If the Lockout Makes Baseball Better, It Will Have Been Worth It

At last, it is safe to say the only three words fans have cared about for months: Baseball is back. Major League Baseball and its players’ union reached an agreement Thursday on a collective bargaining agreement after 99 locked-out days of tedious rhetoric and posturing. Put ’em in, coach. They’re ready to play.

Baseball lovers always find comfort in the rhythms of the game — now more than ever, perhaps, amid a gloomy two-year drumbeat of anxiety and upheaval, near and far. The delayed start to spring training, and the specter of a shortened or canceled season, was almost too much to bear, another disquieting sign of these troubled times.

Now it is over, the second-longest work stoppage in major league history. Spring training will start this weekend in Florida and Arizona. Opening day will be April 7. The 30 teams will play the full 162 games, giving fans their six-month sporting companion, a daily habit no other sport can match.

The longest work stoppage was the 232-day strike from August 1994 to April 1995, which thankfully remains the sport’s most devastating self-inflicted wound. That labor dispute canceled a World Series, reversed a trend of booming attendance, led to the demise of baseball in Montreal and ultimately discouraged policing the rampant use of steroids, a scandal with its own grim consequences.

And it was all for nothing. The strike ended with a ruling by the future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge in Manhattan, who struck down the owners’ attempt to install a salary cap. The players then returned to work under the terms of the previous collective bargaining agreement. In the end, it was a fight to preserve the status quo.

This was very different. You can’t blame anyone for ignoring the minutiae of these negotiations; the issues at stake have been hard to succinctly explain. But the game that returns will be different in significant ways.

The players’ stated goals, as articulated by Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, a top union leader, were to prevent the luxury-tax threshold from functioning as a salary cap; to help young players realize their market value; to discourage teams from manipulating players’ service time; and to eliminate the incentives for teams to tank as a winning strategy. They made gains in all those areas.

The owners’ goals were mainly to make more money, ostensibly to finance the gains the players wanted. They created new revenue streams by expanding the playoffs to 12 teams and — there’s no other way to say this — debasing players’ uniforms and helmets with advertising patches and decals.

Upon taking office in 2015, Commissioner Rob Manfred said he loved baseball uniforms the way they were and saw no reason to slap ads on them. That vow expired after seven seasons, which is longer than his promise that the first two series of this season had been “officially canceled,” as he said last week in Florida when talks with the union broke down.

It turned out that nothing was really canceled, and that Manfred, a wily labor lawyer, was simply trying to apply pressure to get a deal. Obviously, it’s good that he found a way to un-cancel something he canceled. But it doesn’t help the credibility of a commissioner many players deeply mistrust.

It was healthy, then, to hear Manfred say that he had called the union’s executive director, Tony Clark, after the sides formally agreed, in an effort to start healing a fractured bond.

“One of the things that I’m supposed to do is promote a good relationship with our players,” Manfred told reporters in New York. “I’ve tried to do that. I think that I have not been successful in that. It begins with small steps. It’s why I picked up the phone after the ratification and called Tony to express my desire to work with him. It’s going to be a priority of mine moving forward to make good on the commitment I made to him.”

Manfred operates at the whims of the 30 club owners, of course, which makes him something like a preschool teacher trying to hustle a classroom of toddlers into a straight line. The players, too, had divisions in their ranks. The agreement passed by a 26-12 vote of union leadership that broke down this way: 26-4 among the 30 player representatives for each team, and 0-8 among the members of the executive subcommittee.

The team representatives speak for the rank-and-file on their rosters. The subcommittee members are much more heavily involved, and also tend to be richer; four of the eight have signed nine-figure contracts, and all have made at least $37 million. The vote was a good reminder that most of the union members are not as rich as you may think; the median salary for M.L.B. players last season was $1.15 million, down from $1.65 million in Manfred’s first year in office.

It is encouraging, then, that the minimum salary ($570,500 in 2021) will rise in this agreement, from $700,000 this year to $780,000 in 2026. The luxury-tax threshold, which was $210 million last season, will also rise, from $230 million this season to $244 million in 2026. The owners’ franchises are exploding in value, and media-rights deals continue to rise. It is only fair that players at both ends of the salary scale get to share in it.

The decline in earning power for players in the middle — solid veterans whose production could perhaps be replaced by a rookie — might be accelerated in this deal. There are always unintended consequences. But there seem to be some aspects that are bound to make the game better.

Teams often hold top prospects in the minors in an effort to squeeze an extra year of service time from them before they reach free agency. Now, if a player places in the top two in voting for Rookie of the Year, he gets a full year of service time, no matter when he was promoted. That’s fair. So are the limits on the number of times a player can be optioned within a season, and the $50 million merit-based bonus pool to be distributed to players not yet eligible for arbitration.

The owners pushed for an international draft, a complex issue that several Latin-American players, like San Diego shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr., passionately opposed. It took a while, but the league sensibly agreed to let the union study the topic and decide by late July, tying its passing to the elimination of the qualifying offer, a restriction on free agency.

Most encouraging, perhaps: the creation in 2023 of a joint committee, including four active players, an umpire, and six people selected by M.L.B., to consider rule changes like bigger bases, a pitch clock, infield shifts and the automatic strike zone. The committee can decide on a rule change and implement within 45 days — again, a sensible solution that gives players a voice in the rules of their workplace.

There are other logical wrinkles, like the universal designated hitter (nobody wants their favorite pitcher to hurt himself swinging a bat or running the bases) and a lottery for the top six spots in the draft, so the same team cannot guarantee itself the top pick by staying lousy for several years.

Advertising on uniforms is tacky, and we’ll have to see how the expanded playoff field plays out in practice; from here, 12 teams seems like too many. But if all this combines to make the game better, the acrimony will have been worth it. The league and the players gave themselves a chance to restore baseball’s standing in the national psyche. Please, don’t blow it.