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Rob Manfred he saluted himself last month A master negotiator, he boasts an impeccable track record in collective bargaining: four business deals and no missed games since he was hired by Major League Baseball in 1998. Manfred strongly suggested that if anyone had a problem with him right now, it was theirs.
He still believes. On Tuesday, Jupiter, Fla., MLB commissioner Manfred, canceled the first two series of the regular season, a casualty of the lockout he initiated three months ago. Manfred insisted last month that canceling the games would be a “disastrous outcome” for the sport, but he won’t own that disaster – nor will he express regret for failing to gain the trust of players as complaints escalate and tensions rise.
“Look, I’m going to say that we took a step forward in some early negotiations over the five-year period,” Manfred said. “There was a lot of rhetoric about being dissatisfied with a deal they made. Most of the rhetoric about the clubs, the commissioner and me was negative. That environment someone else created. And it’s an environment where it’s difficult to bridge.”
If you can’t build them, burn them.
Salaries fell as league revenues rose. The union has reserved a lot of ground in past deals, and sharp front offices have found ways to take advantage of the system. For almost every team, the luxury tax threshold served as a salary cap. And for all the goodies Manfred and the owners offered in their final bid on Tuesday, they needed to know it was dead on arrival.
His insistence on raising the league’s luxury tax threshold by just $10 million to $220 million and keeping it at that level for three years said it all. Opposition to a salary cap is the first commandment for all true believers in the orthodoxy of the players. The offer was designed to be rejected by the union and chairman of the board, former actor Tony Clark.
“Look, we have a pay inequality problem,” Manfred said. “And weakening the only mechanism in the deal designed to maintain competitive equilibrium is something I don’t think the club group is ready to do right now.”
Ownership is concerned about the competitive balance in every worker negotiation, but that becomes a hard sell. Over the past dozen seasons, Missouri teams have combined to win (2) more World Series (2) than the Los Angeles Dodgers and Yankees (1). At that time, the Yankees and Dodgers were in St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals combined to spend more than $2 billion.
Obviously it’s easier to win with a bigger budget. But some small market teams deserve to be doormats because of bad decisions. Nobody forced the Pittsburgh Pirates to trade three dynamic young players to Tampa Bay for Chris Archer. No one forced the Baltimore Orioles to drain their budget for international talent so they could build around Chris Davis.
The union wanted the luxury tax thresholds to rise from $238 million in 2022 to $263 million by 2026. With soaring franchise values and lucrative cable and broadcast contracts, this doesn’t seem like an exaggeration. Still, the league’s bid reached $230 million in 2026. It’s not even close.
Manfred was tasked with guiding 30 club owners, each with their own agenda, towards a shared vision. He must then form a bond with the union whose aim is to get more money from his bosses. If he gets too intimate with the players, he loses his hold on the owners.
Consider Fay Vincent, the last commissioner who presided over the March lockout, from 1990. Vincent understood that the union did not trust his office, for good reason – the owners illegally colluded against players in the 1980s to suppress freelancers. Vincent needed an agent who could relate effectively to the union’s managing director, Donald Fehr, and hired Steve Greenberg, whom Fehr deeply respected.
Vincent, 83, recalls on the phone Tuesday from his home in Vero Beach, Florida: “The only person on the owner’s side, including myself, was Steve Greenberg, who had credibility in Don Fehr’s eyes. The little room next to my office on Park Avenue. They left for about an hour and they came back and said, ‘We’ve shaken hands on these issues.’ Let’s explain what these are and we hope both sides will agree.’
“Some owners disagreed; They wanted to stay and fight, but calmer minds prevailed. And my lesson from that is, ultimately, these negotiations come when one or two people on both sides decide to bury the moral issue – who is right and who is wrong – and look at it ruthlessly, financially and say, ‘We can do it’. Don’t go any further because we hurt ourselves if we do. We’re ruining our own lunch and our own dinner, and that never makes sense.’”
The sides met, pushing the regular season back a week and playing a full 162-game schedule in 1990. But the owners never forgave Vincent, ousting him two years later and replacing him with one of their own, Bud Selig. Owner of Milwaukee Brewers.
If the collusion didn’t work, the owners thought they could disrupt the union by insisting on the salary cap in 1994. The players stuck with a strike that canceled that year’s World Series, and the owners used substitutes at the next spring practice. it received an injunction by a federal judge In the Southern District of New York – future United States Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor – to stop this bullshit and restart the sport.
It’s the kind of dark history players are fighting for, and for all his self-confidence, Manfred hasn’t convinced players that their owners really see them as partners. This was a failure of the leadership and ended the commissioner’s streak.
Now, with the league and league taking a hiatus after nine days of unsuccessful talks, Vincent says fans should do it too.
“It might be a good time for baseball to be overshadowed, as it was in Ukraine,” he said. “The rest of the country should focus on the real stuff. And baseball is fun. This is a game. I mean, it’s not really life-shaking.”
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