Top issues as MLB looks to negotiate new CBA

The player has until after the World Series to either accept or decline the offer. If the player rejects the offer, his old team gets a draft pick from his new team.

The issue of expanding the year-long active roster is interesting and beneficial to teams for many reasons. Though players like Fowler and Carlos Gomez remain options in free agency, the Cardinals have ample firepower to improve their roster through the trade market.

The agreement also included some new restrictions on signing amateur players, including stricter signing slots for drafted players and an worldwide signing bonus pool.

Of course, many of you know this.

Less than a month had elapsed in Gerrit Cole’s first season as a union rep before he was in up to his eyeballs, dealing with the relocation of a series originally scheduled for Puerto Rico and navigating a complex rescheduling of a rained-out game.

The previous collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was to expire on December 1 and a failure to reach a new agreement would have marked at least the temporary end of uninterrupted labor peace since the disruptive players’ strike of 1994. The owners proposed discarding this system in favour of an global draft to regulate the worldwide market, which has been criticized for being corrupt in recent years. But if they go too far past their signing-bonus allotment, they have to surrender future draft picks. Teams shied away from signing a player who would cost them a top pick.

Contrast that proposal with the current system, arrived at during the bargaining over the current labor agreement. Presently, amateurs in the Caribbean sign as global free agents. Also, it was just a tool to keep more teams from signing free agents, not a way to equal out talent. The path to the major leagues is made even more hard by the limit of September call-ups.

What’s a possible compromise solution when it comes to the worldwide signing system? Teams have ignored the penalties for exceeding global bonus pools and portions of the bonuses often go to trainers and handlers. This is a similar system that Major League Baseball already has in place, luxury tax.

There has always been a desire to level the playing field for acquiring top young worldwide talent, especially teenagers hailing from various Latin American countries. Ultimately, it comes down to the owners’ iron will to defend their pocketbooks. Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports reported the agreement is for five years. They also allowed Major League Baseball to impose caps on what teams could spend on their draftees and on their global signing classes. It requires a deeper understanding of the Latin American markets than the league has been willing to show.

Ultimately, the implementation of an global draft would help the owners save some cash rather than giving it to the people that actually earn the organizations money.

As of Wednesday evening, Major League Baseball and the MLBPA have agreed upon a new CBA, sources say.

Here’s a brief history lesson in case you don’t remember what happened the last time Major League Baseball and the MLBPA went on strike. But this is an issue that quite frankly many expected to have already been completed.

The original amateur draft in 1965 was imposed on the players by the league.

Just ask Ian Desmond, who last year turned down a qualifying offer in hopes of bagging a rich deal but had to settle for a one-year, $8 million deal with the Rangers after spring training started as teams didn’t want to part with their first-round pick for a player coming off a down season.

The union has never made drafted players its priority, because players are not technically members of the union until they’re on a 40-man roster – until they’re close to being big leaguers.

There are alternatives to the current system that do not constitute the radical, regressive implementation of an worldwide draft and do not carry with it.

The new CBA would run through 2021.

There may not be many, even any, who remember that change, but this much you can be sure of: it was one of those “throwaway” items the players were glad to give up in the earliest stages of negotiations, back when strikes and lockouts were little more than scary rumors.

What’s certain is that contracts like Jorge Soler’s 9-year, $30 million one are not to be seen again for global players.