Players Biggest Grievances – What MLB’s New Collective Bargaining Agreement Fails To Address
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball,” second baseman Rogers Hornsby once said. “I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
For a while, it was looking like the start of spring would come and go without any baseball on the horizon.
But just when fan morale was at its nadir, Major League Baseball announced a five-year agreement with its players, ending the second-longest labor interruption in MLB history. Now, April 7, 2022, will serve as most teams’ opening day.
Sports economists like me have long studied labor disruptions in sports. In this dispute – the first major one in baseball since the mid-1990s – player grievances largely centered on two issues: the length of time it takes them to reach free agency and the lack of a payroll floor...