Rob Manfred boasted last month as chief negotiator, boasting impeccable experience in collective bargaining: four labor deals and no missed games since his hiring at Major League Baseball in 1998. If anyone has a problem with him now, Manfred has strongly suggested : was on them.
He still believes it. On Tuesday in Jupiter, Florida, Manfred, the MLB commissioner, announced that he had canceled the first two series of the regular season, a victim of the lockout that began three months ago. Manfred insisted last month that the cancellation of the games would be a “catastrophic result” for the sport, but he would not be the owner of the disaster – or regretted failing to win the trust of players as complaints grew and tensions rose. smoldering.
“Look, what I would say is that we struck a chord in some early negotiations over the five-year period,” Manfred said. “There was a lot of rhetoric about dissatisfaction with the deal they made. Much of the rhetoric was negative about the clubs, the commissioner’s office, me. This environment was created by someone else. And this is an environment where bridges are difficult to build. “
If you can’t build them, burn them.
With rising league revenues, wages have fallen. The Union has given up too much space in past deals, and sharp front offices have found ways to use the system. For almost every team, the luxury tax threshold has served as a salary cap. And for all the extras that Manfred and the owners provided in their final offer on Tuesday, they needed to know he was dead on arrival.
The league’s insistence on raising the luxury tax threshold by just $ 10 million to $ 220 million and keeping it at that level for three years said it all. Opposing the salary ceiling is the first commandment for all true believers in the orthodoxy of players. The offer was designed to be rejected by the union and its CEO, former player Tony Clark.
“Look, we have a problem with wage mismatches,” Manfred explained. “And the weakening of the only mechanism in the agreement, which is designed to promote a kind of competitive balance, is just something I don’t think the club is ready to do right now.
Ownership worries about the competitive balance in every labor negotiation, but it becomes a difficult sale. Over the past ten seasons, the Missouri teams have combined to win more World Series (2) than the Los Angeles Dodgers and Yankees (1). Meanwhile, the Yankees and Dodgers have teamed up to spend more than $ 2 billion on the St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals.
Obviously, it’s easier to win with a bigger budget. But some small market teams deserve to be mats because of bad decisions. No one has forced the Pittsburgh Pirates to exchange three dynamic young players in Tampa Bay for Chris Archer. No one has forced the Baltimore Orioles to gut their international talent budget so they can build around Chris Davis.
The union wanted luxury tax thresholds to start at $ 238 million in 2022 and rise to $ 263 million by 2026. With rising franchises and lucrative cable and streaming contracts, this hardly seems like a scandalous request. Still, the league’s offer peaked at $ 230 million in 2026. Even close.
Manfred is tasked with directing the 30 club owners, each with their own agenda, to a common vision. Then he has to build a relationship with the union, which aims to get more money from his bosses. If he is too comfortable with the players, he loses his influence with the owners.
Think Faye Vincent, the last commissioner to lead a lockout in March, who came in 1990. Vincent realizes that the union doesn’t trust his office for a good reason – the owners conspired illegally against the players to suppress the free agency in the 1980s. those years. Vincent needed a deputy who could work effectively with the union’s executive director, Donal Fer, and he hired Steve Greenberg, whom Fer respected deeply.
“The only person on the part of the owners, including me, who trusted Don Fer was Steve Greenberg,” Vincent, 83, recalled by phone Tuesday at his home in Vero Beach, Florida. “So they went into a small room next to my office on Park Avenue. They were gone for about an hour, and they came back and said, “We shook hands on these issues. Let’s explain what they are and hopefully both sides agree.
“Some of the owners disagreed; they wanted to stay and fight, but calmer heads prevailed. And my lesson from this, after all, is that these negotiations come down to one or two people on each side who decide to bury the issue of morality – who’s right, who’s wrong – and look at it, just ruthlessly, financially, and say “We can” don’t go on, because if we do, we’ll get hurt. We ruin our own lunch and our own dinner, and that never makes sense. ”
The parties came together, moved the regular season back a week and played a full schedule of 162 games in 1990. But the owners never forgave Vincent, replacing him two years later and replacing him with one of their own, Bud Selig, then owner. of Milwaukee Brewers.
If the deal didn’t work, the owners thought, they could ruin the union by pushing for a wage ceiling in 1994. The players held firm with a strike that canceled this year’s World Series, and the owners used substitutes for next spring’s training session. An order from a federal judge in New York’s Southern District – Sonia Sotomayor, the future judge of the United States Supreme Court – was needed to stop this farce and start the sport again.
It’s the kind of shadowy story that players struggle with, and for all his confidence, Manfred hasn’t convinced players that the owners really see them as partners. This was a failure of the leadership and put an end to the Commissioner’s winning streak.
Now that the league and union are taking a break from nine days of failed negotiations, Vincent says fans should too.
“As Ukraine is, it may be a good time to put baseball in the shadows,” he said. “The rest of the country needs to focus on real things. And baseball is fun. This is a game. I mean, it’s really not life-threatening. “