Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations following the MLBPA's August 16th setting of an August 30th strike date have not overly encouraged many people. Management took a particularly dim view of the players' revenue sharing and competitive balance tax proposals presented last Saturday, while also failing to accept even the players' generous drug testing proposal. Reports on the steroid policy have grown somewhat jumbled as the strike date approaches, but it appears owners are still holding out for more stringent guidelines.

I remain optimistic that an agreement will be reached quickly if the players strike. However, there still seem to be many unresolved issues, and although there was plenty of time to address them last week, we're now running out. The draft seems likely to remain unchanged in any initial agreement, as the two sides have assigned a committee to look at a worldwide draft, and they won't complete their work soon. Similarly, I don't think we'll see a competitive balance draft as that would require lengthy negotiations for which there isn't time. Once they reach an agreement, it can be modified before it expires with the assent of both sides. I sincerely hope owners won't push arbitration issues beyond possible Super 2 changes, as that could certainly hold up talks. Management will likely accept whatever drug policy is on the table when other matters are resolved, which brings us to the main areas of contention: the competitive balance tax and revenue sharing.

Both sides have made concessions since we last discussed the issues. Management has moved the base payroll, on which a luxury tax would not be paid, up to $112M, while players have moved down to $120M in the first year of the deal. Players still want the base payroll to increase by $10M each year and to have no tax in the final year of the deal. I think the players will have to agree to a tax in the final year of the deal, and they may need to decrease the incremental increases to somewhere between five and eight million before an agreement will be completed. However, I think the owners will bring the base up to around $118M. The agreed-upon penalty percentages for payroll over the base will likely start around 25% for violation in the first year of the agreement, and then escalate depending on when a team surpassed the base payroll and how many years the team has been above the base.

While many sources have reported that the average yearly value of contracts will be used to determine the salaries that make up a team's payroll rather than using the exact amount a player is earning in that year, most publications have ignored the fact that every team will have $9M in benefits included in their payroll calculation. As a result, several more teams than most negotiation observers initially believed will move into the range of the base.

What upset the owners about the players' revenue sharing proposal was that they want to phase in the changes. While management wants to begin immediately sharing 36% of local revenue, the players want to gradually increase sharing to 33.3% of local revenue.

Additionally, the two sides still differ on how to unequally divide money from the central fund, which is made up of revenue from national broadcasting and licensing contracts. The fund is currently split equally 30 ways. Owners want each team to contribute equally ($2.83M each) to form an $85M separate fund that would be dispersed unequally at the discretion of the commissioner, thus the "Commissioner's Discretionary Fund". The players only want teams that don't receive revenue sharing to lose a portion of their central fund monies. They propose to phase in a plan that would eventually take away $70M from the portion of the central fund that would go to teams paying out local revenue sharing money, distributing it under the same plan used for the local revenue sharing. Reportedly the union's plan wouldn't have the owners sharing the full $70M until the third year of the agreement, instead beginning with only a third that much in the first year and moving to two-thirds in the second year.

If the situation in baseball is so desperate that the owners cannot settle for what the union has already offered, then why haven't they prepared replacement players? There are certainly adequate numbers of minor leaguers and foreign players that would cross the likely imaginary picket lines for the opportunity to play in the majors. Popular theory is that the primary opposition to replacement players in 1994 was due to Baltimore Orioles' Owner Peter Angelos' interest in maintaining Cal Ripken, Jr.'s Streak, which would have ended if replacement players played any regular season games. Owners today face no such impediment. Fans repeatedly express the opinion that the current bunch of players are over-rated and over-paid, so while some would likely miss their favorites, many would still attend games.

I don't have an extensive familiarity with labor law, but I've spent some time looking into the subject recently, and I've found no mandatory waiting period between the time a union strikes and when management can replace workers. Therefore unless the owners believe there is some intrinsic value to the current players, there's no reason for them not to have replacements waiting to play the games on Friday. Consequently, I have to believe that the owners feel they are sufficiently close to an acceptable agreement that any strike will be of negligible length, making replacement players not worth the animosity they would cause in negotiations. Therefore you can hold your breath if the players strike, as there shouldn't be much more than a hiccup in the season.

The less positive viewpoint of the situation is that the owners believe using replacement players would be an obvious indication that they aren't negotiating in good faith. In order to preserve the possibility of implementing the labor structure of their choice upon the players in the event that an impasse is reached, management must continue to appear to negotiate in good faith. This interpretation of the situation might explain why San Diego Padres' Owner John Moores proclaimed that he's prepared to sit out next season if the players strike. I've not encountered another explanation for why owners wouldn't try to salvage some of their losses in an extended strike by playing games with replacements. Their actions in the past certainly don't lead me to believe the absence of prepared replacements has anything to do with maintaining the integrity of the game.

The question of replacement players leads me to another I've had for some time. I've heard from readers expounding their interest in minor league baseball, where the players hustle and everything's more affordable. However, invariably those people are not content merely to attend the minor league games; they also want that atmosphere at the major league level. Why? Minor league teams have leagues, playoffs, and championships, so what's the rationale for needing the team you follow to be at the top of the totem pole?