Alright, full disclosure here, this sucks. What happened over the course of the last 72 hours or so is difficult for me to contextualize and write about. My emotions have run the full gamut, from unwavering optimism, to gut-wrenching realizations, from renewed hope and promise to complete and utter despair.
Hi, my name is Dave Shovein and I’m a lifelong die-hard baseball fan. The game is woven into the fabric of my soul. For as long as I can remember, this beautiful game has been one of the most important aspects of my life. From the time that I started walking and could throw a ball or swing a bat, it’s all that I wanted to do. As a child, I craved knowledge about America’s pastime and would consume it in any possible way that I could – collecting baseball cards, reading books or the daily newspaper and listening to the legendary Ernie Harwell every day and night on my hometown broadcasts of Detroit Tigers baseball.
I would describe myself as an awkward child – and most definitely an awkward adult as well at the ripe old age of 38. Most of that stems from social anxiety – I’m just not fully comfortable in most social situations, especially in large groups or around people that I don’t regularly interact with. Now, I’m not the type of person who is going to run away from those situations, I’m more of a wallflower – or a sit uncomfortably in the corner of the room type of guy. The people who know me – truly know me – would likely describe me as extremely genuine and caring. The problem is that since I struggle to start and maintain most conversations around new people, I can come off as smug or as a bit of a jerk. The one thing that has allowed me to buck this trend my entire life has been baseball.
Due to my knowledge of and passion for the game of baseball – both real and fantasy – I have been able to forge conversations, make lasting bonds with people and greatly improve my overall quality of life. Family members and friends of mine who know that I’m shy would often come to me and ask questions about baseball, or what I thought about how the Tigers were doing and how they could improve, using that as an icebreaker to get me talking and to open up. Growing up in the inner-city streets of Detroit, playing baseball at every waking moment with the local kids in the neighborhood allowed me to forge friendships. The same was true when my family moved just before high school and I had to go in knowing very few people, playing baseball afforded me the opportunity to make friends and interact with people that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
I have been able to parlay this knowledge, passion and skill for the game of fantasy baseball into this amazing job here at NBC Sports Edge, giving me a platform to share these ideas and thoughts with you fine folks. I’ve also turned myself into a moderately successful high-stakes fantasy player which has opened the door to countless new friendships in the NFBC community. In fact, since I had such a successful 2021 season, I finally decided to face some of my overwhelming fears and anxieties and head out to Las Vegas to draft a couple of Main Event teams in March rather than doing them online and to finally meet and interact with many like-minded individuals that I consider friends. Of course it figures that this would be the year that Rob Manfred cancels baseball.
After a marathon 16-hour negotiating session on Monday night that spilled into early Tuesday morning, there appeared to be real tangible hope that a deal could be on the horizon. Baseball twitter was buzzing – and it genuinely looked as though a deal could be reached prior to Tuesday’s new imposed deadline of 5 PM. The early reports on Tuesday completely let the wind out of those sails.
The Major League Baseball Players Association cautioned early in the day that there were still “massive differences” on several key components and that a deal was far from imminent. That would prove to be the case.
Major League Baseball struck back in the media after receiving the player’s first offer of the day, spewing the rhetoric of they thought they had a “path to a deal” on Monday night when they agreed to extend the negotiations into Tuesday, but that the union struck a different note on Tuesday.
At around 3 PM, Major League Baseball delivered its “best” and final offer to the players and gave them until the 5 PM deadline to respond. They didn’t even need that long, as Jeff Passan of ESPN reported shortly after 4 PM that the MLBPA player leaders agreed unanimously not to accept MLB’s final proposal and that there would be no deal on a new collective bargaining agreement on Tuesday.
Just after 5 PM, commissioner Rob Manfred took to the podium to make the announcement that the first two series for each team had been canceled. When questioned later by reporters on this, whether it was a hard cancellation or those games could potentially be made up at a later time, Manfred rambled about the difficulty of scheduling due to interleague play and it not being feasible to make those games up.
In his open letter to the fans of Major League Baseball, Manfred continues to spin a yarn, making it seem like what they were offering was really in the best interest of the players, noting specifically that, “The unfortunate thing is that the agreement we have offered has huge benefits for fans and players.”
I don’t want to get too much into the details here, as they’ve been hashed and re-hashed and reported on by every major media outlet imaginable at this point. The crux of the issue came down to the CBT (Competitive Balance Tax). Max Scherzer explained it best when the Major League Baseball Players Association held their own conference, saying “We look at the competitive balance tax as a breakaway spending mechanism. That’s how this thing was originally negotiated. And.. we’re not seeing that function as breakaway spending. We’re seeing it act as a salary cap.” In the Players final proposal, they requested the CBT start at $238 million in 2022, then grow to $244M, $250M, $256M and $263M in the subsequent years. Major League Baseball meanwhile, did not change the CBT figures at all in their “best” and final proposal to the Players, sticking at $220M for the first three years then going to $224M and $230M in the final year of the agreement. The thing is, that isn’t even money that needs to come out of every owner’s pocket, that’s just the threshold of spending that would trigger the luxury tax. Increasing the threshold doesn’t actually cost most owners anything – all it does is allow the larger market teams that want to spend more the ability to do so.
While the CBT was the biggest deal breaker, there was also still a sizable gap on the new pre-arbitration bonus pool. The Players last offer was for $85M in the first year with a $5M annual increase over the course of the deal, while the league moved from $25M to $30M in their final offer of the day. That would be money directly out of each owner’s pocket, but that’s the sum for the entire league not a per-team figure. Even if they were to meet the Players full demand, it would only amount to an additional $1.83M per team.
I’m not usually one to assign blame in these situations, but in this particular instance I’m placing the majority of the blame on the owners in this battle. They’re the ones who locked out the players and tried to spin it as a “defensive mechanism”. They’re the ones who went 43 days without talking to or presenting an offer to the players. They’re the ones who have tried to aggressively negotiate this deal through the media. They’ve cried poor on numerous occasions, trying to downplay how financially viable owning a Major League team actually is and making the absurd claim that they could have been doing better in the stock market. They’re also the ones who set Monday (and then Tuesday) as hard deadlines to get a deal done in order to start the season on time. They can change those time frames as they see fit, there is no hard deadline, they merely wanted to create a sense of urgency.
Furthermore, if you believe what some of the players are saying, they also tried to pull a fast one on the players late Monday. As Blue Jays right-hander Ross Stripling told Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet, “It got to be like 12:30 and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before… They were trying to sneak things through us, it was like they think we’re dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something. It’s like that stupid football quote, they are who we thought they were. They did exactly what we thought they would do. They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed, and then they tried to sneak some (expletive) past us at that deadline and we were ready for it. We’ve been ready for five years. And then they tried to flip it on us today in PR, saying that we’ve changed our tone and tried to make it look like it was our fault. That never happened.”
On the bright side, Manfred noted in his press conference that with the representatives of the Players union flying back to New York, it was highly unlikely that any negotiating would resume until Thursday at the earliest. Tony Clark and the MLBPA however, announced shortly afterwards that they were available and willing to continue negotiations on Wednesday, so hopefully that’s at least a step in the right direction.
When those talks do eventually resume though, there will now be one additional large hurdle to climb. As we saw during the negotiations leading up to the truncated 2020 season, the Players have no interest in taking prorated salaries for games that have been lost. Bruce Meyer, the lead negotiator for the MLBPA, reiterated that stance in the press conference Tuesday, noting that the players want to be compensated for canceled games. Manfred, on the other hand, had already stated outright earlier in his presser that they would not be compensated for games that are canceled. What’s one more gigantic issue to overcome though when both sides are supposedly negotiating in good faith, right?
Selfishly, I just want baseball. I don’t want to have to miss another Opening Day and deal with a shortened season for the second time in the last three years. Not while the product on the field is so damn good at the moment. We’re going to be missing peak starts from Jacob deGrom. We’re missing the greatness of Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Wander Franco, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, Shohei Ohtani, Trea Turner and the plethora of other stars who are the current faces of the game.
I was 11-years-old during the strike in 1994 that wiped out a World Series. I witnessed first-hand how painful that experience was and how long it took for many casual fans to give the game another chance. That was 1994 – before the explosion of the internet and streaming devices and having an endless number of entertainment options available at our fingertips. It’s already hard enough to get kids interested in baseball the way that I was and that many current fans were. Missing games – missing Opening Day – is one of the worst possible things that can happen if the goal is to grow the game.
As bleak as things look at the moment, it’s important to keep the faith. There’s going to be a season in 2022, it’s far too costly for both sides to drag this thing out for too long. There have been reports that owners are willing to miss games in April – when temperatures are cold and attendance is generally lower – but if that calendar flips to May the urgency to get things done should escalate exponentially. All we can do in the meantime is wait and console our fellow baseball fans for something that was unjustly taken from us. Deep down, there’s a part of me that still thinks there’s a chance things will come together quickly in the next couple of days. I know that I have yet to cancel my flight to Vegas or my hotel plans there as there’s still a sliver of hope that everything works out alright. I hope to see you there.
Leveraging this Information
There will be a strong sentiment among many managers in the fantasy baseball community to take a pause from drafting, player research and other preparation for the 2022 season until we have some kind of solid information on when the season may actually begin. While I understand that thought – and I’m as angry as anyone over Tuesday’s developments – I think that would be a mistake.
Staying sharp is key. We went through similar circumstances in 2020 when the start of the season was moved, and many fantasy managers struggled to gear back up once we finally got word on when the season would kick off. Personally, I dove into my draft preparation even harder during that downtime, stayed sharp throughout and had one of my most profitable years to date.
While it seems obvious, there’s one major actionable item that we can take away from Tuesday’s announcement that at least the first six games of the season have been canceled – and that other games could be canceled as well. That’s to bump up any players who are coming back from injuries whose availability for Opening Day was in doubt. Ronald Acuna Jr. is the prime example of this, as the further back the start of the season gets pushed, the higher his value should climb. He has already been creeping up draft boards, but with this news it wouldn’t shock me to see him climb into the top five picks overall on average.
The same goes for players who are coming back from Tommy John surgery – I’m looking at you Justin Verlander and Mike Clevinger. Not only does it give them at least an additional week (and likely more) to rehab, but a shorter season also limits their overall workload, making them more valuable now if you thought that they were going to have any sort of innings restriction.
This point works for young hurlers as well who are expected to have innings limits – think the Shane McClanahan or Shane Baz types. It also stands to benefit pitchers that are making the transition from the bullpen to the rotation who may have their innings capped otherwise, like Garrett Whitlock (if he’s indeed starting) or Michael Kopech.
One other interesting note that came out of Rob Manfred’s note to the fans on Tuesday was this: “ Also, for the first time ever, we agreed to an incentive system to encourage clubs to promote top prospects to their Opening Day rosters.” If that’s indeed the case, and something that has already been agreed upon, it may be time to bump up those playing time projections for top prospects that we may have otherwise expected to spend some time in the minor leagues to begin the season – perhaps until some sort of Super-2 deadline. Bobby Witt Jr., Adley Rutschman and Riley Greene seem to fit the bill here.
Keep putting in the work. Continue supporting your favorite content creators and providers. We’re all in this together and brighter days are surely on the horizon.
Quick Hits: The agent for Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki told Andrew Baggarly of The Athletic that his client is not reevaluating a move to Major League Baseball. At last check, the Giants and Mariners were viewed as the favorites for his services, though the Red Sox, Yankees, Padres, Blue Jays, Rangers, Phillies and Cubs were known to have checked in on him as well. ... The Mets signed right-hander R.J. Alvarez to a minor league contract.
