If you, like a lot of baseball fans, have been trying to ignore the impending doom of an MLB lockout and now need to catch up on what the hell an MLB lockout is, fear not. Here are the essential episodes of Tipping Pitches to listen to if you’re trying to understand what’s happening in the MLB labor landscape, and why it matters to you, the fan. If you’d like to listen to Tipping Pitches in your preferred podcast app, you can find a list of our availability here.
The State of Labor In Baseball — an annual episode featuring The Ringer’s Michael Baumann — explores the tensions between management and players, the events of the previous year that added to that tension, and what might transpire in the coming year that will change the relationship between the MLB and the MLBPA.
The first installment of our CBA ABCs, a limited series that takes key CBA concepts and breaks them down in real-world ways. In this episode, we talked to Jerry Blevins about his experience winning salary arbitration against the Washington Nationals, before talking to former Astros exec Kevin Goldstein about the importance of winning arbitration from a team perspective.
In this episode, we discuss Pete Alonso’s theory that MLB manipulates the ball based on upcoming free agents, before discussing the priorities that each side might have heading into accelerated CBA negotiations ahead of the deadline.
Our early 2021 exploration of the ways that owners maximize their revenue, with Baseball Prospectus writer Rob Mains. This episode lays the foundation for the business side of baseball, and how owners have changed their philosophy in the last 50 years of MLB. To understand why the Players’ Association can seem so militant, you have to first understand the scope of behavior from the owners’ side.
While 2020 was an aberration in a lot of ways, there was a lot to be gleaned in the way it forced MLB and the MLBPA’s underlying tensions to the surface. In this episode, we run through the ugly timeline of labor negotiations that led to the return of baseball in the pandemic-shortened season.
To discuss the 2020 return to play and the wider forces affecting the baseball industry, we invited Collin McHugh on the show last November. Collin has years of experience as an elected team representative to the MLB Players’ Association. Among other things, we also discussed the challenges of improving working conditions in the Minor Leagues.
Last but not least, a mission statement episode of our podcast: Could Fans Own a Team? In this episode, we explore the different models of fan ownership throughout the world of sports, including the Green Bay Packers, European soccer clubs, and examples from baseball history. If you’re fed up with hearing about what the owners and commissioner want, might we suggest…replacing the owners?
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