Interesting words from Ken Rosenthal on the new baseball CBA -
The deal got done, and that fact overrides every other. As the NBA will learn, labor peace alone carries great value, helps a sport achieve continued growth.
Unfortunately for baseball, low-revenue teams got trampled in its new collective-bargaining agreement, trampled in a way that raises genuine concerns for their future.
“We are headed for massive problems in the next CBA,” one general manager said Tuesday night. “Competitive balance is going to get progressively worse.”
We’ve heard it all before, but the GM isn’t crying wolf, even though the addition of a wild-card team in each league will create greater opportunity for all.
The new restrictions on spending in both the amateur draft and international market are daggers to low-revenue clubs, robbing them of two of the few advantages they had.
Of course, if GMs are upset – and many of them are – they have only their owners to blame. The owners and commissioner Bud Selig wanted meaningful cost controls. Their goal of “hard slotting” for the draft – predetermined signing bonuses – would have been even more restrictive.
As one player agent pointed out, it’s a borderline miracle that a sport with such vast payroll disparity – $200 million at one extreme, $35 million at the other – can pull off a functional deal at all.
That’s the larger point, and it’s important for even the most disgruntled to remember. But if competitive balance is truly the goal, then this agreement is indeed a step backward.
Maybe baseball is OK with that. Maybe the dominance of the big markets – even with revenue sharing – makes the sport healthier overall. But tell that to all the clubs that now will face even more of an uphill fight, particularly as high-revenue teams secure one mammoth local TV deal after another.
I think baseball’s logic here is: The “Amateur Market” carries great risk. So, to protect ourselves from over-spending on that risk, we’re putting these new provisions in place. And, kids who always wanted to play baseball will still sign in order to chase their dream. And, if that means we need to lose some “prospects” to other sports, then, so be it.
I can see the logic in that last part. Name one NBA, NFL or NHL player who would have been a star in baseball if MLB could have locked him up. Michael Jordan was a star in the NBA. He was not MLB level talent. Ditto Danny Ainge. See also: Deion Sanders.
