. The response was “let’s play 114 games, but keep the 100% pro-rated pay”.
MLB went the other way: 50 games for 100% while claiming that they lost money on each regular-season game and that they had to get to the playoffs (thus the impetus toward an expanded playoff plan) to make any money… so long as the season ended soon enough.
But MLB never proved any of those assertions about losses, and that’s exactly what the MLBPA is now going to demand front-and-center as part of any grievance hearing.
It’s going to cost the players some money – that much is certain. As noted on our most recent Atlanta Braves podcast, I congratulated union boss Tony Clark that he’s going to get exactly what he wanted: 100% pro-rated pay for his members… out of a pie that’s only 30% of the whole.
But the goal apparently wasn’t this negotiation. It was all about the next one: the Collective Bargaining Agreement battle coming up in 18 months. The union wants these numbers to get the inside scoop on how baseball’s math adds up. They want to use this against MLB.
It’s a calculated gamble. They might still not see everything expected. The choice of the arbitrator will be key and things will still have to play out as the union hopes. It’s not a slam dunk.
But all along this process, the union maintained the same position throughout. It’s possible an arbitrator will look at that and declare that they were the ones not operating in good faith as a result. The union’s counter will be “but we held to the March agreement and they didn’t.”
Meanwhile, baseball and its fans suffered. Grab extra popcorn, folks. You’ll see Atlanta Braves games in another month, but this courtroom game will take a lot longer to complete.