Game 121, Mariners at Rangers – New CBA Offer Just Dropped
Marco Gonzales vs. Mike Foltynewicz, 5:05pm
The unbalanced schedule already forces some odd stretches like this one where the M’s face Texas 9 times in a couple of weeks. But it means individual starters get extremely familiar with some line-ups…and vice versa, of course. Mike Foltynewicz has already started five games against the M’s. *Five*. He’ll make his sixth tonight. He’s actually fared somewhat better against Seattle than everyone else, but it hasn’t mattered – he’s 0-3, and the Rangers are 1-4 in those games.
As we’ve talked about, the problem for him hasn’t really been stuff. He doesn’t throw as hard as he once did, but he’s limiting hits and walks, at least against Seattle’s low batting-average line-up. But the home runs….oh, the home runs. He leads the majors in dingers yielded, holding off his teammate Jordan Lyles, who’s making a run at it recently. And because of the unbalanced schedule, he keeps facing players who’ve done well against him. The most HRs Folty’s given up to any player in his long-ish career is 3, and that’s to JP Crawford *all of them coming in 2021*.
I’m sure Foltynewicz isn’t pleased about this, but then, he’s still got his job. The Rangers have committed a small-ish amount of money to him, and while he’s pitched poorly, the team is in tear-down mode, and so they don’t much care what they get from him. He’s there, he’s a sunk cost, Texas is making a run at the #1 overall draft pick, their pitching prospects are a bit further away…go get ’em, Mike! Maybe this’ll be the day something clicks.
The unbalanced schedule also means it’s more difficult to evaluate Tyler Anderson, as he’s faced Texas a shocking 3 times in 4 Seattle starts. As much as Folty probably wants to stop seeing JP Crawford, slugger extraordinaire, Anderson is probably enjoying these games.
Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich have a big story today in the Atlantic about the owners’ first offer in CBA negotiations. Rosenthal tweeted that the centerpiece is a kind of salary floor: “MLB proposes salary minimum of $100 million funded by new tax on teams spending $180 million or more.” Players would love to see a salary floor, and putting an end to the Tampa-style process of teams ditching players when they hit arbitration (like Diego Castillo, for instance), and teams rolling with a tiny payroll because they don’t see a path to contention in a given year. A floor would help find lower- to mid-tier free agents a lot more suitors, and that would clearly help. But this is just a non-starter for the players’ union.
The current competitive balance tax or luxury tax threshold is around $210 million, and while it is clearly NOT a salary cap, it often operates like one. Teams would do anything, like trade Mookie Betts, to stay below it, and its creation essentially ended the Yankees’ practice of paying top dollar for a bunch of free agents. Its job was to constrain spending, and it ended up being far too good at it. Some of this is optics; it gives owners a rationale for not spending money. But another part is competition: it’s one thing to tax payroll overages; it’s another thing for those overages to get handed out to your competitors in Tampa/Oakland.
Reasonable people can differ on the degree to which they buy this, but Tampa’s rise as a more-than-competitive team exacerbates whatever underlying annoyance the structure of the current revenue sharing process instills. The problem with the new proposal, then, is that it takes this annoyance and cranks it way, way up. We don’t have details, of course, so it may not be as stark as its presented in a tweet, but teams will absolutely stay under this $180 million threshold if their overages are essentially given directly to teams under the $100 million floor. There are other problems, like the fact that at the rate discussed in the article, there’s not enough overages *now* to get teams under $100 M (hi Mariners!) to the limit. Put it in place, and many of the teams currently over $180 M (which, again, is where the Luxury tax was at nearly a decade ago) would jump below.
It’s too bad, because a salary floor isn’t a bad idea. It just shouldn’t be tied to what *other* teams spend, and shouldn’t be funded by a luxury tax. Or at all; it’s just a floor, a rule. Players thought that the current structure with some indirect subsidies of low-spending teams via high-spending ones would help their members – that it would drive more spending overall. But we know now that it didn’t; payroll hasn’t kept pace with revenue growth, as richer teams studiously avoid the luxury tax and as Oakland/Tampa/etc. keep doing OK despite not materially changing their long-standing practices. The new proposal doesn’t directly address tanking, another thing that players may want to target, and so you might just see teams swapping the MLB equivalent of expiring contracts to stay at the minimum but still be delightfully noncompetitive.
Why would owners propose something that they hate? If the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul part is so odious, why make that the centerpiece? Again, we don’t have the details, but this would clearly seem to constrain total spending more than today’s already-constrained level. A de facto cut in the luxury tax would be good for several ownership groups, even if it might annoy a few others. But if the floor is *funded* out of the luxury tax, then it may just be an empty promise: if subsidies are doled out from the revenue generated by the tax, then if there’s no revenue, or nowhere near enough, then you have a salary floor in name only. And that probably sounds pretty good: an offer that looks like a lot bigger deal than it is.
This is just an initial offer, leaked out to the media to start a conversation and put the players on the defensive a bit. It’s not a best/final offer, and so it doesn’t really matter. It’s a bit worrying, though, given that they’ll have to come to agreement some time between now and spring training.
1: Crawford, SS
2: Haniger, RF
3: Seager, 3B
4: France, 1B
5: Toro, 2B
6: Fraley, LF
7: Torrens, DH
8: Kelenic, CF
9: Raleigh, C
SP:
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2 Responses to “Game 121, Mariners at Rangers – New CBA Offer Just Dropped”
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I desperately hope that the MLBPA is able to actually stick together and get a decent CBA this next go-around. The current set-up sucks for basically everyone except owners and MAYBE the fans of a few select teams.
A salary floor unto itself would be great. This proposal sucks.
If I were designing a salary floor, I’d just make the team pay the floor to the players. So if the final payroll at the end of the year was 55M, and the floor was 60M, 5 million just gets paid out to players, based on service time (so someone on the roster all year gets 1/26 of that, someone half the year 1/52, etc.)