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Baseball|‘It’s Not About Me’: Scherzer Bucks a System That Worked for Him

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/sports/baseball/max-scherzer-lockout.html
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‘IT’S NOT ABOUT ME’: SCHERZER BUCKS A SYSTEM THAT WORKED FOR HIM

A Mets ace, Max Scherzer stands to lose around $233,000 per day because of
canceled games. He wants to fix the system for players who make exponentially
less.

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Max Scherzer, a pitcher for the Mets, was an active participant in the
negotiations between the players and M.L.B. over the last two
weeks.Credit...Greg Lovett/The Palm Beach Post, via Associated Press

By James Wagner

March 3, 2022

JUPITER, Fla. — Max Scherzer drives a Porsche.

That shouldn’t be shocking. He’s a very talented and highly compensated
professional athlete. Investment bankers, company executives and movie stars
drive them, too. And M.L.B.’s billionaire club owners have mansions, jets and
lavish artwork.

Throughout his decorated career, Scherzer has signed two free agent contracts
worth a combined $340 million. The Lerners, the billionaire owners of the
Washington Nationals, and Steven Cohen, the billionaire owner of the Mets, gave
him those deals. The latter, a three-year, $130 million contract signed with the
Mets this off-season, set a baseball record for the highest average annual
salary: $43.3 million per year.

Clearly, Scherzer, 37, has benefited from the economic structure in baseball, a
model that is negotiated in the collective bargaining agreements between M.L.B.
owners and the players’ union. With Scherzer on the team, the Los Angeles
Dodgers, the Nationals and, eventually, the Mets will have paid a luxury tax for
large payrolls.

Despite all this, Scherzer is pushing for change in the players’ new labor deal
with owners. He and Andrew Miller, a veteran pitcher with an estimated $80
million in career earnings, are among the top player representatives in the
union, and certainly the most vocal.



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Scherzer was at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Fla., during the nine days of
face-to-face negotiations with M.L.B. ahead of the league’s self-imposed
deadline of 5 p.m. on Tuesday to begin the 2022 season as scheduled on March 31.
He and Miller were both there for the marathon 16 ½-hour negotiating session
that began on Monday and bled into Tuesday.


Image

Scherzer was one of two players negotiating directly with owners in the final
two days before games were canceled. He spoke at a news conference shortly after
the cancellations were announced. Credit...Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

And after M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred canceled the first two series of the
season — more than 75 games — Scherzer attended a news conference in which he
explained why this all mattered to him, and why players were willing to wait
until they got a labor deal they believed was fair.


M.L.B. OFF-SEASON UPDATES

 * Canceled Games: After the league and players’ union failed to reach a labor
   deal, M.L.B. delayed the start of the 2022 season.
 * The Commissioner’s Offer: Rob Manfred hailed himself a master negotiator. But
   his deal was engineered for rejection, our columnist writes.
 * Jeter Resigns: A winner on the field, Derek Jeter resigned as chief executive
   of the struggling Marlins, ending an ambitious second career.
 * A Hall of Famer: David Ortiz, who led the Red Sox to three World Series
   titles, was elected to the Hall of Fame  in his first year on the ballot.

“It’s not about me; it’s about everybody else,” he said after the news
conference on Tuesday. “And I’ve seen what happens to the other guys, and I’m
willing to fight for those guys, and willing to sacrifice my salary to make sure
that they can make the most that they can.”

The sides have been discussing a new C.B.A. since last spring. When a new deal
wasn’t reached before the previous one expired, Manfred locked out the players
on Dec. 2, halting the sport and any interactions or transactions involving
players. The talks in Florida produced only modest progress, with gaps remaining
on several key issues.



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When March 31 rolls around and stadiums remain empty, players will begin losing
pay and service time. For every day of the regular season that is lost, Scherzer
stands to lose an estimated $233,000.

It will be much easier for Scherzer to miss paychecks — and an unknown part of
his finite career — than most. Scherzer, a three-time Cy Young Award winner and
2019 World Series champion, has many millions already and a guaranteed spot on
the Mets roster. Many others, however, do not.

Teams, which are run by analytically-savvy executives, have increasingly relied
on younger, cheaper players who have little to no leverage to demand raises.
Think of stars like the 2021 American League Most Valuable Player runner-up
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or the National League Cy Young Award winner Corbin
Burnes.

Despite record contracts, like Scherzer’s, the average major-league salary of
roughly $4 million has reached a plateau. The average career length is about
four years, and salary arbitration — which provides raises — generally starts
after a player has accrued three years of service time. According to the union,
60 percent of players who played in a game in the major leagues last year were
paid roughly the league-minimum rate of $570,500.


Image

Scherzer has earned more than $200 million in his career, and his new deal with
the Mets set a record for highest average annual value.Credit...Ron
Blum/Associated Press

The latest minimum salary proposal by M.L.B., which has progressively increased
throughout talks, called for it to begin at $700,000 in 2022. The players asked
for $725,000 this season, with larger annual increases. The sides have agreed to
create a bonus pool for top players who are not yet eligible for arbitration,
but they have bickered over the amount ($30 million with no annual increases
versus $85 million with $5 million annual increases).

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So this, Scherzer said, is beyond a labor dispute between billionaires and
millionaires.

“Players in my position understand that there’s players in the minor leagues
grinding through that have not made a lot of money in their life,” he said about
of players in baseball’s lower ranks, who are not represented by the M.L.B.
players’ union, and who are often paid roughly $8,000 to $14,000 per year — and
not all receive large signing bonuses, either.



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“Getting into the big leagues almost makes them whole when it gets to even the
minimum salary,” Scherzer continued. “They’ve been in debt going through the
minor leagues, and being able to realize that windfall in the major leagues
really makes a difference in their lives and their careers. That’s why, in a $10
billion industry, we veteran players — and I’ve talked to numerous veteran
players — we all agree that their compensation for the pre-arbitration player
has to go up.”




For the first time since the talks in Florida were called off, negotiators for
M.L.B. and the union met on Thursday, for 90 minutes in New York. All the key
issues were discussed, but it was unclear when they would meet again or when a
new deal would be reached. Every day is costly for both sides — and in the eyes
of fans.

“If it was solely within my ability or the ability of the clubs to get an
agreement, we’d have an agreement,” Manfred said on Tuesday. “The tough thing
about this process is it takes both parties to make an agreement. I’m really
disappointed that we didn’t make an agreement and I’m really committed to doing
everything possible to get one.”

While owners have listened to the union and offered ways to increase
compensation for younger players, they have also proposed some ways to generate
more revenue to pay for it, such as expanding the playoffs, and some methods to
curb spending elsewhere, such as their luxury tax model, which players say
hasn’t kept pace with growing revenues.


Image

Three different teams over the years, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, have
paid luxury tax penalties to accommodate Scherzer’s salary.Credit...Aaron
Doster/Associated Press

“We have a payroll disparity problem, and to weaken the only mechanism in the
agreement that’s designed to promote some semblance of competitive balance is
just something that I don’t think the club group is prepared to do,” Manfred
said.



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Bruce Meyer, the union’s lead negotiator, said on Tuesday that the differences
in the sides’ proposals for those pre-arbitration players was roughly $90
million.

In terms of M.L.B. seeing players’ concerns as a wealth distribution problem —
that star players are disproportionately commanding more money than others —
Scherzer offered an alternative explanation. He said that, during the
negotiations, he looked at a metric that compared the total compensation for
players — from the year they enter the major leagues to reaching arbitration —
to what is known about league revenues. Historically, those players’
compensation accounts for 3 to 4 percent of revenues.

“Given that we’ve seen historic amounts of younger players in the game, and the
production they’ve been able to bring to the game, the offer we have on the
table represents 5 percent that we’re trying to allocate,” he said. “Just one
more percentage point of league revenues toward those young guys, and we’re
being told that’s too much.”








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