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MLB Players Association visits Red Sox as labor talks set to soon begin
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- MLB Players Association visits Red Sox as labor talks set to soon begin
FORT MYERS, Fla. – The current collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball owners and the MLB Players Association doesn’t expire for another eight months, but with negotiations taking place soon, the union is visiting spring training camps this month. On Friday, it was the Red Sox’ turn.
“We’re spending a lot of time talking about upcoming bargaining,” said new executive director Bruce Meyer, “and the guys have a lot of questions.”
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It widely believed that, absent a new agreement before Dec. 1, owners will, for the second time in the last five years, lock out the players as a way to jump-start labor talks.
“Nobody wants to miss games. Certainly players don’t want to miss game,” said Meyer. “I think players understand, though, that everything they have in their system results from some previous generation of players either missing games or being willing to miss games, to fight for what they believed was the right thing.
“It’s not an outcome that we’re trying to bring about or that anybody would be happy about. But at the end of the day, it’s the league that’s likely going to be doing the lockout. Things that players believe are worth fighting for are things they have to be willing to miss games for if necessary. But it’s not something any of us thinks is a good thing.”
Meyer believes negotiations will begin in earnest in either April or May. The most contentious issue is the owners’ push for a salary cap, which the Players Association has long opposed.
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“We think the salary cap is actually bad for fans,” said Meyer. “A cap is fundamentally anti-competitive. It prevents teams from doing what they think is in the best interest of their team to help put a better product on the field. A salary cap is a form of collusion, institutionalized collusion, which allows teams to use it as an excuse as opposed to putting better teams on the field.
“I would say it’s bad for players. None of the unions in the other sports have a salary cap because they think it’s a good system for players. That’s not how they arrived at that. They’ve broken unions in other sports to get it. It’s a cap on players’ salaries, which is very obviously not a good thing from a player’s perspective.”
Meyer added that a cap would also, among other things, effectively eliminate guaranteed contracts and limit freedom of movement.
The union contends that, despite revenue sharing to help boost small-market teams, too many refuse to invest in the on-field product and instead use the payments for profit.
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“We want to incentivize and reward teams that compete,” said Meyer.
Meyer pointed to the game’s competitive balance as further evidence that a cap is unnecessary, including the fact that the Milwaukee Brewers, playing in MLB’s smallest market, last year had the game’s best regular season record.
Meyer has a hard time understanding why owners would want to shut down the game after MLB set attendance and revenue records last season, culminating with one of the best World Series of all time, along with increases in franchise values and TV ratings.
“It seems an odd time for the owners to say ‘We want to blow it all up and miss games,’ ” said Meyer. “Hopefully, the majority of the owners don’t want to do that. But they also have been talking about how they want to negotiate new national TV contracts in 2028. Again, it would seem to be an odd time to do things that would be likely to damage the product that they’re going to be selling. We have a lot of momentum and the hope is that we can continue that.”
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