Author Topic: Baseball labor dispute and potential strike in 2021  (Read 350 times)

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Offline Dave in Fairfax

  • Posts: 2016
I have been predicting this for a while. Free agency is to me the biggest issue. I think players accepted a certain period of team control with the expectation that they would make up for that in free agency. It was an unwritten assumption, though Jose Bautista made it explicit when he said players did expect payment based on past performance. With more analytically-driven teams refusing to pay for older players, that unwritten system has broken down. So the CBA negotiations are likely to include a demand for earlier free agency. Since the teams do have a valid argument that team control is the benefit they receive for assuming the risk of player development, each side has a position they are likely to stick to, increasing the risk of a strike.

Tanking teams is a somewhat related issue, since it reduces the number of teams willing to bid on free agents, but I am not sure how a new CBA could address that. Joel Sherman recently mentioned limiting the number of years a team could get better draft picks to reduce the incentive to go into multi-year "rebuilds"; that may be an option.

I believe the owners may be expecting that they will need to compromise on the team control issue, and the minor league reforms are their way of getting ahead of the issue and cutting player development costs. They would also be inclined to shift much more of the player development burden to the NCAA and colleges, as with the NBA and NFL. There would still be some need for the minors, since even four full years of college ball wouldn't prepare most players for the MLB grind.

Expanding the DH to the NL might be another matter addressed in the next CBA, but I don't think there is a huge disagreement between players and owners on this. It is more among fans.