There’s been a lot of scuttlebutt and leaked news around the MLB CBA negotiations over the last three months since the lockout began – but with games now canceled and the two sides still at a stalemate on many items, Yankees team president Randy Levine joined Carton & Roberts on Monday to discuss the state of the game.
“I wanted to come on because your audience needs to know from my perspective, as a former labor negotiator, that we are in a terrible place. To have both sides yelling and pointing fingers at each other, it’s just awful,” said Levine, who was indeed one of the lawyers representing the league during the labor negotiations around the 1994 MLB strike. “It has to stop, and we have to make a deal on what’s possible. All of that negative doesn’t get us to where we need to be, and there’s a lot of anger and misinformation out there.”
That said, while Levine praised the players for their competitive spirit, it seemed he put some of the onus for ending this impasse on the players compromising – and made references to the last CBA negotiations, which went beyond the Dec. 1 expiration of the previous CBA but ended shortly after while the two sides kept the game going in good faith.
“Players are the game and I respect them, they are real competitors who care about winning and losing, but this is about compromise – and I think this stems from the last agreement five years ago, where some of the same player reps now were there, and made choices that they regretted,” Levine said. “But that’s okay, because collective bargaining ebbs and flows. It’s about being one team, compromising, and getting together to grow the game – but because the players lost in their minds five years ago, they’re upset and they want to win and get all this stuff back.”
To that end, Levine reiterated the need for compromise several times, noting that the players and owners have both gotten “wins” (i.e. more salary to younger players and the end of free agency draft pick compensation for the players, rule changes and advertising gains for the owners) so far.
“There’s clearly a deal to be done, but people on both sides have to realize you can only do what each side can do. If wish lists can’t happen, they won’t happen. Each side has to prioritize and make choices, and there has been compromise already,” Levine said. “Instead of being angry at each other, we have to get to common ground. We’re at the point where games are being canceled and we have 2 ways to go – we can continue, or stop the fighting because we can’t change what happened years ago and negotiate a deal. At the end of the day, it’s time to stop the blame game, roll up our sleeves, and do this.”
The Collective Bargaining Tax threshold seems to be a key holdout in that realm, and that’s a number Levine thinks “should be compromised, not a number that shuts the game down.”
“The clubs made an offer for a minimum payroll and the players rejected that,” Levine said. “There are discussions and caucuses on both sides, but the fact is the clubs have an offer of 220 (million) at the first threshold out there, and the union wants 238. It’s a numbers game, we should be able to compromise. There’s a number both sides can live with, and we have to get to that – each day we cancel games, there’s less money for everybody. It’s bad for everybody.”
Speaking of numbers, though, the key issue for owners, it seems, is cold hard cash.
“Perception is we have endless money, but we didn’t have fans in the seats for a year and a half. Revenues have gone down due to COVID, and at end of the day, the numbers are clear: when you don’t have fans in the seats for a year and a half, you lose money,” Levine said. “When you don’t broadcast games and sell food and beverage, you lose money, and you have to borrow money to get to where you are. It doesn’t just reappear. The fact is this game doesn’t have a salary cap, and we have to deal in the realm of what’s possible. There are constituencies on both sides that have to be satisfied.”
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Levine also continually urged both sides to make a deal, noting that “we’re all on one team” even if players and owners – collectively and within each side – may have different interests at times.
“I want to urge everyone – the consequences of not making a deal are horrific. Our fans are watching, and they want baseball. Losing games is terrible for everybody.”
Levine also claimed that Max Scherzer’s quote that the Padres had a higher payroll than the Yankees “completely not true,” and when it comes to how the Yankees plan to compensate fans and ticketholders if games continue to get canceled (with Opening Day at Yankees Stadium next on the chopping block), he said that “every time I hear games canceled it makes me sick, but we will get into it and try to accommodate our fans the best way we can if we have to.”
Oh, and one last thing: Levine is a fan of the 14-team playoffs, and while one might think more playoff teams is something the Yankees, who make the postseason regularly now, would eschew, it’s quite the opposite.
“I think what we’ve learned is that baseball is about hope, and the more teams that can have hope to get in, I think it’s great – and it’s great for the players, because it means more teams spending money when they think they have a chance to get into the playoffs,” he said. “The Yankees are about winning in October, and we’ve gone over that threshold more often than not.
And, I think some of these teams that haven’t been for a while, if they have a chance to get in, they’ll spend money.”
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