Attorney estimates a 75 percent chance for a work stoppage next season
By Kris Olson
BridgeTower Media Newswires
BOSTON, MA -- Enjoying seeing fans back at Fenway Park and rooting for the Red Sox in what is on track to be a full, 162-game season?
Don’t get too used to it, warns Boston attorney Matthew T. Henshon.
Last spring, Henshon penned an article for the ABA journal Entertainment and Sports Lawyer as Major League Baseball was about to embark on an abbreviated, 60-game season. His piece took a dim view of the prospects for the 2022 season to start on time, due not to lingering effects of the pandemic but to owners’ and players’ failure to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement.
The 2021 season is now off to a relatively smooth start. But Henshon hasn’t grown any more optimistic that a strike or lockout can be averted.
“I would say it’s probably 75 percent there’s a work stoppage,” he says.
Henshon’s deep dive into baseball’s labor dynamics was prompted not by anything in his diverse business law practice but by his two high-school-aged, baseball-playing sons.
Henshon knew that big leaguers were increasingly using technology to help hone their skills and wanted to help his sons separate the snake oil from the legitimate tools.
What he stumbled upon was insight into the way that technology is affecting the way the sport’s economics are evolving.
As Henshon chronicles in his article, court victories in the mid-1970s gave the players leverage to end the owners’ longtime use of a one-sided, indefinite “reserve clause” to control where players plied their trade.
The Players Association adopted an approach which assumed that if players earned the right to become free agents after six years of “service time” in the majors, it would maximize their earning power.
The theory was that players would hit the market in their late 20s or early 30s, triggering bidding wars among teams eager to employ them in their “primes.”
But technology is increasingly allowing younger, cheaper players to improve their game. Batters can use video to work on improving their “launch angle” — the trajectory at which the ball comes off the bat — and “exit velocity” — the speed of the ball after it is struck. Pitchers have access to an optical device which allows them to monitor the “spin rate” of their pitches. Used in combination with high-speed cameras, pitchers can engage in “pitch design,” tweaking grips and deliveries to impart more spin and make those offerings harder to hit.
The result is that teams are more likely to resist the temptation to jump into free agent bidding, assuming that technology can help keep them competitive even without star players.
Owners have also figured out how to manipulate players’ service time, buying what is essentially a seventh year of team control by having their top prospects bide their time in the minors for the first month or two of their rookie seasons.
The end result has been that free agency works great for a handful of elite players, but decreases the earning power of players who are merely good.
“They’re basically at the mercy of the market, which right now is totally bifurcated,” Henshon says. “The Bryce Harpers and Mookie Betts of the world get paid at age 27, 28, 29 with these huge, decade-long contracts, and the average guy is basically looking at a one- or two-year deal and playing for a contract every single year.”
That reality means the Players’ Association enters negotiations to some degree as a house divided.
At the end of the day, Henshon figures that the older players will have to bite the bullet for the benefit of players coming up behind them, just as a previous generation of players once sacrificed for them.
Adding to the complications of the upcoming labor negotiations is that owners and players in baseball have never had an agreement to share the game’s revenues on a percentage basis, as their counterparts in the other major sports do.
“A bigger pie doesn’t translate to the players, and that’s fundamentally one of the biggest problems,” Henshon says.
If you could start from scratch, you would create a system where owners got, say, 55 percent of league-wide revenues and players the other 45 percent. The ever-rising tide would lift boats on both sides, Henshon says.
Instead, you get a zero-sum game that has led to a series of work stoppages beginning in 1972.
Given how much water has gone under the bridge, revenue sharing is probably too much to hope for from the upcoming negotiations, Henshon says.
Henson says the best hope for labor peace may be that, with new revenue streams popping up regularly and the proliferation of legalized sports betting, owners will realize that it is time to relent and grant some concessions to keep the money machine cranking.
But he still believes that with all the wrinkles to be ironed out, a work stoppage is almost unavoidable.
“I think that the battle lines are drawn so sharply that I can’t see a way out,” he says.
