I mean, MLB would never do it. But if they did and the players didn't report, it would become a strike. Which would be an interesting PR pivot.
Baumann sums it up pretty well here too:
Hereâs the way the system is supposed to work: Players work their way up through the minor leagues, and once theyâre in a position to help the big league team win, they get promoted to the majors. For three years, they make the league minimum, maybe a little more. Years four through six, they get paid an escalating percentage of their value, either by agreement with the team or as determined by an arbitrator. Thereafter, players cash in on the open market, and the best and most senior players make up for being underpaid in their early- to mid-20s. (Whether that framework is fair is up for debate, but thatâs how it was designed to function.)
In the past decade, however, ownership has perverted the arbitration-to-free-agency timeline. Baseballâs empirical revolution has revealed that players are more productive earlier in their careers than previously realized. So rather than spend money on expensive 30-year-old free agents, teams have loaded up on cheaper 25-year-olds and held players down in the minor leagues longer than necessary to prevent the clock from starting on their salary raisesâa practice that is at best a legal gray area, and at worst a violation of the CBA (even if itâs proved difficult to enforce).
As for small-market teams, like the Pirates and Orioles, theyâve realized that the rules designed to protect themârevenue sharing, the competitive balance tax, and the draftâactually allow them to turn a profit without making an effort to win. Thanks to the billions of dollars in annual leaguewide broadcasting revenue, a team can run a rock-bottom payroll, lose 100 games a year, and still come out in the black.
A week ago, Rich Hill outlined the problem to Sean McAdam of Boston Sports Journal: âWeâre in a situation where teams get this revenue money, shared throughout the league, but theyâre not spending it on players and trying to get better. The fans are paying their hard-earned money to go see a major league product and theyâre not getting that in some cases now. Thatâs not ideal for the industry, and itâs not fair to the fans.â
These ownership practices have heavily damaged free agency, which, to work properly, requires most teams to be making a good-faith effort to win in the near future. Absent that, we get the kind of capital strike that doughnut-holed the offseasons from 2016 to 2019 and the stagnation of wages across the board even as the league set new revenue records every year up until the pandemic. Meanwhile, the average experience of an MLB player, measured in service time, dropped from 4.79 years in 2003 to 3.71 years in 2019. And thanks to repeated ferrying between the minors and majors, the median player made just over the minimum salary in 2019.
