In a must-read report for The Athletic, Marc Carig takes a deep look at MLB’s salary arbitration system, wherein teams and players with the required amount of service time negotiate or squabble to settle on salaries. The whole thing is well worth your time, and it includes this outrageous detail:
[B]efore the meeting adjourns, they’ll celebrate an unsung hero in this battle over dollars. The ceremony ends with the presentation of a replica championship belt, awarded by the league to the team that did most to “achieve the goals set by the industry.” In other words: The team that did the most to keep salaries down in arbitration.
There’s a belt! There’s an actual freakin’ championship belt that people representing MLB teams give out every year to the team that does the best work suppressing player salaries in arbitration. The league even admitted as much in a statement to Carig.
And, look, you’d be kidding yourself if you thought MLB teams all good-heartedly wanted to ensure every player on their roster got fair pay for their contributions. The whole Moneyball thing that filled up front offices with smart business bros in slick suits is predicated on finding the most efficient ways for a team to spend money, and it is both within teams’ rights and generally to their benefits to suppress salaries by every means possible, either so they can reallocate that money to improve the elsewhere or so they can thrill owners with better profit margins.
But I think the word we’re looking for here is: Slimy. It’s slimy.
Ultimately there are a lot more smart business bros in slick suits in this world than there are guys who can crush massive homers against Major League pitching, and even in an era of front-office fetishization, I don’t think there are a lot of fans who ultimately root for executives more than they do the players in uniform doing cool baseball stuff.
And it’s just a horrible look for these people to be patting each other on the back for doing the best job taking money out of other people’s pockets. Also, if we’re being honest, super nerdy.
C’mon. A wrestling belt? Players do stuff like that in the clubhouse for guys who hit walk-off bombs, sure, but a big macho championship belt for getting the most out of Microsoft Excel? I’m a nerd myself, but that feels too poser-ish to me. And the rewards for being the best front office are already built right in: Your team’s going to win, or you’re at least going to make some billionaire a bunch of extra money, and people are going to want to hire you to do bigger and more lucrative front-office jobs.
The salary arbitration process is hardly the most egregious instance of teams taking advantage of their players, but Carig’s report highlights the growing labor discontent among players in practically all phases of their careers, and further exposes something that has become increasingly obvious over the past few months: The whole system needs an overhaul.
Like a lot of MLB’s financial particulars, the arbitration process has been in place since the early 1970s, and it seems like simply amending and adjusting isn’t going to work anymore. There’s too much money in the game, too much talent in clubhouses and front offices both, and now, too much suspicion and anger to keep the current structures in place.
