It would be disingenuous to say owners in MLB are doing “nothing” and getting rich. But, by default, they are. Whether it’s indirectly or through media rights deals, from the top to the bottom, each ownership is going to eventually land on a pile of greenbacks.

Case in point: the San Diego Padres. Current owner John Moores has been trying to unload the club for years now, a nasty side-effect of community property laws in California and a divorce from his wife. When the deal with Jeff Moorad fell through, it actually worked to Moores’ advantage.

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This is Part Three of a multi-part series on MLB’s latest labor agreement. Part One addressed changes that impact the first-year draft. Part Two focused on the luxury tax and the minimum salary.

In the first installment of this series, I noted how it took 183 days from the time that the MLBPA and MLB reached a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on a new labor agreement until the document was released to the public. It was a long time, which speaks to the complexities involved in the union/management relationship in sports. And while the CBA was released on May 23rd of this year, the associated drug agreement was not.

In Part One of this series on MLB’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the focus was on the changes to the draft system. Today, we look at changes to minimum salaries and the soft-cap via a luxury tax on total player payroll.

Each time a new labor agreement is reached in professional sports, there is invariably the question of, “Who came out on top?” You might be able to say the needle swung slightly one way or the other, but in the end the only real winner is “compromise.”

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This is Part 1 of a multi-part series on the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement

On November 22 of last year, Major League Baseball and the MLBPA did something that the NFL and the NBA could not: reached a new labor agreement without a work stoppage. For those that follow baseball’s labor history, it has become a miraculous run. By the time the current five-year Basic Agreement (read here) expires on December 1, 2016, it will have been 21 years of uninterrupted labor peace.

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It’s not exactly the beginning of the season, but we’re not yet approaching the All-Star break either. It’s that time of year when the league and its clubs are beginning to settle in on the business of matters. There are times when one topic per week simply won’t do, and this is one of those times.  Here are capsules on a number of things going on in baseball outside the lines.

The Latest CBA Will Be Going Public… Really
While the NFL and NBA went into lockouts last year, MLB and the MLB Players Association announced that a new labor agreement had been reached on November 22, three weeks before the 2006-2011 Basic Agreement was set to expire. While general details for the 2012-2016 agreement were released at the time, it’s been nearly five months now and it has yet to be released in its entirety.

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"Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face." – Albert Spalding, 1881

How long have we been hearing that baseball players are paid too much? By my count, it’s been since it was decided that they should be paid. Babe Ruth was the first to hit the $50,000 mark in 1922, and Hank Greenburg hit the $100,000 mark 25 years later.

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It took a day longer than expected, but shortly after 10 AM PT on May 1, the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers from Frank McCourt to Guggenheim Baseball Management LLC (“GBM”)  for $2 billion took place. The Dodgers’ new ownership includes Mark Walter as control person, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and Stan Kasten as CEO of the organization.

The Los Angeles Dodgers stated, “The Dodgers emerge from the Chapter 11 reorganization process having achieved its objective of maximizing the value of the Dodgers through a successful Plan of Reorganization, under which all claims will be paid. The Dodgers move forward with confidence - in a strong financial position; as a premier Major League Baseball franchise; and as an integral part of and representative of the Los Angeles community.”

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You’re reading Baseball Prospectus, and I write for them. So, maybe not everyone will understand when I say that numbers are flat. They don’t tell the whole story. They can only get you close. What you have to have with numbers is “context.” I don’t care what the application of numbers is; if you don’t explain them, you’re only telling part of a story and, possibly, the wrong one.

Major League Baseball attendance is no different. The variables underneath what drives attendance figures are often overlooked. Each year I look at the numbers, and each year there seems to be something else to throw in to try and determine the underlying facets of them.

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Before Howard Lincoln, Chuck Armstrong, and fans from the Pacific Northwest begin calling, the Seattle Mariners are not for sale. I’m not saying they are. I haven’t even heard a mere rumor to indicate as much. So if the Mariners do issue some kind of statement saying they are “unequivocally, absolutely not on the market” and that “Maury Brown is engaging in the worst kind of journalism,” everyone can point to the 90 words in the first paragraph of this article where I made sure to say they aren’t.

If you were to profile a club that was a prime candidate to be sold, however, the Mariners would be right there at the top of the list, very much looking the part of a club for sale. They are perfectly positioned. They have owners that seem to be in need of selling. And they’re sitting within a near-perfect atmosphere to be unloaded in the wake of the Dodgers sale. The Mariners may not be on the market at this time, but you’d be hard pressed to find a team more suited for it.

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I’m not saying this in a Chicken Little way. I’m saying it as a reality that some fans may not fully be grasping: MLB is hitting the mother lode, and that’s translating into player contracts that see greater average annual values (AAV), lengths, and total dollar amounts.

Case in point: USA Today recently released their annual Opening Day salary numbers, and the league will see a 5.55 percent increase in total dollars allocated to 25-man rosters from last year—a jump from $2,786,163,302 on Opening Day in 2011 to $2,940,659,204 this year. This represents the largest year-to-year increase since 2007.

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I’ve been saying since coming back in January that writing for Baseball Prospectus was like falling in love again. I never really knew how much.

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If you haven’t gotten on the social media train, it’s left the station and then some. Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets for social media have become key communication platforms not only for fans, but for players, clubs, and leagues alike.

With that, you get a “good thing/bad thing” proposition. The good thing: players can now reach fans directly. The bad thing, well… players can now reach fans directly.

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