The Major League Baseball Players Association is preparing to establish a new major league with new rules in new cities and other alternate plans for the 2022 season and beyond if the union and club owners can’t agree on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. The current contract expires Dec. 1.
“The union has gone through these negotiations before,” Bruce Meyer, chief negotiator for the MLBPA said, “but it has never been as prepared as it is now to go its own way if the owners keep jerking it around as they have in the past. The moment they announce a lockout, sayonara.”
Deputy Baseball Commissioner Dan Halem, Meyer’s counterpart representing the owners, said he is willing to work with the players “as long as they’re willing to give us everything we want including whatever we stupidly gave away the last time – like, y’know, a lot of money and a lot of control and a lot of other stuff.”
There have been eight work stoppages – five strikes and three lockouts – since 1972. No regular-season games were lost in five of them, but the last one was the worst, wiping out the 1994 postseason, including the World Series.
Tony Clark, executive director of the players’ union, said if there’s a lockout the players will resume serious negotiations with cities ready to support new big-league teams under the banner of the Continental Baseball Association.
“I can’t name all 20 of them, and that number could go higher,” Clark said, “but Brooklyn – yes, Brooklyn – is in the mix, along with Indianapolis, Charlotte, New Orleans, Columbus, Sacramento, Buffalo, Tampa Bay, Oklahoma City Memphis, Nashville, Las Vegas, Portland, Montreal, San Antonio, Orlando … wait a second. I don’t remember. Does Tampa already have a team? Anyway, we’re ready to rock and roll if the owners think we’re bluffing.”
An MLPBA source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the union has tentative television agreements with Netflix, Amazon, Google, Hulu, the Roku Channel and Apple TV to broadcast games nationally and regionally. “The commercial networks we’ve known for decades like NBC, CBS and so on, they’re dinosaurs,” the source said.
To make up for the reduction from the existing 30 American League and National League franchises, Clark said CBA rosters would be expanded to 32 players, possibly more, from the existing 26 so current players wouldn’t be out of a job, and the new league would enter into agreements with independent leagues to form a farm system.
The new league plans to keep together as many of the players as possible on existing teams and, in a January allocation draft, divide up the remaining players among the new franchises.
Along with designated hitters, the CBA will have designated pitchers and perhaps designated fielders, too. “We’re still working out the details on those,” Clark said.
To shorten the time it takes to play a game – the average was up to a record 3 hours, 10 minutes in 2021 – visits to the pitcher’s mound will be prohibited. In their place, managers or pitching coaches will communicate with pitchers and catchers the way NFL coaches speak to quarterbacks, through microphones and helmet headsets. “Strategy on how to pitch to someone? Just tell your battery what you want,” Clark said.
“And when a manager in the dugout wants to change pitchers, he’ll tell a reliever, ‘Get out there,’ then get on the mic and tell the guy on the mound, ‘Get in here.’ Oh, and the bullpen is in front of the dugout. The relief pitchers sit with the rest of the team. None of this strolling-in-from-the-outfield business.”
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