It’s here. At long last. Bobby and Alex comb through the recently-released MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement and discuss the parts of it that that stand out beyond the headline items, including sports betting, international play, service time manipulation, grievances, market sizes, uniform regulations, and more.
Links:
The Collective Bargaining Agreement
Evan Drellich’s breakdown of the CBA
Join the Tipping Pitches Patreon
Songs featured in this episode:
Daryl Hall and John Oates — “Rich Girl” • Booker T & the M.G.’s — “Green Onions”
Episode Transcript
Theme
Tell us a little bit about what you saw and—and—and being able to relay that message to Cora when you watch Kimbrel pitching and kind of help out so he wasn’t Tipping his Pitches. so Tipping Pitches, we hear about it all the time. People are home understand, what Tipping Pitches is all about? That’s amazing! That’s remarkable.
BOBBY: Alex, I’d like to tell you about my last 24 hours. 2-4, 24 hours. Currently, as we sit here, a couple of feet from each other, at June 7th, at 7:00 p.m., 24 hours ago, I was sitting in PNC Park in Pittsburgh, watching your Oakland Athletics—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —put it on the Pittsburgh Pirates. Um, I guess before we get into the next 24 hours after that, would you like to formally declare that this is the day that the season turns around?
ALEX: Right. That we’re back, baby.
BOBBY: I, uh, I was in the elevator after the game ended with, uh, three other A’s fans, I guess it was the traveling— the A’s traveling circus.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Um, first of all, a couple—a couple of people told me they like my shirt. I was wearing the elephant standing on the billionaire shirt.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: I was like, “Well, if you like it, you could be one of five people to actually own it, because nobody actually bought that design.” I was like, “tippingpitches.myshopify.com.” I didn’t actually say that, because I’m too ashamed.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: The worst thing in the world would be for someone to know that I’m a podcast host, like, in-person.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Um, and the guy said, “I guess we chose the right elevator,” because it’s just a bunch of A’s fans in there. And I was like, “Yeah, it’s a good—it’s a good sign. Good vibe. Could be the day that the season turns around.” Uh, Jace Peterson MVP campaign starts here?
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Hey, I don’t know. Uh, anyway, more on PNC Park later. But the next 24 hours, I drove through, uh, several states, the rest of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and now part of Illinois. And what did I do during that drive? What did I do sitting in the passenger seat of the car when I was not operating the motor vehicle? Well, of course, I pulled my laptop out. I hotspotted my phone, and I read the 450-page Major League Baseball collective bargaining agreement governing the seasons between 2022 and 2026 for this very here podcast. I’m pumped.
ALEX: That’s right. Uh—
BOBBY: Are you pumped?
ALEX: I’m really pumped. I’m, like, a little giddy. You know, coming in, I’m kind of like—we’ve been building this up for—for each other, for our listeners for—for so long and I just want to do right by—by them, right?
BOBBY: Right. The
ALEX: By the—by the Tipping Pitches name and by—and by the collective bargaining agreement. Absolutely.
BOBBY: That which is holy, the collective bargaining agreement. Um, before we do that, PNC Park, it’s—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —beautiful.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Great. You can see all the bridges, the water, the three rivers.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: They’re all—they’re all—I—I did confirm the existence of all three—all three rivers—
ALEX: That’s great.
BOBBY: —right there. Uh, really nice ballpark, cool entrance, cool fan base, nice view. A lovely night for baseball.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: About 75—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —clear skies, the smoke—the smoke from our burning universe at night—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —has not quite set down the entire East Coast yet.
ALEX: Yup. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: So, uh, I had a good time. And I—I think maybe me and my partner, Phoebe, are the A’s good luck charm.
ALEX: Uh, it’s quite possible.
BOBBY: So John Fisher, cut the check, please. You’ve not been to PNC Park, have you?
ALEX: I have not, no. And it’s—it’s high up on my—on my bucket list of remaining ballparks, again, for many of the reasons that you mentioned. And I think it—it—and it also kind of speaks to our conversation with Neil last week, right? And you can correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand that that’s a ballpark that has done a decent job about incorporating itself into the city rather than sort of just planting its footprint down and kind of wherever it—wherever it landed. I mean, is that the sense you got?
BOBBY: It does tuck itself in quite nicely right on the river, right—uh, in among kind of, like, the downtown there. We stayed in a hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, we walked about 20 minutes to the ballpark. It was very easy. Not like a lot of event congestion. It was a Tuesday night against the A’s, so it was not like the most well-attended game in the—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —history of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Uh, Although, it’s Mitch Keller night, so that brought out the diehards—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —who were very frustrated to see that—
ALEX: I’m sure.
BOBBY: —Mitch Keller took the loss.
ALEX: to the Oakland A’s.
BOBBY: James Kaprielian and his six walks per nine. Um, but, you know, it was a nice night at the ballpark. Only my second game of the year, which is—
ALEX: Um—
BOBBY: —kind of remarkable. It’s June, 2nd game of the baseball season.
ALEX: We’ve really been slacking.
BOBBY: We’ve really been slack—we haven’t been giving enough of our revenue to the Major League Baseball owners, uh, as dictated by the collective bargaining agreement that we’re about to discuss. Uh, as—as we’ve joked multiple times on this pod, this is the—this is the podcast that we—that we’ve been waiting for. That we couldn’t do, because we weren’t given the CBA for over a year after it was agreed to, because, you know, we have it on good authority that it didn’t exist.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But it is here now. The CBA was released about a month ago at this point, maybe just three weeks ago. Um, and we’ve read through many of the new parts, not really cover to cover, But I’m going to just full disclosure this right now, we did not read it cover to cover, uh, partially because a lot of the clauses are—if not copy and pasted from the last CBA, just functionally speaking the exact same—
ALEX: Definitely ripped a lot of plot points—
BOBBY: Yeah,
ALEX: —from the—from the last version.
BOBBY: Exactly. Uh, the orig—the original is better. The sequel is not quite as good. Um, and we’re gonna discuss many of those things. We’ve broken it down into categories. We’re gonna revisit some of the CBA ABC topics that we had discussed in great detail during the lockout. Uh, and then we’re—of course, we’re going to do a beloved speed round at the end of this—the Tipping Pitches CBA Deep Dive. I’ve been waiting—I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment.
ALEX: I’m strapped in. I’m ready to go.
BOBBY: Uh, it’s coming. But before we do that, I am Bobby Wagner.
ALEX: I’m Alex Bazeley.
BOBBY: And you are listening to Tipping Pitches. Alex, we don’t have a lot of time to waste, so let’s just get right into it. We’re gonna start with some overall observations—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —from the collective bargaining agreement governing the years of 2022 to 2026. Can we come up with a shorter name for it? Here to four as they would say—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —in CBA language. Just CBA. We’re not going to keep specifying that it’s the current CBA. If it’s the old CBA, I will say it—
ALEX: We’ll say old CBA.
BOBBY: So overall observations, um, I already kind of alluded to it. Uh, meet the new CBA, same as the old CBA.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Yeah.
BOBBY: This is, like, not really fair—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —to the Players Association, uh, because this is how most collective bargaining agreements work in most industries. It’s like you build incrementally on the previous document and that’s why it’s so important to fight really hard for your first CBA and to set that line in the sand, that will then move incrementally in one direction or the other on multiple topics for years, decades, centuries to come.
ALEX: Yeah. I—I mean, as you mentioned, it’s a 450-page document and, like, the—the core part of the CBA ends on, like, the 171st page, right? And after that, it’s largely like—like emails and attachments back and forth between lawyers and, uh, and representatives, basically—basically codifying, you know, discussions that maybe they had at the table, right? But it—it is—what I appreciated about that element of it, and I know we’re gonna get some of the things in there—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —is that there’s a little more editorializing that can be done.
BOBBY: A lot more editorializing. I love how—okay. That was one of my other overall observations, that all of the meaningful changes in this collective bargaining agreements are literally just copies of emails.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like, you might think we’re joking. Like, that they—that they—we—they took the body, the text of the email. No, it’s literally the whole email.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Subject line, “RE: Joint Drug Agreement Policy—”
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: “—Changes.”
ALEX: This is to confirm and—
BOBBY: Confirm.
ALEX: —that we agreed on this.
BOBBY: Bruce Meyer.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like, they’re just—so I guess my question, and maybe we should be the ones answering these kinds of questions, but were these guys just typing these emails up to each other and bargaining?
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Likely what was happening was that they were sidebarring over these things and they were coming to an—a shared understanding and then they were putting that in email form to each other, approving it back and forth. And then the final copy of that email is the one that made it into the collective bargaining agreement, and it was then signed off on by the executive committees on both sides. But the fact that there’s nothing more formal than just copying or screenshotting an email and putting it in the legal document that governs a $13-billion industry, to me, is—is funny. To me, it’s very funny.
ALEX: Absolutely. You get instances where you can see this very clearly in emails like one that came from Tony Clark to the Commissioner’s office, uh, discussing possible removal of teams, possible contraction over the years, right? And it—almost word for word is so you know just as well as us that we think that should be collectively bargained over.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: You guys don’t believe that. This is just verification that we didn’t come to an agreement, but obviously, we think it should be collectively bargained over.
BOBBY: The—
ALEX: But that’s the entire email.
BOBBY: The lack of the existence of this in the first 171 pages does not mean that we agree—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —that—to what you think.
ALEX: Which like—and—and that sort of thing is really important, right?
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: And I think that’s why these—that part of the CBA is really instructive, because you do get to see the places where there still are some fractures, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: There are moments like that that caught up.
BOBBY: Leave no stone unturned—
ALEX: Exactly.
BOBBY: —in the document. Leave no avenue untraveled.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Make sure that you dot every I, cross every T. And that’s part of the reason why it took so long to get this document in the first place, is that every I need to be dotted, every T needs to be crossed from a legal perspective. But also from a philosophical perspective, how are we going to convey the fact that these things that we did not come to an agreement over, that are going to no doubt be problems in the future like expansion or contraction, the flip side of that same coin, that we, uh, memorialize in a legal setting for the future for an arbitrator, that we talked about these things and did not come to an agreement? And so if we go to a grievance over it, here is evidence—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —on the internet at mlbplayers.com/cba.
ALEX: Can you—can you read the whole one? Because that’s—that’s just the link to the CBA. BOBBY: Okay, okay. Wait. At mlbplayers.com/—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And I’ve learned that I’ve been getting that wrong—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —for the better part of my online days, /_files/ugd/—
ALEX: Oh, you are—you are doing it.
BOBBY: —4d23 and the rest will be available on Patreon.
ALEX: You mean, you’re reading the rest of it?
BOBBY: Yes, exactly.
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: The—the document is—you don’t need to pay Patreon for the document. You can just go get that yourself. Google it. Uh, I will add one more overall observation before we get into the specifics. Um, I found it interesting qualitatively, UM, in terms of what we are saying about ourselves in the baseball world. We being the people who are talking about this document, that, uh, whenever the Commissioner is referred to, the Commissioner—current Commissioner being Rob Manfred, but, you know, it’s not guaranteed. They—they don’t refer to Rob Manfred by name or what’s in this document.
ALEX: Right. Yeah.
BOBBY: It’s just Commissioner. Uh, whenever the Commissioner is referred to with pronouns, it’s always he or she. But whenever a player is referred to with pronouns, they don’t bother, uh, with anything other than just he, which I thought is interesting, because there’s no rule against someone whose pronouns are not he playing against—playing in Major League Baseball.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: But that’s just kind of the boys club.
ALEX: There’s no rule but—but there’s, you know—
BOBBY: Well, it’s codified in a legal document that this is what we think it should be.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Um, it’s nice that they think that there can be a girl boss Commissioner, though. I’m holding out hope that the next Commissioner is a girl boss. Any candidates that you have in mind to be Commissioner of baseball who is a girl boss? Liz Cheney?
ALEX: What—uh, oh, I was gonna go Liz Holmes, but—
BOBBY: Oh, when—when gets out of prison.
ALEX: —um, I hear she’s tied up for the next few years.
BOBBY: Well, Rob’s got the next like, 10 long [12:07]
ALEX: Absolutely.
BOBBY: —easy.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And that’s going to take him straight into Cabo—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —straight to retirement age. I can’t—what—this is a tangent, however. Uh, post-retirement Bud Selig has given us so many gems.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: He wrote a book, he went on a fucking effectively wild to promote that book. If there’s one place that post retirement Rob Manfred should appear, it is this podcast. And you know what? If he wants to dispel some of the rumors about him—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —some of the assumptions about him, he should take that kindly. Take that into consideration.
ALEX: A chance to correct the record.
BOBBY: Any other—we’re gonna let him do it. We’re gonna—I swear we’re gonna let him talk. We’re gonna let him correct the record. Uh, Rob, if you’re listening or if you’re paying someone to listen, now is the time, intern, send this part to Rob. He can come on. Uh, any other overall observations before we get into the kind of specific categories that we’ve outlined here?
ALEX: No. I mean, I think the—the only kind of final observation I have is that this is a document that I think really leaves you wanting more. Like, it’s really hefty and there’s so much in there, but there’s also so much that’s referred to that I’m like, “No, that’s—that’s the thing I want.” You know, the questionnaire you send to all the teams asking them what their, like—
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: —finances look like top to bottom.
BOBBY: Oh, I’m gonna talk about that later. Don’t worry.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Okay. Okay. All right.
BOBBY: I have a whole screen about that. Uh, yes, I completely agree with that. Uh, I would say, like, conservatively, 150 pages of this—well, first of all, like 20 pages of it are the outline.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: The table of contents. And then like 100 to 125 pages of it are just defining terms that appear elsewhere.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: So it’s like we’re gonna define every term that could be up for debate within this section before we get into the section.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And that’s going to take up two-thirds of the section. So that is consistent with all CBAs. Like, this is—this is how these things work. We read a legal document, it all starts to kind of look the same. Did you find yourself—by the way, this is sort of also a tangent.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: But did you find yourself, like, picking up quicker on being able to read the way that this is worded, where there’s, like, a million different commas, like—and then at the very end of the sentence, it’s just like, “Oh, that’s what they were talking.”
ALEX: I mean, that’s what I started doing is skipping to the end of the sentence and kind of working backwards from there.
BOBBY: You’d be a terrible lawyer. Everything in between is really important.
ALEX: Get to the point.
BOBBY: Yeah, yeah.
ALEX: Come on.
BOBBY: You know, brevity—
ALEX: I mean, I—yeah, there’s—there’s a very unique language that’s—that’s used here and it’s very self-referential, which I think was the toughest thing for me, right, is it would say—you know, it—you’d be in the middle of a section and then—then it would start referencing that section. And I’m like, “Aren’t—isn’t that what we were already talked about?”
BOBBY: Were we still in the [14:45]
ALEX: Like—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And I understand.
BOBBY: I thought this was particularly true in the sports, um, betting section—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —which we’re about to get into.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Okay. Categories, we are going to do a check-in again on the CBA ABC categories that we discussed last year during the lockout. Now as a reminder, if you are not a listener at that time, uh, those categories are arbitrary—salary arbitration, competitive balance tax, and revenue sharing.
ALEX: I—real—real quick, point of order.
BOBBY: Okay.
ALEX: Did we really—
BOBBY: Point of order.
ALEX: Did we really, um, pick an A, uh, a C, and—and no B? Like, we were that close to actually having it be ABCs?
BOBBY: Well, there wasn’t a B yet, because betting wasn’t allowed.
ALEX: And now I know.
BOBBY: Listen, we were doing our best. There was the lockout. I think, frankly, that those episodes, if you have not heard them, are still relevant—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —and still useful, particularly because the guests that we brought on effectively explain them in concept and in history. And in Jerry Blevins’ case for salary arbitration in practice. So if you are interested in this sort of thing and this is the type of episode that animates you and excites you when the Tipping Pitches podcast posts to your podcast feed, I would suggest going back to November of 2021 and, uh, give those a listen. Uh, all right. Let’s check in on those. I’ll, um, I’ll—I’ll give you a little choice here. Do you want to start with the one that actually has some meat on the bone or do you want to start with the two that basically haven’t changed from a podcasting perspective? I think maybe the ones that haven’t changed.
ALEX: Let’s start with the ones that haven’t changed yet.
BOBBY: Uh, revenue sharing, not a lot changed. Structurally speaking, not a lot changed. Um,
this is the one also candidly that I find the hardest to understand. Like, the revenue sharing paying system is more or less unchanged, um, and that is kind of directly tied to the competitive balance tax, which, structurally, also has not changed. Now, they’ve plugged and played different numbers into those competitive balance tax, um, systems and obviously, there are steeper penalties now in terms of percentage of the—percentage penalties that you have to pay when you are a “repeat offender” for going over the competitive balance tax threshold. And the higher competitive balance tax thresholds, they’ve added in new thresholds that are more strictly penalized. But from a philosophical perspective and from—for the purposes of discussing them on a podcast, I found it interesting how basically it is functioning exactly like the owners have always wanted it to function. Now, you know, there have been a—there have been more teams that have gone over now, now that they know what that is, and now that they know what those penalties are going to be. And there’s fewer, uh, unknowns about the concept of a new CBA maybe penalizing them more than they were anticipating. And so, that—I think that is intriguing. Um, but that’s all the stuff that’s sort of well-tread ground on this podcast.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, revenue sharing in particular still feels like quite a black box to me, um, and there is a lot in there that also notes that, you know, if this—the Players Association thinks anything shady is going on, right? They can go to the Commissioner’s office and say, “Pull the file on the A’s,” and they’ll pull—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —the file and the A’s. And so, uh—
BOBBY: Although, there’s still an outstanding lawsuit right now—
ALEX: I know. Yeah.
BOBBY: —against four teams for exactly what you’re talking about, revenue sharing for—for the PA filing against the A’s, the Rays, the Marlins, and the Pirates, all the people who definitely are violating the revenue.”
ALEX: Right, right. Yeah.
BOBBY: Like, “Oh, wow. If you had to pick four teams that you think are violating the revenue sharing clause, which would they be?” Which is to say—you know, for people who don’t know, what it says about revenue sharing is that any money that you get from other teams in revenue sharing whether that’s from—whether that’s because you are a smaller market or whether that’s from other teams going over the competitive balance tax and redistributing that money to the smaller market teams, whatever you get from revenue sharing has to then directly be put back into the team on the field. It can’t just be the owners pocketing that as profit. Of course, that is very hard to determine, which we’ll—I think we will get into a little bit later. Um, one—one other thing of note with revenue sharing competitive balance tax is that I think it’s a—like a moderate to large failure that neither of these things are tied to the actual growth in revenue year over year. Like, that these numbers are—I mean, revenue sharing is in a way, because it’s among the teams, but I mean, tied in that the players are not getting more of a percentage of the revenue year over year. And I know that that gets into the whole philosophical difference between, uh, an open market versus, uh, a closed market with a salary cap where you share a percentage of the revenue. But the fact that the competitive balance tax is basically just going up, like, 3 million per year is, one, barely keeping up with inflation, if—if that.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And two, certainly not coming anywhere near keeping up with—keeping up with growing revenues.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good point, right? There’s a lot of really hard numbers in here that some of them change over the course of the CBA and some of them don’t, whatsoever, right? The amount in the Commissioner’s discretionary fund for example, right? Or like these— again, just like these little pockets of money—
BOBBY: Heretofore known as the slush fund. Rob slush fund.
ALEX: Right. Yeah. Like, I—
BOBBY: A parody. That’s parody.
ALEX: Of course.
BOBBY: We’re not—actually not accusing Rob just giving money off the top of the Commissioner’s fund.
ALEX: And, again, I, you know, I don’t know how—how you would structure that in order to accurately reflect revenues of baseball, but I bet there are some pretty smart people in there who do know how to do that.
BOBBY: Yeah. It’s like, “If revenues grow by this much, then this number goes to this.”
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: “And if they grow by this much, then this number goes to this.”
ALEX: Yeah. You know?
BOBBY: Which—and we know what revenues grow by because the MLB announces that—that, like, gross total number at the end of the year. Gross as in, like, total, not gross as in, like, disgusting. Although, it is kind of a disgusting amount of money.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Uh, okay. Let’s go—let’s go—let’s go to arbitration because we got to keep on pace here. Kind of a lot of juice in this arbitration—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —uh, section in terms of what has changed. Primarily, uh, in the pre-arb bonus pool, which is completely new, which we should talk in-depth about. But before we do, uh—
ALEX: I’m Bobby Wagner.
BOBBY: —I’m Bobby Wagner—no. Before we do, do you think that it messes people up? Like, when I say, “before we do”?
ALEX: I mean it messes me up.
BOBBY: Because—okay. Here’s something that happens, actually. This is another tangent. Uh, in our anchor ad—or, sorry, our Spotify for Podcasters ad, when I say, “And best of all, it’s totally free,” there’s a Ringer podcast where there’s, uh, invest—there’s a Ringer podcast, which has a soundboard drop from, uh, the Ben Affleck movie boilerplate, where he says, “And best of all kids, I am liquid.” So every time I hear myself say that, I just think that the next words out of my mouth are gonna be, “I am liquid.” Anyway—
ALEX: God willing, one day, they will be.
BOBBY: I’m feeling pretty liquid. Are you feeling pretty liquid?
ALEX: I’m feeling liquid right now.
BOBBY: Like, all the $100 that I have is available to me. It’s not tied up in stocks or bonds.
Okay. Pre-arb bonus pool in just a second, but first, uh, paragraph six, Section E on arbitration, location of hearings. “The single hearing site for each year will be agreed upon by the parties with preference being given to either Tampa/St. Petersburg or Phoenix.” So you give preference to those two places, but you’re not required to do it at those places. So the way that I read that is that they could hold our salary arbitration hearings at my apartment in Brooklyn—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —in the studio for us to observe—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —with the sign, the glow of the sign on Bruce Meyer’s face.
ALEX: I mean—
BOBBY: Giving him power, the same power that we have every week when we record.
ALEX: As we set up top, it’s vitally important to lay out what was agreed to and what was not agreed to—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —right? There is nothing in here saying that the hosts of Tipping Pitches may not sit in on arbitration hearings.
BOBBY: However, the next paragraph, paragraph seven says, “The hearing shall be conducted on a private and confidential basis.”
ALEX: So I’m—
BOBBY: Once—
ALEX: —I’m very confident of it.
BOBBY: Once you’re done, um, as A-Rod’s protégé—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: A-Rod, by the way, making an appearance on Baseball BBQ, fucking coward.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Coward. He’s a coward. That is my official statement—
ALEX: You know, from the place—
BOBBY: —on the record.
ALEX: —the place that would give him softballs.
BOBBY: Uh-huh.
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah.
BOBBY: Oh, you go to the place that’s not going to grill you on your business practices. Interesting. Intriguing. Fine. Um, I’m sorry. He’s already given us his seal of approval.
Uh, once you’re done with his sort of masterclass crash course—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —for being a billionaire, you could go and get certified as a federal arbitrator and join the association of federal arbitrators. Yeah, you’re Googling it right now, because you will do something like this. You would do something like—you have to go, like, school for, like, two years, I think. But you could do it. You’re very level-headed. You’re very reasonable.
ALEX: I am.
BOBBY: You don’t make quick decisions. You [24:04]
ALEX: Oh, boy. Do I?
BOBBY: Tweet that on your application. I’m [24:08] Many people have said that I’ve never made a fast decision in my life. And you could then be an arbitrator at the Tipping Pitches Studio for salary arbitration. Okay. All jokes aside. Uh, another interesting section of arbitration, paragraph 10, subsection C, uh, eligible statistics for the purposes of determining salary in arbitration. Uh, “All publicly available data can be used. However, data generated through the use of wearable technology,” I use Statcast, “is still not deemed admissible.” I actually think that that was my summary of that clause, so, um, take that quote away, listener.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Take that quote away. I don’t want to be misquoting this—this holy document. I just—I find it interesting conceptually and I wanted to ask you whether or not you think that it’s past time that we start including like Statcast data in admissible statistics for salary arbitration. Like, do you think even the—the Players Association wants that? Because I didn’t hear much of a push for it and I can see a world in which the Players Association would be freaked out by wearable data being included—included in salary arbitration, because it’d be such a radical change from how they’ve built up these practices of determining how much they’re supposed to make—how much they’re supposed to make. But on the flip side, I feel like a lot of guys are kind of getting screwed, because Statcast data shows they’re phenomenal, but like usage data, accounting statistics, the way that players are used nowadays, is not consistent with how it used to be. And I feel like it could go either way to me.
ALEX: I mean, it is an interesting question, right? Because I feel like that’s—that poses a very structural sort of quandary of our players compensated based on their performance or are they compensated based on their skills or their expected performance, right? And I mean, I think it—that’s the kind of thing that cuts both ways, right? Where a guy who’s going into arbitration who might have had a fluke great year, right? But whose Stackhouse metrics don’t back that up could very easily be—be tucked down off of that, right? So, like, I mean, that’s a little bit of a wishy-washy answer, but I do think it opens up kind of, uh, a can of worms that, uh, we are headed towards, like, having that discussion.
BOBBY: Yeah. It’s going to be there at some point.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I mean, the compelling case for [26:30] is that it’s not the only stat—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —that you’d be allowed to use. Of course, it would be—it would—it would be a heavy ingredient. You would taste that ingredient in your soup.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: If you allowed it to be added to the soup.
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: But, like—uh, it’s tough because teams are analyzing players based on this. Teams are selecting players based on this data that they have from them in high school and college. And so if this is how you are training yourself to be good, shouldn’t this be the—the Statcast be a more representative statistic in terms of how valuable you actually are to your team and how much they should be paying you than saves? You know, like, nobody is getting saves anymore.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Nobody is going to break the saves record. Nobody is going to, especially as a rookie, get enough save opportunities to make significant cash in salary arbitration from it. And so, I—I hear what you’re saying and that, like, it would really suck if a guy had a great year and the team was just like, ‘Well, your, you know, your horizontal movement on your slider sucks and so we’re not actually going to pay you anything.” And that—that would also just confuse the arbitrators, which is another element of salary arbitration, which is [27:35]
ALEX: I mean, that’s kind of the other thing that I was—right. Is that like—it’s like the—the arbitrators have to be able to understand the—like, can you try explaining, like, expected barrels to me? Just try explaining it to me. Not even a labor legal professional.
BOBBY: What about—no, you’re a labor—labor—
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: —legal professional.
ALEX: Legal labor.
BOBBY: I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term. Uh, no, I can’t explain expected barrels, but you know what I can explain?
ALEX: What? [28:03]
BOBBY: [28:03]
ALEX: Yup. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: I got you on that front.
ALEX: That’s right.
BOBBY: And I can explain FIP—
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, I can—I can explain it conceptually. I couldn’t tell you what goes into it. BOBBY: Low good, high bad. That’s all—that’s all Joe arbitrator needs to know. Low good, high bad.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Put it on a fucking plot, you know, on a bell curve. That’s all you need. Uh, okay.
Pre-arb bonus pool. This has been, um, heavily covered, so like the—we’ve known these numbers for a while, but I did want to go over them again and—and talk to you about it, uh, kind of conceptually as well. And there’s a couple of, like, little nuggets in here that I wanted to discuss. They established a pre-arbitration bonus pool, though, and this is for players who have not reached their third year of service time when they’ve become arbitration eligible. So they’re not actually going into the hearing, they’re not submitting their own number, they’re not having a panel of arbitrators decide which number they should make. These are just players making the league minimum or making whatever the team decides to pay them, which in 100% of the cases is league minimum. Uh, they are eligible for more money each—each season. The clubs collectively contribute $50 million into a pool and that money is divvied up, um, based on the top 100 pre-arbitration players by WAR, by a statistic called Joint WAR that MLB and MLB— MLBPA have agreed to create. We actually don’t know what Joint—Joint WAR is. We don’t know the formula for it, but I can only assume that it’s kind of like an amalgam of all of the publicly available wins above replacement statistics. So that’s kind of what I’m going off of, that—that it’s like somewhere in the ballpark of Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus, Baseball-Reference, all of these places. Um, you can also win money from that pool by winning awards, so you get two and a half million if you win the MVP or Cy Young. So you are the best player in baseball, two and a—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Two and a half million for you. Um, 1.75 million if you finish second in either of those awards. 1.5 million if you’ve finished third in either of those awards. Uh, one million if you, uh, place fourth or fifth in MVP or Cy Young. Or if you finish on the All-MLB first team. Are you following the All-MLB teams closely this year?
ALEX: Incredibly closely.
BOBBY: It’s a tight race. You know, who’s gonna get the spot for NL first base? Probably gonna be Pete Alonso, no? He just got hit on the hand today, though. That’s a—that’s an L for your boy. Uh, $750,000 if you win Rookie of the Year, and $500,000, if you come in second in Rookie of the Year, or you finish on All-MLB Second Team. So that was a lot of numbers to throw out to you—throw out to you. Basically, you get a big chunk of cash if you win an award or if you come close to winning an award, and then they take that chunk out of the $50 million bonus pool, and the rest of the money is divvied up. So say, for example, two rookies won MVP. Never happened, probably never will. But that would mean that two and a half million went to one guy, went to the other—one to Alex Bazeley, one to Bobby Wagner, and, uh, the rest of the $45 million is divvied up among the top 100 finishers in pre-arbitration players by Joint WAR. A ton of details that I just threw out to people.
ALEX: Ton of details—also worth noting that—that you can’t get two awards at the end of the—like—
BOBBY: Yes. You can’t get two awards.
ALEX: You can’t get awarded twice. Right, exactly.
BOBBY: Yes. You get the higher of the two.
ALEX: Right. So if you win MVP as a rookie, you’re not getting the Rookie of the Year.
BOBBY: [31:29] if you win Cy Young and MVP.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean—
BOBBY: That’s, uh, that’s—that’s really tough for you. Here’s a funny little detail that I wanted to bring up.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Bonuses for All-MLB awards are contingent on the player participating in any award ceremony with the reason—with reasonable and necessary travel expenses for the player and one guest covered by the Office of the Commissioner consistent with Article Seven, Section A, unless the players’ attendance is excused by the Office of the Commissioner for a good cause shown. So you don’t get your two-and-a-half million dollar check if you don’t show up to the MVP award ceremony. It’s so petty. I don’t know why I find that so funny, but I do.
ALEX: Yeah. There’s a lot in this CBA about, like, kind of player obligations outside of baseball, right?
BOBBY: Yeah. Like, conduct.
ALEX: And there’s—and there’s a lot that I think that maybe the average fan doesn’t realize about how obligated they are to do these sort of public appearances—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —right? To do the charity things, to do the, like, you know, uh, press gaggles, especially during international play—right? To be—uh—
BOBBY: Yeah, we’re definitely gonna get to that. Yeah.
ALEX: And there’s some stuff we’re gonna—we’re gonna get to, but, like, they really kind of—kind of lock you in, don’t they?
BOBBY: I think that they just—I don’t know. If I was gonna really galaxy-brain that, I think that I would look at MLB in comparison to other sports leagues and I would say, uh, you know, like, the NFL is a league that represents its shield very well, it has good positive, like, associations with the league and, like, the conduct, if you don’t, like, think critically ever about these things. But, like, that is—that is like a tight ship, you know, and the NFL is in control of its image and it—it—the image that it wants you to see, you see. And then like the NBA, where it’s like a little bit more player-friendly, and they kind of dictate the terms and they decide whether they show up for things, and they decide what is cool and what matters, and how often they’re gonna play and all of these sorts of things. And I think MLB is trying to, like, toe the line in-between those two things.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I know I mentioned that we don’t really know the Joint WAR calculation formula, but one thing that I heard a lot of this who are sort of more like sabermetrically-minded people talking about when this was floated in bargaining and it came out that this was kind of going to be a structure that governed how people get paid based on wins above replacement, that made a lot of, um, number of people very queasy, because this is very—it’s an imperfect science, sabermetrics. We learn things as we go. And, famously, WAR is a statistic that changes. As they decide to tweak the formula, you go back to old pages and someone’s WAR looks slightly different. Now in some cases, that can add like as much as one or two WAR to a player’s career. Um, it’s interesting that in the CBA, there is no such thing as a wreck—retroactive change to your bonus. So if they decide that in the Joint WAR formula there’s a bug and they go back and change it, but somebody had a bad year in the past, based on that bug. Tough luck. The changes are not retroactive to the previous years. Now, I don’t—like functionally speaking, I don’t know how you would, like would you go and would you take money away from a guy that you gave to in the past if it lowered his WAR formula? I don’t really know. All that to say, I think that those concerns were valid by people like Meg Rowley and Ben Lindbergh on Effectively Wild had a great conversation about this and, you know, Craig Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus. Like these people were raising this as a potential concern. Now, I’m glad that it’s not, like, the only thing dictating what people get paid, like MLB wanted to do in salary arbitration. But it is still like a not insignificant piece of how younger players make legitimate big league money.
ALEX: And, look, I mean, this is money going to players who in—originally were not going to get it before, right? And for many of these players, this might, you know, be life-changing money, right? So—so-called life-changing money. Um, I do think it sets kind of a weird precedent to have players compensation being dictated by what is effectively a third party, uh,
the Commissioner’s Office and—and the Players Association, right? I mean, they’re—they’re treating a joint committee that are going to come up with this number, and the figures will be submitted. And so, there’s gonna be some oversight there, but I do think it gets into sketchy territory, again, not only with the fact that stats like these are very fluid. But also what does it mean to set that sort of precedent on a—on a pay by statistic level?
BOBBY: Uh, yeah. Especially when those statistics don’t—aren’t actually at the cutting edge anymore.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I mean, WAR—I think most people would still agree that WAR, if they are actually using a formula of WAR that we can agree is valid—valid, because we don’t know what the formula is, again. Uh, it’s a pretty good, like, catch-all for how much value you gave to your team, because it is cumulative and it factors in many different things, including offense and defense. Um, but defensive statistics are—
ALEX: Yeah, not—not great.
BOBBY: —not perfect. And based on what else we can glean from the CBA, those defensive statistics that are in their Joint WAR cumulative stat are not factoring in wearable data, or not factoring and tracking technology like Statcast. And I think most people in the sabermetric community would agree at this point that especially on defense, wearable data is very important.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Is—is like the gold standard of today. So I don’t know, better, not perfect.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, it’s also still, like, uh—uh, a drop in the bucket of Major League Baseball’s revenues in a given year and—
BOBBY: 15 million total split up among 30 teams, so that’s, like, 1.8—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —million per team.
ALEX: Right. Yeah. Split up among a hundred players, right? Like—
BOBBY: Yeah. So if they all had the exact same WAR, you can expect to get $500,000.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, I guess less, because some of that money will, uh, already be given to whoever, like, award winners.
BOBBY: The Rookie of the Year.
ALEX: Yeah. Uh—
BOBBY: Fascinating.
ALEX: Yeah. Later on in this document, they—they do point out that they made, like, $9.7 billion in revenue a couple of years ago, so I appreciate them keeping themselves honest.
BOBBY: Yeah, I guess. Okay. Um, speaking of making billions of dollars in revenue, sports betting.
ALEX: Yeah. Should we get to the actual—the—the categories, the topics?
BOBBY: The categories, the topics. I mean—I mean, I think those were categories and I would—
ALEX: I know. Uh-huh.
BOBBY: Uh, I would classify those as categories and topics. But in terms of new stuff, stuff that we really want to dive deep in, stuff that we did not have in the previous CBA. Um, betting is maybe the biggest one. Um, it’s definitely the one that is like—it’s definitely the one where the most money is on the line. Now, of note, this section of the CBA about betting doesn’t really have anything to do with divvying up the profits. Um, all of that stuff is kind of con—confined to, like, competitive balance tax arbitration. Those are the things that really determine how much individual players make on a year-over-year basis. And then, of course, like, what they negotiate with their agents, which is not really what this document exists for, um, other than to outline that, like, parties will not prohibit players from using agents. And, you know, once they’ve hit free agency, like it—all that stuff is in this document and stuff, but we know all that stuff that hasn’t changed at all. So the betting clause, I think, in a fascinating way is really just like the rules of what you can and can’t do when it comes to sports betting. And the fact that it needs to be so long and so specified, I think is kind of a symptom of the disease here, if—if I can go that far.
ALEX: Yeah. I love the, like, first section of the betting policy just being like no betting on baseball. Thank you for laying that out—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —Rob.
BOBBY: I mean, they—they allude to, uh, Major League Baseball Rule 21-A—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —which has been in existence for, you know, decades and decades. This is—Rule 21-A is the rule that the Black Sox violated, the rule that Pete Rose violated. Um, so they obviously already had rules against betting on baseball—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —because sports betting is not completely new. It’s just that the expansiveness of it now require that they be more direct about what you can and can’t do. And they were trying to—you know, in an effort to address some of the problems that might crop up based on the pervasiveness of gambling. They literally use the word pervasiveness. To me, pervasiveness is kind of—has kind of a negative connotation.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But that’s just me. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Um, I’m gonna take you to page 375—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —Section G.
ALEX: I need—um, I need like a book that I can be flipping, like, into the microphone.
BOBBY: Wow, that would be really nice.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Textural—audio textures as we call it in the biz. You can promote sports gambling companies as long as the promotion doesn’t mention betting on baseball, only on other sports.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: So what sports betting company doesn’t have baseball available?
ALEX: So I mean, the—the way that I understood it is that Mike Trout can go on TV for—for FanDuel and say, “Hey, it’s football season.”
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: “I’m placing my bet on the Eagles this year.”
BOBBY: Yes. that is so stupid.
ALEX: Right. And I know—
BOBBY: We know that Mike Trout is a baseball player, just—uh, prohibiting him from saying that he’s a baseball player and that you can also bet on baseball—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —that’s just like implied to me. Anyway, page 376 Section H, you can’t own a gambling company unless you own less than 1% of the shares of the company. You can own a gambling company if the gambling company does not have baseball betting. I—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I ask you again, what gambling company doesn’t have baseball betting? So, um, I am to read that as only the owners can profit—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —at that scale—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —from sports betting.
ALEX: I—I have been—I mean, this is—I—I understand this is not the point of the CBA, but every time I came across these things, I was like, “It’s really only one-half of the equation that’s being referenced here.”
BOBBY: I know.
ALEX: In terms of conduct.
BOBBY: I know, we have fucked country.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: We have a fucked Country. Page 377, Section I, “Any major league player who has an ownership interest in a sports gaming company must submit to the Commissioner’s office, compliance@mlb.com, by no later than March 1st of each year. An annual written disclosure that includes the amount of such ownership interests.” It’s so funny that to own part of a gambling company, you just had to shoot rob an email.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “Hey, Rob. Re: Me owning point—”
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: “—0.99% of FanDuel.”
ALEX: Circling back.
BOBBY: Um, it’s—they’re playing with fire here putting MLB—important MLB email accounts in the document for us to just read.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: That’s why I pointed that out. compliance@mlb.com Who does own the gambling companies?
ALEX: Yeah. I’ve got some questions.
BOBBY: They’re certainly sending them conspiracy theories. Uh, page 379, um, this is attachment 61. This is from Matthew R. Nussbaum, Esquire, general counsel for Major League Baseball. This is one of those famed email attachments.
ALEX: These famed legal, uh, labor experts.
BOBBY: Yes, famed legal experts.
ALEX: [43:02] were—yeah.
BOBBY: Yup, you got it. Um, this is—this is a letter, um, confirming that in addition to the terms of the sports betting policy for Major League players, the parties have reached various other agreements on the topic of sports betting as set forth below, Section A: Safety.” You tell me if you feel like these policies are being adhered to in practice, and more importantly, Alex, in spirit.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: “Clubs shall include in their fan policies a prohibition against betting-related abusive fan speech, and behavior that is directed at players, players’ family members, club personnel, or umpires. Clubs shall include in their ballpark security plans measures to prevent spectators from entering the field of play and other restricted areas. And also measures to protect any area of the ballpark designated for seating of player, family, and guests.” So, this is basically saying that teams have to prevent fans from yelling, “You fucked up my parlay.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I don’t think that that’s going to happen. I don’t think that that’s currently happening. I don’t think that there’s even any point in putting that in the document—
ALEX: No, because all—
BOBBY: —because once you’ve given the power to these gambling companies, it’s over. You’ve lost the battle already.
ALEX: And, like, all of the things you just said, I kind of thought they would already be doing that. I already thought fans couldn’t run onto the field of play.
BOBBY: Well, you can’t run on—no, this is just saying you can’t run out into the field and say, “You fucked up my parley.”
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: You already can’t run on the field. You can—now you can’t run on the field and say, “Hey, man, hit the over today.”
ALEX: So, is it just—uh, but it’s only, like, negative—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —negative comments towards the players, is that correct?
BOBBY: Yes. Number—part three, “The parties will jointly develop a safety hotline for players to report any threats, potentially threatening communications or other inappropriate sports betting-related conduct or contact that a player or any family member—any member of his family receives related to sports betting, e.g. social media messages threatening violence as retribution for gamblers losses. The Office of the Commissioner and the Players Association will—will each receive notice of any player or player family member call to the hotline and will collaborate—collaborate with respect to any appropriate next steps deemed necessary to protect the player and/or his family, e.g. contacting law enforcement with the players’ permission.” So any mean tweets? You can call the hotline and tell Rob to call the police on this person for harassing you for not having your parlay.
ALEX: I mean, I just—the fact that—yeah, the fact that—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —that—this has to be in there, right? Okay. In the event that your family members start receiving death threats, because you went over the day before—
BOBBY: Call us.
ALEX: —call—call—call, uh, you know—
BOBBY: 8675-309.
ALEX: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And just give us a heads-up.
BOBBY: Yeah. Oh, what—we’re gonna send the—the MLB police to their doorstep and tell them, “You better stop. Otherwise, we’re gonna call the real police on you.” Number four, no betting lines—
ALEX: I—I wish MLB had a secret police, you know?
BOBBY: Don’t they?
ALEX: Probably.
BOBBY: It’s the umpires. We’re gonna send Joe West to your house—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —to say, “Knock it off, buster.”
ALEX: I mean, someone caught Ryan Braun, right, and that—and that clubhouse attendant.
BOBBY: He mixed up the sample. I don’t know what you’re talking about. “No betting lines on players specific performance, or other players specific betting-related information may be displayed on an in-stadium video boards or other in-stadium signage during a game or during pregame warm-ups.”
ALEX: Useless. Useless.
BOBBY: So if you have SNY on in the clubhouse that—guess what’s all over SNY in pregame? Bedding lines.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: And guess what teams do? Put SNY on in the clubhouse, put the YES network on in the Yankees clubhouse. I don’t know if all teams do this. I imagine if players didn’t want them to have that on, they wouldn’t put it on. But you know what? Players want to hear what the media are saying about them, and so they have YES Network on. So this is just a moot point to me.
ALEX: Right. You’re—you’re telling players not to engage with—
BOBBY: Betting.
ALEX: —betting on baseball at all, but surrounding them with it at literally every turn, right? It’s going to be on the banners behind home plate. It’s there—
BOBBY: But not in the stadium, though, that—what this is saying is that you can’t actually have it. So that’s just a green screen that they’re putting up on TV.
ALEX: Right. Okay. Yes.
BOBBY: Okay. So now your wife has to see that if you don’t hit a home run here, some guy in—in—um, I don’t know. What’s a legalized gambling state, California? They have gambling there?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: New York?
ALEX: Jersey.
BOBBY: New York? No, you can’t—
ALEX: No, you can’t—you can’t in New York.
BOBBY: You can’t do it in New Jersey. What I’m saying is your wife has to see on the scoreboard that if you don’t hit a home run, here, some dude in New York is going to go bankrupt.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Okay? So, I’m glad we’re protecting everyone. Um, and the number five is all about how, um, the Commissioner, clubs, and players are not allowed to disclose any information that can be used to benefit people who are gambling on the sport, which I understand why that has to be in there. I also think, like, I don’t know, gamblers are gonna get the inside track one way or another.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, by definition, you’re setting up a system that is going to—
BOBBY: Be exploited.
ALEX: Yeah, benefit parties who actually invest their, like, fucking livelihood in this, right? Like—
BOBBY: Two more sections from sports gambling that I wanted to, um, flag for you. Section B.5, page 382. “Grievance is challenging player discipline for violations of the policy Rule 21 D, or any other player discipline related to sports betting shall be handed on—shall be handled on an expedited basis.” Which is just to me, like, is tacit—is it tacit acknowledgement that you can just do a lot of damage by having sports betting in here?
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: That you’re just like—you are inviting the possibility that this could completely fuck your entire season. If there’s a scandal related to this—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —and so you are putting expressly in your collective bargaining agreement that you need to handle it on an expedited basis if this comes up. It’s just—that’s not nothing, you know? They put that in there for a reason, because they’re envisioning a scenario in which random player X gets caught up in a scandal—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —of this nature and they’re like, “Okay. We have to put this fire out as soon as possible. Otherwise, the whole season is gonna unravel.”
ALEX: Right. And—and, you know, there’s reference in here again to, like, maintaining the integrity of the game, right? That phrase sort of comes up over and over, that throughout all of this, we need to make sure that fans still feel like the game is pure. And I just—it feels really hard to reconcile these two ideas in my head. Like, I don’t—I am—which is not an assumption that games are going to start being thrown tomorrow, maybe the next day, but—but I just—uh, it feels like there are two versions of the sport that you can kind of consume these days. I mean, this is actually—I mean, this is something that you got into in your newsletter a little bit
this past week about—
BOBBY: The letter [50:01]
ALEX: Oh, that’s right. Right.
BOBBY: You got a professional on deck.
ALEX: You know, in this sort of splintering of baseball fandom, right? And I do feel like this is sort of encouraging a whole new way of engaging with the sport in—in a way that does not really mesh with how traditional fans have enjoyed it.
BOBBY: Traditional fans is a term that we can use now [50:21]
ALEX: It is, yes.
BOBBY: Um, okay. Last thing, Section C, part two, page 382. The parties will also meet and confer each offseason or more often as needed to discuss existing emerging or anticipated issues in the area of sports betting, including but not limited to betting technology, for example, in-stadium mobile betting, integrity monitoring, government investigations, legislation and lobbying, sponsorship and promotion issues arising in other sports leagues, and any other issues raised by the parties. My—we might have to meet more than once per year to talk about integrity monitoring, government investigations, legislation and lobbying, sponsorship and promotion issues arising in—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —other sports leagues and any other issues raised by the parties’ shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my shirt.
ALEX: It’s really unfortunate because I was gonna—I was gonna use that meme to make a joke about a different part of the CBA later in this episode about the [51:19] uh—
BOBBY: Well, dawg, you were sleeping—like you got—use another—use another drill tweet, I guess.
ALEX: It’s so—so good that they’re just kind of like, “And anything else that happens.”
BOBBY: Legislation and lobbying is honest—honestly my favorite, even above government investigations.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: It’s like, uh, “We might have to meet to talk about this, uh, section of the, uh, Biden’s budget doc.”
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Because it includes one tiny, little thing about sports betting.
ALEX: Right. Build back better—
BOBBY: Um, okay. Do you have anything else on sports betting? You wanna read any other clauses? I feel like I’ve been reading so many clauses.
ALEX: You have, and I—and—
BOBBY: I’m gonna pass it off to you on this next subject, though.
ALEX: Yeah, you are, and I’m gonna read far fewer clauses.
BOBBY: Okay. All right.
ALEX: Um—
BOBBY: I’m a clause guy.
ALEX: You are—you are a clause guy. I do that—I like that. I like telling sources.
BOBBY: Can you the—listener, can you tell which one of us has had to actually write a—a CBA and who values the clauses, and the letters, and the subsections, and the paragraphs?
ALEX: I can tell.
BOBBY: Yeah. Well, maybe it’s not an interesting podcasting, but I feel like the listeners appreciate the—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —the homework. The homework that was done throughout the great state of Ohio.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Uh, okay. Anything else on betting?
ALEX: I mean, no, there—we could talk for hours, I’m sure, and—and come up with theories on how this could blow up in MLB’s face. And we probably wouldn’t hit on how it actually would, right?
BOBBY: I know.
ALEX: So—
BOBBY: Multi-versal possibilities, yeah.
ALEX: It’s kind of one of these things that we got to let unfold, you know?
BOBBY: Okay. Next—
ALEX: Beautiful,
BOBBY: —topic. It’s our favorite, service time manipulation. I’m just gonna let you—I’m gonna let you cook on this one because you love to manipulate service time.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: You’ve been manipulating my service time for years here on the podcast. Actually, just recently hit free agency.
ALEX: Yeah. So service time manipulation, a—uh, obviously a big sort of one of the key talking points coming into the CBA about existential issues in the sport of baseball that need to be addressed. And I think the jury might still be out on, uh, on how some of those—on the impact that some of those guidelines had. With regards to service time manipulation, I think the most interesting thing to me is not that teams are—is—it’s not that the—the penalties for service time manipulation have been ramped up. It’s that the incentives for not manipulating service time have been ramped up, right? So—so, like, teams that promote a player to the opening day roster and keep them up for the full season receives up to three draft picks if the player finishes and have three rookie of the year voting or top five in ML—MVP, Cy Young voting before he is eligible for arbitration. Which—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —is a—like a lot of words. That’s how much of this document is put together is, like, qualifier after qualifier, after qualifier, after qualifier, right?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: But I just—uh, and they are like these, you know, guardrails in—on how many times a player can get demoted in a certain season, which I think is good.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: You see these cases where players get just, like, shuffled up and down and up and down. And—and the top two players and rookie of the year voting, each receive a full year of service time.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: It just feels like kind of recognizing that the foundation of the house is unstable. And instead of starting anew or trying to figure out a better system, they’re saying, “Well, put just band-aids on. We got—we got duct tape.” Right? So how about we just give you the service time if you do really well? And that’s just like—I don’t know. I’m curious to get your, like, broad scale—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —sort of thoughts on—on how maybe they envision this being implemented versus like what this is actually going to look like on the field, because I don’t know that it’s going to make a massive difference in what we’re seeing teams do.
BOBBY: It’s fascinating. I mean, I think that we were already trending towards teams not manipulating the service time of their top, top prospects, even before this agreement went into effect and—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —has just been accelerated by the—some of the provisions in this agreement. But we’re now seeing teams approach it with the philosophy—some teams, some teams.
ALEX: Some teams.
BOBBY: Approach it with the philosophy of, “Oh, if we call this guy up, and he’s doing well, and we get a better sample size of him in the Major Leagues, we can offer him this extension, where he might sign for under market. And in the aggregate, the financial position that we’re in is that we can take this—we can give him more money now, so that we don’t have to give him more money in the back end. And we’re going to own the team for 20 years, and so this guy’s whole career is going to be encapsulated within that time period, and we’re going to make more money in the aggregate.” That is like the—the macro-economic approach that teams—bigger market teams have been approaching this with. Um, now, you know, there are still teams manipulating service time. Like, I’m not gonna—I’m not absolving all teams of this sort of thing, but I—I find the provisions in this agreement around service time to be a cool test case of MLB owners creating a problem and making MLB PA expend capital on solving that problem, and then—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —around, and around, and around we go until, um, time immemorial. It’s like we already had something in there that was like, “You’re not allowed to manipulate service time.” And then we’re like, “Okay, but we’re gonna—we’re gonna do it anyway, right?”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Like, everybody’s looking around like, “So we’re gonna do it anyway, right? And—and then they were like, “Oh, so then the PA will have to, you know, spend even more time and money and, uh, you know, bargaining capital on fixing these problems, so that we don’t continue to keep the salaries of younger players down and manipulate their careers even more.”
Um, it’s really hard to, like, extricate the differences in that macroeconomic trend that I was already talking about, and these rules in this agreement, which thing is like actually leading to more players being caught up and kept up—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —to start the season. I do think one maybe sort of unexplored aspects of this by us at the time and not really about other people—I—like I heard people talking about this was that it’s like doesn’t do much for the vast majority of players who have—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —their service time manipulated. It’s really only the top prospects who already are probably—probably bonus babies anyway and so, like, they don’t need it as much as the other guys who are, like, ready to be called up and still not being called up.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Like, the Mets are a bad, example, because they kept sending Francisco Alvarez and Brett Baty down but, like, those are their top prospects. But a guy like Mark Vientos, like they’ve kept him up and down in the minors all year, and they’re gonna probably get another year of service time back from him, too. So, um, I’m just saying that because, like, that’s an example that’s close to home, but that these are the kinds of guys, like the second tier guys, that doesn’t make as many waves with, because it’s not quite as obvious that that guy should be up in the—in the bigs. But, like, you know who’s better than Eduardo Escobar this year is Mark Vientos.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And they’re not calling up because they want more service time and they’re already paying Eduardo Escobar. So these are manifestations of an ailing system still, and I don’t think this—this really cleared out, like, some of those problems.
ALEX: Right. As you mentioned, it’s only—it’s literally only “top prospects” who are covered by this. So outside of that, like, uh—
BOBBY: Tacit admission that everybody else is still kind of fucked.
ALEX: Yeah, exactly.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And—and I under—like, I understand how it got to this point, right, because this is sort of MLB’s way of saying, “Well, we do want to showcase the stars of the future. We have to retain the interest in the game somehow. And it’s pretty shitty PR for us if Elly Dela Cruz is held down until mid-July, right? I mean, it’s June, but like—
BOBBY: You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Bob Castellini.
SPEAKER 3: He’s got carrots, and lettuce, and mushrooms porcini. The vegetable king, Bob Castellini.
BOBBY: I just said that so that we could do the drop. Uh, okay. Anything else on service time manipulation?
ALEX: I mean, I think the last point here, and this is not something that has changed whatsoever, is that it still puts the onus on the player/Players Association to, like, keep an eye out for this, and—and judge what is manipulation and what is not. Which is not even necessarily extremely, clearly defined in this CBA, whatsoever. Um, and I under
BOBBY: Looks like it’s manipulation if you feel it—
ALEX: Right. It’s—if you—
BOBBY: —in your—in your bones.
ALEX: If, like, he should be up, but, like, no.
BOBBY: If you walk outside, there’s no electricity in the air, it’s manipulation.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: And if there’s not, it’s just not.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: You’ll know it when you see it.
ALEX: And, again, like seeing the history of, say, grievances regarding service time manipulation, keeping that onus on players and—and acting like this can be reasonably resolved with a third party arbitrator. And it’s just doesn’t really sit right with me.
BOBBY: I—I want you to know, I would call you up. You can trust me to call you up. You can trust me not to manipulate your service time. If I saw you’re crushing it down there in AAA, I’d be like, “This guy is ready for the bigs.” That’s my earnest promise to you. Okay. Um—
ALEX: They should just be asking owners ahead of—I just want to say, whenever they come in, they should just ask them as part of the kind of, like, entrance interview. Oh, like—like, “Will you—will you manipulate service time?”
BOBBY: Manipulate? Yeah. And they’re—if there’s like, “No.” It’s like—it’s like, “Oh, cool.”
ALEX: Well, we—that’s—that’s what we needed to know.
BOBBY: All right. Good. Can I talk about debt service now? I—I cannot be more excited to talk about debt service.
ALEX: Yeah, I can tell.
BOBBY: Okay. Um, there’s something that I should have mentioned earlier on, is that, um, the way—one of the ways that I approached this is that I went back to Evan Drellich’s article from when the lockout ended, and I read all of the sort of subcategories that he outlined in his article because that—those were categories that he had gleaned from a memo that the Players Association sent out to players about big changes in the CBA. And so I thought this would be a good way to approach this, now that we have the actual document to go back and see what Evan, like, knew all of the details of already, and what kind of like, “Ooh, we don’t know. Like, sports betting, there’s a whole new different agreement that they’ve never had before, a state-of-the-art agreement on sports betting.” Um, and one of the things that Evan mentioned in there was debt service. And I was like, “That’s fascinating.” Particularly in the context of the conversation that we had last week with Neil DeMause about stadiums. Stadiums are probably the biggest—um, the biggest thing that team owners incurred debt to acquire. Um, they use this as a financial battering ram, oftentimes taking on debt and loosening some of the rules around debt servicing in order to get that stadium. And then all—at the end of the day, they have this beautiful new stadium that they can, uh, package together with the appreciation of their asset, and say, like, “Hey, now buy this team for $6 billion.” You know, like, this is part of the owner playbook. And so debt service, while it may seem nerdy and it may seem boring, and you’re not going to see anyone talking about this on SportsCenter. For the purposes of the Tipping Pitches podcast, like debt service is kind of a really important thing. And so Evan pointed out that they loosen the—the debt service rules from the last CBA. And I look at that and I say like, “That’s something that the PA probably doesn’t really care about, but I care about because it signals to me, like, what they want to do. Why would they want to loosen the debt service rules? Why would they want to allow team owners to take on more debt?” And it’s because of this strategy that I’m outlining. You take on more debt, year over year, you buy new stadiums. It fits squarely within the small to mid-market team strategy of owners collecting the debt, amortizing that debt, keeping their personal tax bill down because of it. And then at the end of the day, their asset has risen in value and they sell the team for a massive profit. And then the next guy has all this debt that he can do the exact same thing with. So—so just so we’re clear, total debt, total club debt means a club’s total outstanding debt, calculated as an average over the course of each fiscal year, including without limitation on long-term and short-term obligations, and all indebtedness resulting from debt incurred pursuant to the Major League Baseball industry [63:42] blah, blah, blah. All of that stuff that you owe money to other people, whether that is JP Morgan or whether that is Robert D. Manfred. It doesn’t matter. it’s all the debt averaged over the course of the fiscal year. Um, what this provision does in the collective bargaining agreement, it says you can’t have more debt than this. The this in this case is your earnings times a number that they come to an agreement of. So, basically, you have to be able to cover your debt with your earnings from a reasonable fiscal perspective. And that’s your earnings, you know, before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, all of that—all of that good stuff. And so, for this current CBA, you are not allowed to have total club debt that exceeds your earnings times eight, except any club, which incurs stadium-related debt to finance construction of a new ballpark, or the major renovation of its existing ballpark, may use a multiplier of 12 for the first 10 fiscal years after that ballpark’s opening or reopening. So you basically get—you’re allowed to have 50% more debt to build a new stadium. That’s—that—to me, like that—that is—that’s it right there.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: That’s all of it. It’s like why are all these guys building new stadiums? Why are they all pining for new stadiums? Why are they pitting cities against each other? Why are they saying, “You must build us a new stadium. You must give us all of this money.” It’s because it allows them to take on more debt to lower their own tax bill, their own personal tax bill, and profit all of that—those earnings in the—like in the interim. You don’t have to like—they’re not going to garnish your wages unless you go over this multiplier. Now, that—it does outline remedial measures for clubs that don’t comply with the debt service. Meaning if you have more debt, say that—so say that you make—for round numbers, say that your club makes $100 million a year. Obviously, teams make more than this, but just for the purposes of this podcast. If you have more than $800 million worth of debt, which is a lot of money to have in debt as an MLB club,
here are the things that Rob can do to you. Uh, he could require the club to submit a written plan for achieving compliance with the debt rule. Prohibit the club from encourage—uh, incurring any additional debt. Require the club to reduce some or all of its outstanding debt. Prohibit the club from making any capital expenditures without the approval of the Commissioner. Require the club to perform or refrain from any other action the Commissioner deems necessary in order to ensure the club brings its total debt down. Retention by the Commissioner of the club share of central funds playoff money, all that good stuff. Reservation by the Commissioner has the power to approve a club’s general and administrative expenditures. Limit or suspend the club’s ability to obtain additional financing. Suspend the benefit of the Major League rules such as selection rights to the club under Major League Rule 5. That’s the Rule 5 Draft. Deny the club’s right to be represented at Major League meetings and/or representation on Major League committees. Suspend individual executives, impose monetary sanctions. Any other measures or sanctions with the—which the Commissioner has the power to impose. Require ownership to guarantee the club’s debt service for the next three years, subject to liquidity concerns. Commissioner may have mandatory debt reduction so you can garnish the team’s wages more or less. Now, why did I read all that stuff? Because it varies greatly in severity.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: It gives Rob so many different things that he can do before he actually has to do something of consequence to one of his bosses.
ALEX: Uh-hmm. Right. He can either ask for a spreadsheet with expenses and—and revenues. Or he can take over day-to-day financial operations of the team.
BOBBY: Yes. Exactly.
ALEX: And it’s like—and—and anywhere in-between.
BOBBY: Exactly. Which I find fascinating because it gives him the ability to basically just let owners violate this rule if he wants to.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And he probably does all of the time.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: He probably lets them take on billions of dollars in debt to build new stadiums, a theoretical debt that is going to be, like, forgiven in tax credits by cities in the future, or whatever.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: But, like, by the rules of this agreement that he should be punishing them for. By the way, preventing them from any meetings is really funny to me. “You can’t sit on any committees if you’re in violation of the debt service.” That’s my favorite by far. Okay. Last two things, I promise. I will—I will end this screen on—on—
ALEX: I’m loving it, man.
BOBBY: —on debt servicing.
ALEX: I’m still not entirely clear on what it is, but like it’s a problem.
BOBBY: Imagining how much debt you have in comparison as a fraction of your income.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Uh, on page 248, Section 6.4. The Office of the Commissioner shall provide, uh, Players Association right to information. The Office of the Commissioner shall provide the Players Association with the following and—following information, earnings, related party debt summaries, correspondence from the Office of the Commissioner or a club in connection with the operation of Section 4, drafts or proposed correspondence to clubs imposing remedial measures. Any documents and/or other information provided to the Players Association pursuant to this section shall be covered by the parties’ confidentiality agreement. This was, like, all the stuff we’ve ever wanted to know.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: It does exist.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It’s all part of this clause. It’s all of their earnings—earnings before depreciation, whatever, taxes and amortization. It’s all of their debt. It’s all of their plan to get rid of the debt.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It’s all of what is the debt has been incurred for.
ALEX: Yup.
BOBBY: It’s everything. It’s crazy that this has never leaked.
ALEX: And, like, this was, I have to assume as with everything else in here, just sent in an email, right? Tony Clark was like, “Hey, can you just give me the finances of all 30 teams?” And Rob is like—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —”See attachment.” It’s just like there.
BOBBY: Do you think it’s, like, password protected, though? Probably. It’s like a password-protected Google attachment.
ALEX: Well, uh—
BOBBY: Like, sometimes I accidentally put a password protection on, like, a mp3 file and you’re like, I need this. Like, what’s the password?” “I don’t know.”
ALEX: There’s a—there is a clause later in here and—and we were speaking about this shortly
before going on air where, um, it outlines how players can use highlights from games on—on social media and whatnot.
BOBBY: Uh-hmm.
ALEX: And there’s a whole app that they can use and—and—and it is worth noting that, like, all the information on how to sign up for said app is in here, that there’s a code you can use to sign up.
BOBBY: Yeah. They should take that down.
ALEX: It’s all caps, MLBPLAYERS, and then you have access to the database where they—
BOBBY: It’s—where’s the—
ALEX: —where they dropped, like the Memorial Day, you know, post that you can use or, like—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —the Jackie Robinson day post.
BOBBY: Right. And that no one is crazy enough to read through this and actually find that besides us two. Um, everything we’ve ever wanted to know we could accomplish by just going through [70:37] for the Players Association. Now, we could never talk about any of that stuff, because—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —we have to give this pod up.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: This is the Catch-22 of our modern lives. Um, page 250, Section 6.6, the Players Association can reopen the agreement and strike if a team is leveraged at 30% or more. Meaning, you’re 30% over the eight times or 12 times multiplier of your earnings before depreciation taxes and amortization, and you have more debt than that. Basically, there is a debt—a number of—there’s a—a total gross amount of debt that teams could incur, that could lead to the players saying, “I rip this agreement in shreds.”
ALEX: Yes. Yup. How do we get them there?
BOBBY: I mean, [71:27] is trying.
ALEX: Just—just let the A’s keep doing what they’re doing.
BOBBY: Okay. I just—I want to say thank you for allowing me to do my debt servicing section. I just—it means a lot to me personally to talk about debt service.
ALEX: Interestingly, also on—on the point of the A’s, this was something that—that jumped out at me that I thought was—that I thought was relevant, which is that, obviously, stadium-related debt, as you mentioned, that’s incurred in the process of either building a new stadium, or doing renovations is obviously a part of this. But it does not become—
BOBBY: Only service renovation.
ALEX: But it does not become a part of your debt until the stadium itself actually—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —opens.
BOBBY: Until the first year that you play in the stadium.
ALEX: Exactly. So, like, you can rack that—that up, which the A’s have been doing. I mean, they, you know, they made claims at one point that they were spending like—
BOBBY: Over a hundred million dollars.
ALEX: A hundred million dollars, yes. And that was like, you know, like a year or two ago, right?
BOBBY: I would like to see the documents pursuant to—to—to Section 6.4.
ALEX: Look, we maybe—
BOBBY: Is this like the sort of thing where like Michael Scott declares bankruptcy? Like, if I walk up to John J. Fisher and I say—I say the page number, like does he have to give me that information? How does this work?
ALEX: Like—like you personally?
BOBBY: Yeah. Like, will he think that I’m like—if I know this much about the CBA—
ALEX: Right. Like, if you walk up and, like [72:51]
BOBBY: [72:52] Players Association, they’ll get flustered and be like, “What’s your email?” You had your shot.
ALEX: Yeah, that—that is—that is true.
BOBBY: You could [73:00]
ALEX: Well, unfortunately, I hadn’t read the 2022 to 2026 CBA, don’t—
BOBBY: Just before it was known as CBA. Uh, okay. last major section, and then we—we’re gonna do some speed round stuff, because we’ve been going. Uh, internet is—international play, which has a whole big long section governing where they’re going to play, uh,
how much players are gonna get compensated for going what they need to do, the conduct of the players—uh, I’m gonna let you take the reins on this one since I’ve been talking so much about debt service.
ALEX: So, there is a lot in here that governs international play, right, from—from exhibition games to.
BOBBY: Like, series within the championship season. They call it like—basically, the London series.
ALEX: Right. Exactly.
BOBBY: Or the Japan series to Open Season.
ALEX: Yes. And—and all of that stuff is—as a—what I do really appreciate is, like, if you have any questions about specifically anything that’s going to happen this year, like—like it’s in here.
BOBBY: Right. Like if you want to know whether or not players are going to show up at local charities, all you got to do is look in the [74:09] section.
ALEX: It’s—it’s like—I—this is an aside, but you can also basically find every single possible injury that a player could get, and also the suggested remedies for these injuries. There’s, like, how to do an MRI on the shoulder in here.
BOBBY: I know. I know. And also, like there’s—I love the section in here that I never, like, fully [74:31] stuff.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: But there’s a section in here about how none of—no wearable data will be disclosed publicly.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: And then they just define what is wearable data and, like, what they might collect. And it’s like players’ breathing rate, players’ heart rate, players’ heart rate while sleeping, players’ breaths per minute while sleeping. Um, and then, like, body temperature, height, weight, waist measurement. Like, all of this different things. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. Man, I should have been a lawyer. Which is good—still good, you know, I’m not 30 yet.
ALEX: There have been stranger pivots. What do you mean? At, uh, a pro labor baseball advocate turn lawyer?
BOBBY: Uh, I mean, dawg, like my—my application is just the last six years of this pod.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Do you think—I mean, you don’t—you don’t technically have to go to law school. Like you don’t need your JD to be a lawyer. You just need to pass the bar. Do you think—do you think reading this document is good—good enough?
ALEX: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: Okay, okay. Keep going. Back to international play.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: What is interesting to you about this being in the CBA? Because this is a new-ish thing as well. I don’t know if this was a clause in the previous CBAs, but certainly something that is this fleshed out, that is defining a vision of what the Commissioner’s office wants international play to be, and then how many things you need to govern in order for the players to participate that—in that in the way that you want them to. I think it’s interesting to me personally.
ALEX: I think it’s interesting, uh—uh, as you mentioned, to sort of see the vision that the Commissioner’s office is sort of laying—laid out for the scope of international play. And particularly, how involved the—the players themselves have to be in sort of the ancillary work that goes into that, right? The—the players are obligated to—to play in these games, and I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, I believe they get like a little stipend as well, right? Um—
BOBBY: Yeah, they—uh, I think $70,000 gets split among the players.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Of each team that participates in these games, basically.
ALEX: Right. And so I think that’s kind of it, right? There’s—there’s a lot in here about international ambassadors, um, with, like, a couple—a couple people from—uh, given the series, right, who will go out and actually go the extra mile to represent Major League Baseball on international stage and you get paid a little—you get paid a bigger stipend.
BOBBY: $10,000 per appearance. Each player who participates in an event shall be encouraged to promote the event, including by participating in at least two large group activities and one smaller group promotional activity in the event location arranged by the Office of the Commissioner, or the Players Club. Routine media availability at the ballpark shall not be counted towards these promotional activities.
ALEX: I—I know that when they say group activities, they mean sort of—um, I know they mean like—like public facing—
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: —events that encourage fans to—to get engaged,
BOBBY: Right. Like, going to the Boys & Girls Club like—yeah.
ALEX: Right. Exactly. But I was really hoping it’s just like icebreakers. Like, we’re gonna do some large group activities.
BOBBY: Two truths and a lie.
ALEX: And then we’re gonna break out—uh, we’re gonna go into breakout groups.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And, yeah, you guys are gonna do trust falls with each other.
BOBBY: I would go to that. I’d pay $50 to do trust falls with JJ Bleday.
ALEX: I’d pay $50 just to watch baseball players do trust falls.
BOBBY: There’s all these clauses in here about how the Commissioner’s Office has to send them a plan of how they’re going to promote the activity.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah.
BOBBY: Each player participates in an event may also be required to participate in at least one charitable or youth development activity. For example, instructional clinic or visiting a hospital.
ALEX: They’re like, “What are two really good examples of this?”
BOBBY: Yeah. Right. Like, “Huh, man, I just watched The Dark Night. What are some things that we can do? I can teach some kids and I could go to a hospital. $10,000 to go to the hospital, this is—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Um, okay. I’m—I’m sorry, I’m reading—I’m so—I’m reading so many clauses again. Uh, but, uh, on page 334, Section 2 is the compensation outlines that we talked about, $70,000—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —split among the players, and I think, like, 50K or 25K split among non-player personnel, uh, which is like the clubbies and whatnot. And there’s also a section in there that says, “Players are not allowed to tip, you know, non-player personnel.” So that’s—that’s like clubbies, like trainers, all that stuff.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: More than they would for a normal game. That’s so petty. You’re not allowed to tip them more flying across the Atlantic Ocean and taking care of your ankle.
ALEX: Also, like, who determines that? Like, do you—I don’t know. This is—I would like a clause in here about tips, right?
BOBBY: I know. The fact that there’s even something in here about tips, like that feels like something that should never be written down. Like that—baseball is all about unwritten rules. I thought—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I thought tipping was, like, one of those things that no one can agree on.
ALEX: I think it’s one of those things that, uh, as you mentioned, like putting it down only raises more questions, because now I really would like to know who’s—who’s doing the tipping? Like—
BOBBY: Who’s—who’s skimping out?
ALEX: Who’s skimping out? Right. Exactly. And who’s—who’s shelling out the big bucks? And again, is there like—
BOBBY: Look, if you talk to MLB players, they will tell you who tips and who doesn’t.
ALEX: I’m—I’m sure they will. Yeah.
BOBBY: I’ve heard some stories.
ALEX: But is there like a database of this? Is it just honor system?
BOBBY: Yeah. Right. Like, is the clubby gonna come forward and be like, “This guy gave me too much in London.”
ALEX: Right. “He gave me”—yeah.
BOBBY: Uh, yeah, it’s really weird. The last thing kind of the end of this section is about how all expenses related to these events will be covered by the Office of the Commissioner, um, and all
revenue generated from these events will go to the Office of the Commissioner. So it’s not—if—if MLB London makes $10 billion next year, the players don’t see any of that.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: Obviously, in the present, that’s probably equating to the Commissioner’s Office taking a loss on these events, um, in order to kind of, like, grow the game, so to speak. But really to grow, like, different revenue streams for the Commissioner’s Office that are not part of the revenue that MLB own—um, MLB players feel particularly entitled to. Um, I’m—I’m curious to see how much they grow in popularity and in revenue, honestly.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen some really nice popularity, again, as you mentioned, the—the—I think the London games have been really well received. People love the sort of ex—
BOBBY: One of the games that we’re going to be going to next year [80:52]
ALEX: That we’re—yup, exactly.
BOBBY: [80:55]
ALEX: I mean, people—people love the—the, like, uh, Japanese exhibition games as well. I know the A’s and mariners often have played that in the past. I don’t—I don’t think the A’s would be welcomed into most countries right now
BOBBY: We’re sending our best. Uh, yes, it’s fascinating. And I think one of the more instructive sections of this agreement in terms of, like, what Rob’s vision of what baseball is.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Um, so if you’re—can’t fall asleep tonight, just go check that one out.
ALEX: I mean, the—the other aspect of this, and this is, I think, in a—a different section, right, is like international players themselves, right?
BOBBY: Uh-huh.
ALEX: And it was a section that I think I was a little underwhelmed by these—I mean, international prospects are not a part of the Players Association, obviously. So the—
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: —the association doesn’t have a responsibility to bargain on their behalf. Um, but I think it—it does get into this—it gets into this weird spot where you are sort of bargaining over players who will be a—a future part of your organization, right? But who do not have the protections right now. And as a result, may be in more vulnerable positions for teams to exploit them.
BOBBY: Exploit.
ALEX: And there’s certainly plenty in here about, “Here’s what you can and cannot do with regards to citing international prospects.” Some of them maybe even be in reference to, uh, recent events. Like, pulling certain prospects together or doing handshake deals.
BOBBY: No one’s doing that anymore.
ALEX: No, you’re right. That’s true.
BOBBY: [82:39] evolved. Cut that all out of the game.
ALEX: I think—I mean, this is something we’re going to talk about soon.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: But it—it really does feel, like, the sort of next frontier when it comes to baseball’s labor rights. Like, this is an entire class of—of players who—
BOBBY: Are not being serviced.
ALEX: Are just not being serviced. Yeah.
BOBBY: Uh, cheeky little—cheeky little nugget in here.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Uh, on page 164, in Section B, possible expansion. Notwithstanding the foregoing definition of international play if a Major League franchise is awarded to a city outside the United States and Canada. All championship season, All-star, and postseason games played in that city by such franchise shall not be considered international play. So while they’re defining international play for the purposes of this section of the agreement, um, they’re talking about anything outside of the United States and Canada. And in this little carve out, they’re saying if there is an expansion to somewhere that is not in one of those two places, that will not be considered an international play, obviously, because teams will regularly be going—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —there and that’ll just be part of the championship season. Um, I thought it was interesting how they put that in there specifically.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: I really—I guess there’s really only one option, it would be Mexico City. They’re not going to put a team in, like, DR, I don’t think.
ALEX: No. Uh—
BOBBY: I’ve ever heard of that rumor. Mexico City is kind of the only place that, like, North American Sports have ever explored expanding to.
ALEX: Yes. Yeah.
BOBBY: I would love to see it. I would love to go—have a reason to go to Mexico City. I’ve been trying to get there. I would love it.
ALEX: That would be—uh, yeah. Imagine trying to explain, like, Mexico City Park factors to a neutral arbitrator. You know, being like, “No, you don’t understand.”
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: “The ball jumps there.”
BOBBY: Okay. Time for speed rounds. Thank you to everybody who has made it this far. This has been a lot of clause reading, a lot of little inside jokes, a lot of stuff that probably only makes sense to two people who read most of the Major League Baseball CBA in the last 24 hours, but speed round. I know you have a lot of stuff for this, so I’m gonna let you go first. I only have two things.
ALEX: Some of these are—oh, this could, uh, be impactful down the road and some of these, uh, are—are completely meaningless, but—
BOBBY: I laughed—
ALEX: —really—really fun to me. Uh, on—on page 207, there is a—they—they go to great lengths to clarify that teams will not have an information bank about free agents. Uh, it’s an email from Dan Halem, deputy Commissioner, and, uh, to Tony Clark.
BOBBY: Dan Halem is my dawg by the way.
ALEX: Yeah, he’s a [85:11]
BOBBY: You know, I’d love to hate him. If Halem—if my dawg Halem was listening this late in the pod, just know game recognize game, big dawg. Come on the pod. Let’s talk through some of this stuff.
ALEX: Dear Tony, one—one sentence. This is to confirm our understanding that during the term of this agreement, the clubs will not operate an information bank with respect to free agents.
BOBBY: No information bank, you heard it here first.
ALEX: Once again, my shirt.
BOBBY: So you think there’s an information bank? The fact that this email exists would lead me to believe that there’s definitely an information bank.
ALEX: Right. Or—or at least that is a discussion that has been had and—uh, among players as potentially existing in the past, right?
BOBBY: Okay.
ALEX: So—
BOBBY: Yes. Then—then, yes, it’s definitely—
ALEX: Yeah, it’s real.
BOBBY: They think that—the—this is the conspiracy theory section of the CBA.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Uh, do you want my serious speed round or my—my silly speed round first?
ALEX: Let’s do the—the serious one.
BOBBY: Rule changes, baby.
ALEX: Oh.
BOBBY: It’s kind of crazy that this is just completely out of the players’ hands. Like, when you actually—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —read through the legalese of this—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —it’s basically just like, “So we have you guys over a barrel.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “And we can change literally any rule we want and all we have to do is tell you in the offseason beforehand.”
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: And that it’s gonna go into effect. And, uh, by majority vote of its members, the competition committee may adopt, revise, or repeal any playing role, and determine when such revision repeal right options shall go—shall go into effect. So if Rob lost his—lost it, lost his marbles. It’s like [86:41] with four now, but only for the home team. Let’s bring back home-field advantage. They could literally do that. Like they could literally do that tomorrow.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: It’s so crazy. I know rule changes are banned, but like not for this pod. We’re talking about everything.
ALEX: But—but—right. We’re talking about the idea of rule changes and—
BOBBY: Yes. Okay. Okay. One more thing. One more thing.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Uh, on page 91 Section A, clauses 1—1A-1C. Consultation period. Committee recommends a rule change or amendment to the Commissioner’s Office that is considered the consultation period of 45 days. After 45 days, a quote prompt meeting to vote whether they, uh, wanna adopt this rule change. Um, they can make revisions to it over that, um, consultation period. Then they announced the implementation of when this will go into effect. The, um, the spring training of the season that the rule will go into effect—it—it goes into effect. And there is no mandatory waiting period after making a rule change. So, again, uh, the away team bats three times. That’s the rule now.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: You have to use at least one left-handed pitcher per game.
ALEX: These are good. Keep them coming.
BOBBY: All I’m saying is like—
ALEX: It’s—it’s—yeah.
BOBBY: I know I sound ridiculous right now, but, like, abandoning the ship [87:52] would have sounded this stupid to someone in 1985.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And now they just have the authority to do stuff like that.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: It’s—it’s bad—it’s bad. It’s, uh
ALEX: Right. With—without, uh, without the input of the people who are actually going to be, uh, governed by the [88:06]
BOBBY: Yes. I’ve been trying to avoid criticizing the MLBPA directly, because I know making a CBA is incredibly hard. This is—this is bad.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: This is bad bargaining. It’s completely short-sighted. They traded this away, because they know that Rob—this is a pet project of Rob—Robert D. Manfred and they traded it away for whatever else they traded it away for. I—I don’t—I can’t confirm that. I don’t know what it was. But conceptually speaking, they gave this way for—for nothing and this is something that not— should not—and it’s not just because I don’t like the current rule changes in the pitch clock and all that stuff. It’s just—they should not give this away. Baseball is fucking sacred and the fact that Rob Manfred is in complete control of it is crazy.
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: Crazy Town. Okay. You’re next to speak out.
ALEX: Slightly less serious. Um, I had a lot of fun in the uniform regulations attachment. So much fun.
BOBBY: This is great.
ALEX: There’s actually a lot—a lot in here that plenty of language clarifying that you cannot cut jerseys in any regard. Once again, this is not referring to anything that has happened recently, whatsoever.
BOBBY: Um, [89:11] kind of really goated [89:13] for that.
Alex. Um, my—
BOBBY: In his own section in the CBA.
ALEX: Um, my—I think my favorite part is, uh, on page 228, Section C-6, which reads, “Under no circumstances may a jersey be ordered at or altered to a length where it cannot properly be tucked in.” So you cannot order a crop top version of your jersey. This just feels like, once again, Robert D. Manfred exerting his force—
BOBBY: Yes.
ALEX: —in undue fashion.
BOBBY: They—
ALEX: And, frankly, I’m sick of it.
BOBBY: They hate to see us winning.
ALEX: They hate to see us winning.
BOBBY: They hate—they hate to see mid-drift.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: They don’t want it because they are afraid of it.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: They don’t want it because they’re afraid of what it will do to the fans. It will rile them up. It’ll have them acting crazy.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: It’ll break them out of their sheeple state if we can see someone’s core. Okay, okay. Speaking of that—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —um, they don’t want you to be able to see someone’s beautiful body, because they’ve been working on it so hard. And you know why they’ve been working on it so hard? Because on page 383, is, uh, attachment 62, and this is, uh, an email to Bruce Meyer. It’s about the joint strength and conditioning policies, and the amendments that they’ve made to it, about nutritional supplements and about how they have to make these nutritional supplements available to different players in all clubhouses. And there’s a list of 10 nutritional subs—substances that need to be made available to Major League Baseball players. They told us they’re stack, bro. It’s all about the bulking. It’s all about the bulking. We finally got the information on how players get so ripped. Are you ready?
ALEX: I’m ready.
BOBBY: Here’s what is available to you—
ALEX: Yup. Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —if you’re a Major League Baseball player. How many of these things do I already take? We’ll see. Number one, multivitamin and antioxidant. I got it on lock.
ALEX: Uh, yeah.
BOBBY: I got it on lock. Number two, Omega-3 fish oil. Really good for you, really healthy. Um, I don’t currently do that, but my mom does. Number three, pre and probiotic enzyme/digestive aid. Gotta get rid of those belly rumbles.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: Uh, I do that, too. Number four, protein. Protein powder or protein bar. You have to have at least two protein powder options available for players. Maybe like a vanilla and a chocolate. Maybe like a vanilla and strawberry, whatever. Uh, and you have to have a bar and you have to have at least two options for ready-to-drink shakes, so they have—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —to have two powders—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —two ready-to-drink shakes for you. I do powder and ready-to-drink shake and bar. I do all three of those. Five, amino acid. I’m not doing any amino acid. BCAAs—
ALEX: Uh-huh.
BOBBY: —Branched-Chain Amino Acids not for me.
ALEX: Sure.
BOBBY: I haven’t found the right one yet. Number six, electrolyte and minerals, fluid replacement hydration. I do that only when working out intensely for over an hour. Don’t need electrolytes really if you’re just doing normal stuff. That’s just for the folks at home. Seven, Joint Aid. My—my dog takes that. I don’t take that. But I can see why a player might need to take it, a lot of strain on those joints. Eight, energy pre-workout, energy carbohydrate, energy caffeine nitrate buffer. You have to have one of those two options available. Um, I don’t do pr- workout. I don’t fuck with that shit. I mean, I took pre-workout once and I was, like, putting my head through a wall.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: Number nine, creatine, only in bulking for me. Only in bulking. They only have to have one creatine available. That’s sass. That’s sass to me. That one—that one might not be the one for you. And number 10, last but not least, cognitive sleep and vision support. I don’t—I don’t really know—I don’t know what that is.
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: Could that be like a—
ALEX: Like, melatonin?
BOBBY: Yeah, I—I guess, but is that vision support? These are kind of—I guess this would be kind of, like, a Vitamin D supplement or something like that, with—or magnesium.
ALEX: Well, I—because it says one of each category, right?
BOBBY: Oh, okay.
ALEX: So—
BOBBY: So you have to have, uh, cognitive—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —which would be like magnesium. Uh, sleep, which would be melatonin.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And vision support, which is like carotene?
ALEX: Carrots?
BOBBY: Vitamin K? Yeah. I don’t—I don’t really know. That was just really—
ALEX: It’s—
BOBBY: —fascinating to me. I just—I couldn’t read through.
ALEX: Once—
BOBBY: They’re talking about fucking creatine.
ALEX: Once again, this is—one of the best things about this is if you actually have any questions about what—
BOBBY: What’s in a locker—
ALEX: What’s in a locker—
BOBBY: —for players?
ALEX: —and what players have to do? You’ve—you’ve got it all. You can see the, like, medical questionnaire that teams will send to players to fill out. Like it’s all—it’s all there. You can see the concussion protocol and see the questions that are asked. Like, I’m—
BOBBY: I just want to know what brand of creatine, you know? I want to know if they’re using foreign—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —just like your boy, [93:44] please reach out, sponsor the pod. Come on. I’m gonna call walmart.com over here, like which—which creatine? Are they using Nutricost? I don’t know what any of this stuff is.
ALEX: Uh, I—I’d like to think that MLB has their own, like, private label, you know?
BOBBY: Yeah. If you have to ask, then you don’t know.
ALEX: Right. I mean, it’s just an addition to, like, the—the Rawlings factory, right?
BOBBY: Right. Exactly. Uh, okay. That’s the end of my speed round. Do you have a couple more that you want to give us before we—
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: —uh, land this plane? As we’re approaching the two-hour mark?
ALEX: Are we?
BOBBY: We’re getting close.
ALEX: Jesus. All right. We—
BOBBY: We better hurry.
ALEX: We really gotta wrap it. All right. Um—
BOBBY: We can’t give the people the two-hour pod—
ALEX: No.
BOBBY: —if they want it. We just got to keep teasing it, keep teasing.
ALEX: Uh, MLB ranks teams by markets get—uh, assigns them, uh, a market score.
BOBBY: I know.
ALEX: Uh, I just want to say the A’s are at number eight on that list. Number eight, top eight, top eight market. That’s—
BOBBY: That actually really is funny. That’s—that’s legitimately so funny.
ALEX: Now, again, like, it is meant to be not a reflection of the team, whatsoever, right? So, the—the—obviously, the Yankees and Mets, exact same market score. The Dodgers and Angels, exact same market score. A’s and Giants. exact same market score, right? Because they play in the Bay area.
BOBBY: Yes. Which it’s a population metric.
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: It’s like an, uh, access to how many fans you could have.
ALEX: Right. Exactly. Which, again, makes me wonder what all this talk about not being able to succeed in this town over the last few years has—has been about—I mean, I know what it’s—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: I know what it’s been about. But when you put this stuff right here in—in front of us—
BOBBY: I know.
ALEX: —uh—
BOBBY: You’ve committed to it paper.
ALEX: —makes you think—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —just a little bit.
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: Where’s Vegas on this list? Where would it be on this list?
BOBBY: Uh, not above Oakland.
ALEX: I—I think it would be—
BOBBY: Bottom half?
ALEX: At least, right?
BOBBY: Bottom third? I don’t know what the Commissioner has studied for a hundred million dollars to figure it out.
ALEX: Clearly, yeah.
BOBBY: Um—
ALEX: Did you know the Home Run Derby has an official scorer?
BOBBY: No.
ALEX: They do. I am not surprised by it, but—
BOBBY: An official scorer?
ALEX: Scorer, as in someone—
BOBBY: Oh, like a guy.
ALEX: You know how—how every game has an official scorer.
BOBBY: Oh, yeah.
ALEX: There’s also a guy or a gal—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —who’s assigned to the Home Run Derby. Now, this makes sense to me, I guess.
BOBBY: I guess it’d be like—just like a home run—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —or, like—yeah, he fills up like a multiple score—score books if he does that.
ALEX: Right. I mean, I would like to see—like, is there a different method of—of formatting? BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: I think he’s part—part, like, timekeeper, too. Um—
BOBBY: Well, that’s like a squishy rule if you ask me.
ALEX: It is a super squishy rule.
BOBBY: They—they—they’re supposed to wait until the next—the last one lands before they throw the next one. That’s impossible to enforce.
ALEX: My—my last one is something that I’m bringing up because it was a question that I think we got, uh, a week or two ago when we were soliciting a bunch of listener questions. And one of the ones that we got—and—and—and I’m sorry, it’s been a couple of weeks and I’m blanking on your name right now, but it was—would there be consequences for players if they opted out of, say, wearing the Memorial Day hat, right?
BOBBY: Oh, yeah.
ALEX: Or the Armed Forces Day hat?
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: And I do think it’s interesting that there is a whole outline, right, on these sort of MLB theme days, and they do note no punishment for opting out of any team day. And it does—you know, it—it again lists these examples like Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, like, um—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: I don’t know who’s—once again, I don’t know how in—in—in any world they could put something in here that would penalize them from—from doing something like that, that’s like a—kind of a pure sort of expression of—
BOBBY: Yeah.
ALEX: —belief.
BOBBY: I mean, but there—there are so many rules about their uniforms anyway. Like, you can’t work certain cleats, you know?
ALEX: No. Exactly. You can’t write certain things on there—uh, once again—
BOBBY: Probably for the better.
ALEX: What?
BOBBY: Good rule.
ALEX: Right. There’s like—you can’t—you can write a nickname on your glove, unless it’s, like, offensive, you know? And, like, again, really squishy territory where I’m like, “So can—”
BOBBY: What would they consider offensive? Like, if Little Dickie made the ML—made MLB—
ALEX: Right. Can—
BOBBY: —like, could he write Little Dickie on his glove?
ALEX: I mean, can—can [97:44] write dick mountain on his glove, right? Like, is it on there? Probably. I think it is, right?
BOBBY: Fascinating.
ALEX: Fascinating stuff. Once again—
BOBBY: [97:52]
ALEX: Once again, everyone, please go read the uniform regulations, the aspect of this.
BOBBY: You love these uniforms. Okay. I have two final questions for you.
ALEX: Okay.
BOBBY: Number one, is this contract meaningfully different than the one—that we were operating under in the previous CBA? Different enough that it was worth a lockout and all of the consternation over it?
ALEX: Uh—
BOBBY: That’s question number one. Number two, so, uh, why did the executive committee that was negotiating this contract vote against it unanimously? Those are just two, uh, food for thought questions for you at the end of this here, almost two-hour podcast? Got anything? Do you have anything for me?
ALEX: It doesn’t feel immediately meaningfully different, but it does feel like it sets the stage for potential real changes down the road, right? With things like rule changes that you mentioned, the introduction of sports betting and, uh, and like all these things that we’ve sort of talked about do feel weighty enough that, like, I think we’re gonna see very little to come of this in maybe the next year or two.
BOBBY: I do think that there—one meaningful difference in this is that there are, like, placating measures from the owners to the players in this that were not there in past agreements of the 21st Century.
ALEX: Yeah
BOBBY: Like, oftentimes in contracts, uh, there’s like a philosophy of just, like, throw money at us. And this is a throw money at us contract. There’s something in—uh, common in contract language called, uh, ratification bonuses. So when the—when it gets ratified, all the members of the Union get a bonus. And we call them rat bones in the—in the organized labor world. And, uh, I really wanted—I really wanted rap bones in our contract personally. We fought for it and Spotify was like, “We don’t think so.” Uh, but there’s, like, a series of what I would consider rat bone-like structures in this.
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: You know, “Oh, here’s $50 million for the pre-arb players.”
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: “Don’t—don’t question us as to why they’re still pre-arb or—”
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: “—like why we can’t knock service time off. Just—here’s $50 million.” You know?
ALEX: Yeah. There’s a lot of concessions that, like, don’t actually change the fundamental financial structure of the league.
BOBBY: Right.
ALEX: Which is maybe too much to ask of them.
BOBBY: You could say that the owners are basically tipping the players to leave them alone.
ALEX: Right. Yes. As to your second question, I do think it’s an interesting one, and I don’t have a concrete answer for you. I—
BOBBY: Well, that’s—well, I actually have Francisco and Jorge. He’s gonna come in and tell us, actually.
ALEX: Okay. Bring them on in. Um, there was one thing that stood out to me that struck me as being a potential sticking point for players, and that’s the point of the—the grievance process. Um, starting on page 40 is kind of where the grievance procedure is—is laid out, and obviously, a lot of this has to do with, again, like if a player is suspended, uh, you know, for—for [100:39] conduct or something like that. Like, how can they grieve and whatnot. Uh, but there’s one section in there that raised concern with the players enough that it’s actually addressed by Rob Manfred himself in the attachments at the end here. And that’s section—
BOBBY: Woo. I’m getting excited.
ALEX: Uh, this is—so this is, uh, Article 11, Section—Section A-1B.
BOBBY: Okay, got it. Reading along at home?
ALEX: And it says—please bear with me on the language in this one. So it says, “Notwithstanding the definition of grievance set forth in sub-paragraphs above.” I’m not going to read the—the definition because it doesn’t really matter. But it says, “Grievance shall not mean a complaint, which involves action taken with respect to a player or players by the Commissioner, involving the preservation of the integrity of ,or the maintenance of public confidence in the game of baseball.” So it’s basically saying if—if—that the Commissioner can penalize a player, if he thinks that said player is potentially negatively impacting the integrity of the game, or, uh—uh, the maintenance of public confidence in the game.” And the—this is something that is not covered in, like, the grievance arbitration process. Like, if Rob Manfred says, “You did something that reflects negatively on us as a league that I think you did.” And you take issue with that as a player, you can go to him and say, “I take issue with that.” And he’ll say, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” And come back with a ruling that as—as outlined here in the text, is equivalent to an arbitration panels ruling in a normal grievance process. And—and the reason that I bring this up, is because the very first attachment here, on page 172, is a letter from one Rob Manfred to Tony Clark, saying, “I understand the Players Association has expressed some concern that the Commissioner might take some action pursuant to”—the section I just read to you above, which could negate rights of players—
BOBBY: This feels like a thriller. I feel like we’re at the end of Zodiac right now.
ALEX: Yeah. Which could negate rights of players under the new basic agreement. So the players were concerned that that clause would allow him to basically make some sort of unilateral decisions that might negate, like, anything else in here. And the way he quells that concern is to say, “Well, I have difficulty seeing that this is a real problem. I’m quite—”
BOBBY: This is how I know Rob wrote this.
ALEX: I know.
BOBBY: This is how you know him.
ALEX: I know. “I’m quite willing to assure the association that the Commissioner will take no such action.” So he said, “I promise I won’t.” I—no, I pinky swear.
BOBBY: So—okay. Okay. The fact that this is attached in this document, and that this was ratified by the owners—
ALEX: Yes.
BOBBY: —means that he is agreeing that he will not take action pursuant to this section. But I do think that your point is well-taken and that there’s, like, almost no trust between these parties, that anything in this document will not be exploited to the nth degree. And why wouldn’t the players distrust them? We just got finished talking about all of these different things that MLB has exploited in these problems that they’ve created that they’ve needed to expand bargaining capital to address. And this is like a really shining example of why if you are close to this—
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: —if you’re a part of this process, uh, day in, day out, reading all of the different proposals, all of the, you know, all of the backhanded language associated with implied by the owners. In some of these proposals that were—they were passing across the table that were, like, borderline offensive, if not, totally offensive. Like, that you would be so close to this process and be like, “Well, I’m not—I’m not gonna vote for any of this. Fuck this.”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “We can’t get way more money from them. These guys are so rich. They’re making so much money on baseball. I’m actually seeing what they’re making on baseball, because the Players Association can provide me these financial inquiry, whatever, sheets that—
ALEX: Right.
BOBBY: —tat I forget what the—FAQs. And so, I—I think there’s way more in this deal that we could get and, uh, I mean, the rest of the rank and file was like, “Yeah, but what’s it—I mean, what’s it going to take?”
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: “Is this—is this going to be the blow up here or not?” And it turned out in the end, it wasn’t.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: And I think that’s okay. Um, it’s—maybe not what we were—we were expecting two years ago, three years ago. Maybe by a year ago, we were kind of expecting it to go like this. So, I think that’s it.
ALEX: Yeah. I—
BOBBY: That’s all we got for people.
ALEX: Yeah. I—I have no more to say.
BOBBY: Um, I sincerely appreciate anyone who has made it this far in the podcast and who has—who has considered this a useful exercise in deep diving into the CBA. And, uh, I—I can’t promise what this podcast will look like the next time there’s a Major League Baseball CBA, but I can promise—
ALEX: Right. We made them part of the Players Association by that point.
BOBBY: I can promise that I will be personally interested in it when it does roll around. Um, is there anything else that you would like to say to the—if there—okay. Here’s what I’ll say. If there are sections that we did not cover somehow in this—
ALEX: Uh-hmm.
BOBBY: —nearly two-hour podcast and that those are your particular favorites, please email them to us, tippingpitchespod@gmail.com or call in and talk about them, three-minute time limit, though, on the voicemail. 785-422-5881. I’ve been told that I’ve been reading that, uh, number too fast and people are like, “I don’t know what number—”
ALEX: 785-422-5881.
BOBBY: 785—it’s like an infomercial.
ALEX: Yeah.
BOBBY: 785-422-5881. It’s drive time with Alex Bazeley.
ALEX: Call now to get your free offer.
BOBBY: Thank you everyone so much. This was weirdly fun for me.
ALEX: In—in a very perverse way.
BOBBY: Yes. In the most perverse way possible. Uh, we will be back next week.
SPEAKER 4: ‘ Cause you’re a rich girl, and you’ve gone too far, ’cause you know it don’t matter anyway. You can rely on the old man’s money. You can rely on the old man’s money. It’s a bitch, girl—
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: Hello, everybody. uh, I’m Alex Rodriguez. Tipping Pitches. Tipping Pitches. This is the one that I love the most. Tipping Pitches. So we’ll see you next week. See ya!
SPEAKER 4: High and dry, out of the rain. It’s so easy—
[01:46:50]
Transcriptionist: DH
Editor: KM
Tipping Pitches 
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