Three days of negotiations in Texas did not provide any hope that Major League Baseball can avoid its first work stoppage in 27 years as the league’s owners are expected Thursday morning to lock out the players shortly after the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement at midnight EST.
“Being at the seat at the table and hearing the tone of the negotiations, the lockout seems like a very likely scenario,” said pitcher Max Scherzer, who finalized his record-setting $130 million contract with the Mets on Wednesday while taking part in the negotiations with the league as part of the union’s leadership.
Rosters will be frozen during the lockout as teams will be forbidden from making any transactions or even speaking publicly about major league players. The league’s last work stoppage was a players’ strike that canceled the 1994 World Series and the last lockout was a 32-day stoppage in the winter of 1990 that delayed spring training.
Spring training is still more than two months away, allowing time for the league and union to come to an agreement without disrupting any preparations for the new season. But optimism will wane the longer the labor dispute drags out. The two parties seem entrenched in their beliefs, making it possible to imagine this lockout extending into at least the start of spring training.
“We have a pretty good war chest behind us of money that we can allocate to players who would need it for certain situations,” Scherzer said of the ability to persuade the players who are not multi-millionaires that they can survive an extended work stoppage. “... For the last five years, we’ve been kind of thinking that we would need as big a war chest as possible coming into this.
“Best-case scenario would be to not tap it. Hopefully we can get a deal at some point in time, but as players we are steadfast in our belief of how we see the game.”
The players, unhappy about the outcome of the CBA that was signed in November of 2016, are looking for a bigger cut of the league’s revenue. The average salary has declined as many franchises have constructed teams with younger and cheaper talent while rebuilding their rosters, making it difficult for veterans and mid-tier players to find a place. Too many teams, the union believes, are not actively trying to build winning clubs.
Scherzer, who will earn the highest-average annual value for a pitcher at $43.3 million, chided teams for viewing the Competitive Balance Tax as a salary cap and refusing to eclipse it. Altering the CBT — and perhaps even eliminating it — is a key point of the negotiations.
The tax is charged to teams that exceed a predetermined payroll threshold. Last year’s threshold was $210 million and teams will be notified this week if they exceeded it. The Phillies have never paid it. The tax penalties begin with a 20% tax on overages and can grow to include the loss of draft selections and international free-agent money.
“First and foremost, we see a competition problem and how certain teams are behaving because of certain rules that are within that,” Scherzer said. “Adjustments have to be made because of that to bring up the competition. As players, that’s highly critical to us to have a highly-competitive league and when we don’t have that, we have issues.”
This year’s lockout caused an unusual flurry of activity in the last week as some teams rushed to sign free-agents. Teams combined Wednesday to spend more than $1 billion on free agents.
The Rangers pledged a combined $500 million to infielders Corey Seager and Marcus Semien, the Mets spent $130 million on Scherzer, and the Tigers signed Javier Baez for $140 million. The Phillies jumped into the fray by signing reliever Corey Knebel on Wednesday afternoon to a one-year deal worth $10 million.
The weeks leading up to the winter meetings, which were scheduled to begin Monday in Orlando but will be canceled, are usually slow for player movement. And the movement has crawled at an even slower pace in recent winters. This year, teams were motivated by the deadline of the looming lockout.
“This was actually kind of fun,” Scherzer said. “I’m a fan of the game and watching everyone sign right now and to see teams actually competing in this timely fashion, it’s been refreshing because we’ve seen free-agent freezes for the last several offseasons. It’s been frustrating as a fan to watch that like ‘When are these guys going to sign?’”
After a busy few days, baseball is lining up for a quiet winter. And no one is quite sure how long the silence will last.
“We have something in our rules that creates non-competitiveness,” said agent Scott Boras, who represents Scherzer and many top players including Bryce Harper. “It creates something that drives down fan interest. All of those things need to be addressed and addressed immediately because the whole integrity of the game needs to be back to where it was where there is an incentive to go to the ballpark and win everyday.”
