February 20, 2022

Labor Tensions Just Came for MLB Spring Training

Closed and locked gates at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium on the first day of the Major League Baseball lockout, December 2, 2021./Image of Sports/Newscom/ZUMA

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Since December, Major League Baseball players have been locked out of their training facilities, thanks to a disagreement between their union and team owners. With the off-season coming to an end, the dispute is now guaranteed to postpone the start of spring training—and could potentially delay Opening Day.

This season’s lockout is the MLB Players Association’s first work stoppage since the 1994 season, when a labor dispute ended the season early and canceled the World Series. This time, players are demanding better pay for younger players (who are often underpaid relative to their contributions), changes to the free agency framework, and a major increase in the competitive balance tax, which sets a ceiling on teams’ total payroll and serves as an unofficial salary cap. All this inside baseball amounts to a guarantee that spring training, originally scheduled for February 26, won’t start until March 5 at the earliest.

In 1994, players launched a mid-season strike over a salary cap demanded by team owners, who argued that runaway salaries were threatening the league’s financial solvency. That strike was ended by none other than then-federal district court judge Sonia Sotomayor, who ruled that team owners couldn’t get around the strike by hiring non-union replacement players (otherwise known as scabs). Sotomayor’s ruling once again bound players and owners to the terms of their previous collective bargaining agreement, and players voted to return to work. Baseball remains the only major sport in the US to lack a salary cap.

The 1994-95 strike was a financial and public relations disaster—just think of all the money lost by canceling the World Series—and players and owners have tried to play nice, or at least keep up the pretense, ever since. Owners say that this year’s lockout, the first since 1990, was an attempt to spur negotiations and reach an agreement by the time teams are set to play ball.

Meanwhile, as players and owners engage in serious, complicated negotiations, New York’s much-maligned ex-mayor Bill de Blasio is proving that it’s never too late for him to make a mockery of himself online:

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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