MLB

New MLB CBA

26 Comments

Not sure if this has been covered yet, but:

MLB wants to expand replay to include fair-or-foul calls, "whether a fly ball or line drive was trapped" and fan interference all around the ballpark. Umpires still must give their approval and it's uncertain whether the extra replay will be in place by opening day.

Personally, I'm not a fan of replay on fair-or-foul calls, but there it is. My guess is that we're going to see a lot more close calls get called "fair" and then (maybe) rescinded on replay, for the same reasons that NFL refs consistently err on the side of ruling a fumble on the field--if you reverse a "foul" call, it's hard to tell what might have happened, but it's generally really straightforward to reverse a "fair" call. I think it's a matter of taste, but for a call that umps get correct so often, I'd rather see focus on improvement directed elsewhere. We'll see how it plays out, I know to a large degree I'm swimming upstream on this issue.

Eliminating a practice of some teams, there is a prohibition on "taxi squads" -- calling up players from the minors and not activating them.

Do teams really do this? I can't think of any recent examples. Usually the Twins are in dire need of the player they call up since they tend to have a wait-and-see approach to players going on the DL.

And there's at least one issue still to be decided.

For the postseason, the sides agreed to negotiate on tiebreaker rules -- do teams tied for the last wild-card berth meet on the field, or will the tie be broken by a formula?

I hope it's on the field. I hate tiebreakers with the unbalanced schedule. I mean, I guess I hate the wild card with the unbalanced schedule, but tiebreakers are a further injustice (in my book.) I suppose the issue is that this means the players have to play more games without additional compensation, since paying players extra for the playoff game would conceivably provide an incentive on some level for teams to want to tie to end the season. Yeah, it's a little far-fetched, but given its history with gambling and game fixing, I think they are right to be cautious.

I'm probably getting ahead of myself, though--travel and schedule are likely bigger culprits. Who wants to be the team that plays three games in three days in three different cities? Well, I guess I'd rather do that than sit at home because I lost a tiebreaker, but I suppose on some level that's a matter of taste, too.

Quick uniform number switches will be a thing of the past.

Players must tell the commissioner's office by July 31 of the preceding year if they want a new jersey. That is, unless "the player (or someone on his behalf) purchases the existing finished goods inventory of apparel containing the player's jersey number." As in, every replica jersey, jacket, T-shirt, mug and anything else with a number that's anywhere in stock.

I wonder what made this a pressing issue. It seems like most players that switch their number spontaneously are either accommodating a teammate or pretty unknown. This also makes me wonder if, say, the NBA got burned when Kobe switched his number and MLB didn't want that to happen to them. (Unsure on how the timing works there.) I'd guess the major ramification here is if a team makes a big free agent acquisition and the new guy wants an occupied number, the new guy is going to have to buy a whole bunch of jerseys to make it happen.

The deal also bans players and team officials from asking official scorers to reconsider decisions -- clubs must instead send video to MLB to appeal calls -- and increases punishments for slow-moving hitters and pitchers, raising pace-of-game fines up to $10,000 each for the sixth violation and beyond.

Anything that reduces bias on the part of official scorekeepers is a plus in my book. The scorekeepers don't get paid enough to deal with players complaining about their decisions anyway. Not a big fan of the pace-of-game fines. Does the league get fined every time the players are ready to play and the commercial break isn't over yet?

That's about it, except for no corporate tats. Have there been any high-profile cases of this? I can imagine some corporation might pay good money for a forearm tattoo.

26 thoughts on “New MLB CBA”

  1. Personally, I'm not a fan of replay on fair-or-foul calls, but there it is.

    Std issue in Cricket - useful for No-balls, Run Outs, Stumpings, Close Catches, and whether a boundary is a sixer or merely four.

    1. i'm relatively ambivalent about replay, but if it goes for plays like this, it better not involve all four umpires lumbering into the dugout to take a look.

      also, robot umpires, etc.

      1. This makes me dread robot umpires even more. How hard will it be for them to get down the stairs into the dugout to view the replay?

  2. Thanks for the info, ubes. There's obviously a lot of stuff that's in the new CBA that hasn't been commented on very much.

  3. Does having a tattoo of, say, the Superman symbol count as a corporate tattoo? It's a registered trademark of DC Comics/Warner Bros., I'm sure. They play different sports, but both Shaq and Kevin Faulk have that tattooed on their arms. Could Ben Revere get, say, the Flash symbol on his forearm under the new CBA?

    This interests me a fair bit since my old job had pretty strict tattoo regulations which changed a few times while I was in the association. I'm fairly sure I'd get turned away from the recruiter's office now if I tried to join the same organization, which tells me a fair bit of what I need to know about the people running the place.

    1. That's a good question. My guess is that MLB is mainly trying to keep from players getting endorsement money from tattoos, so if someone had a superman tattoo but didn't get paid for it, they probably wouldn't worry about it. Maybe.

  4. The NFL has gotten to the point where I'll turn the channel when they go to a replay. Their system is terrible. It takes forever and they somehow still seem to get a lot of calls wrong.

    I really hope baseball doesn't go in this direction.

        1. i had my first redzone experience last sunday. it was a wholly superior experience to watching any one game.

          1. Fortunately, a certain website that is known is very good about having a working redzone, so I usually pop that up on Sundays as I go about doing things that are more entertaining, like laundry and such.

            Not that I think the NFL is in danger of becoming irrelevant or anything, but it has to be a bad sign when skipping around from game to game is significantly more entertaining than watching one whole game story unfold.

            1. Well, what about this year's Games 162? That was pretty rad flipping around baseball.
              (If only on MLB.com's Gameday, Twitter, and the half-baked confines.)

              1. Indeed. But I would still prefer to just watch one game during the regular season than flipping around madly, personally.

                1. Every now and then it's just entertaining to watch MLB Network's Quick 60 (or whatever they called that show) and follow while they flip between the games. They'll focus in on interesting in-game situations, and I've seen lots of neat action resulting from it. And I learned that there are ball teams outside of the East Coast -- did you know they now have one in Houston?!

                  1. I agree with that, but over the course of a 162-game season, that desire doesn't seem to grab me as much. Over the course of a 16-game NFL season, its what I prefer every single time.

            2. yeah, i was trying to use said, uh, feed to watch the vikings game (for some reason) last week, but i couldn't get it to work, so i plugged into redzone instead. might try that again next week.

    2. What's the ratio of time during plays to time between plays in the NFL? 1:4? 1:5? Worse? It's so tedious. I really don't understand why these huge revenue sports can't just have a full time booth official for each game. Yeah, maybe it's a little awkward that he can overrule the guy who is supposed to be in charge on the field, but we're all big boys and they ought to be able to work that out. If it's not immediately obvious the call should be overturned, they should just move on. The obsession with "getting the call right" has gone too far.

      1. Yeah, you can safely turn the channel between any two plays, whether there's a replay or not. I'm finding football to be unwatchably slow these days, possibly because I don't drink during the day anymore.

        1. It's pretty ridiculous. I missed the Green Bay-Atlanta playoff game last year since I was out of town, and watched it later. Having zero commercials and being able to flip through the slow times was awesome.

  5. I know the Red Sox use a taxi squad pretty regularly. There are multiple weeks when they'll have 3 or 4 Pawsox on standby ready to plug in as soon as JD Drew declares himself unable to play.

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