SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Major League Baseball Players Association is expecting to be locked out by MLB during next year’s collective bargaining on a new agreement.
“Unless I am mistaken, the league has come out and said there’s going to be a work stoppage,” Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, said Friday morning to a few members of the media after meeting with the San Francisco Giants players at Scottsdale Stadium. “So, I don’t think I’m speaking out of school in that regard.”
Clark said he’s basing that opinion on recent rhetoric from commissioner Rob Manfred, who told The Athletic in January that offseason lockouts are not necessarily a bad thing.
“In a bizarre way, it’s actually a positive,” Manfred said. “The great thing about offseason lockouts is the leverage that exists gets applied between the bargaining parties.”
An offseason lockout, which occurred in 2021 during the negotiations that preceded the current five-year Basic Agreement, is preferable to losing games in season as baseball did during player strikes that tore apart the 1981 and 1994-95 seasons. Manfred compared it to “using a .22 [caliber firearm], as opposed to a shotgun or a nuclear weapon.”
That remark rankled Clark then and continued to rankle him Friday.
“The statement has been there’s going to be a lockout and it’s a good thing for the game, even to go as far as saying it’s like using a .22 rather than shotgun,” Clark said.
After much rancor during the last lockout, the 2022 season was delayed, but the entire 162-game schedule was preserved, with off days and split-doubleheaders making up for the games lost during the one-week delay.
For his part, Manfred has recently tampered down his rhetoric, saying during an early February spring training press conference in Phoenix he’d prefer to negotiate MLB’s position at the bargaining table rather than through the media.
“I’m not going to speculate how we’re going to negotiate with the PA. We’re a year away,” he said. “I owe it to the owners to coalesce around our bargaining approach. And quite frankly I owe it to our fans not to get into this too early. It’s bad enough when you’re doing it and bargaining, and everyone is worried about it. We’re just not there yet.”
Clark said he expects the negotiations to open next spring, on track with historic norms. And like 2021, if a deal is not concluded by the December 1 expiration date, then he expects another lockout to commence.
The key issue is again a hard salary cap. But Clark had this message to MLB labor negotiators: “No. We haven’t agreed to that in 50, 60 years.”
And there’s no reason to change now. It’s appropriate if some teams choose to use what is this year’s initial $241 million luxury tax threshold as a cap, Clark noted.
“That’s different. A team using the threshold as a cap is their prerogative,” he said. “As you know we’ve had eight or nine teams that go over the threshold. So, a third of the league is acting differently. And I would argue those teams are the ones most interested in being the last team standing.”
When asked why the union hasn’t been willing to negotiate a floor in salaries, Clark bristled at that assumption as well.
“We never said that,” he said. “During the last round of bargaining, we had that conversation. Except the response is every time you talk about a floor there has to be a cap. And that’s not accurate. You don’t have to have a cap in order to have a floor. The union isn’t against one.”
Furthermore, Clark said instituting a cap at this point is not an elixir to the disparity in the way MLB teams spend on player salaries. There’s a wide gap this year between the leading $392.5 million Los Angeles Dodgers and the last place $64.8 million Miami Marlins.
“I will say this: There are ways of addressing the system that aren’t salary or cap related or require the restrictions of player salaries as the answer to every one of these questions,” he said.
