Quote:
Originally Posted by Pelican
Those of us who have been through arbitration hearings shudder at the thought of that in baseball. It seems simple; but it is not. Start with the arbitrator. If he/she has absolute ability to dictate a solution, full discretion, the only real issue is who that person is. I don’t think there is any one person to whom both sides would agree to give that power. So a fallback would be a “baseball” arbitration, where each side makes a final proposal, and the arbitrator is bound to pick one of them. Still tough to imagine a person with that authority that both sides would trust.
A mediator is a better tool here, IMHO. Not a person who decides the deal; but someone with good communication skills who is given the authority to convene meetings and require submissions. The best mediators can talk very candidly to each side about what is at stake, appeal to their fears, appeal to their better instincts. The best mediation technique is to lock the negotiators in a room, or better yet two rooms with a conference room in-between, and not let them out until they have an agreement. I once had a mediator deny me coffee until I worked on my client to be reasonable. It worked!
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While I largely agree I don't think a mediator is a thing that makes any sense either until/unless both sides are reasonably close to reaching an agreement. And frankly this always seems to happen, every single damn CBA. The owners make some absurd line in the sand, claim that 31 of the 30 teams in the league are losing money (the Rays are losing money twice!), and when the players ask to see the books the owners refuse. And then over time both sides slowly climb down from the original demands until they wind up being close enough to each other that they could hammer out an agreement or bring in an arbitrator or mediator to help out.
Yes, this is about a lot of money for everyone, although let's be fair here: minor league players, whom the MLBPA doesn't appear to be ready to take on and who the owners most certainly don't want to start worrying about, are absolutely hosed in the current system. I *think* that with reducing the levels they got rid of most of that old system where families would agree to house guys for a few months, but that crap is absolutely unconscionable for a corporation as large as Major League Baseball to do to its employees. Without even talking about all the ancillary jobs that baseball kind of screws over - as another example, I've looked into doing analysis/web stuff for baseball in the past but I can literally make 2-3 times as much doing the same work for enterprise clients - these are actual baseball players who aren't only not making millions, they don't even get paid enough to rent their own apartment for 3 months.
Just an FYI, the minimum salary for the G-League (the NBA's minor league) is $37,000 a year, which is itself pretty bad for a professional athlete but at least you can make a living on that. The NHL's lowest minors pay $907 a month, which is kind of horrible but wait... MLB's minor leagues got a *raise* from 2020 to 2021... from $290 a month to $500. That's absolutely insane.