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Wednesday, February 03, 2010
MLBPA throws Orlando Hudson to the wolves
When year-to-year salaries are on a constant slope up, everyone is happy, because, eventually, it’ll be your turn to sign and get the payday. But, sometimes, as we see these past two offseasons, there’s a downturn. And so, the guy waiting for the big payday… never gets it. He signs a one-year deal hoping that it will bounce back… and it doesn’t. By the time it might, he’ll be near the end of his career.
Tough, basically, MLBPA would say to Orlando Hudson. There ARE ways around it. It’s called “redistribution”. But, the MLBPA doesn’t care about trying to make sure there are no casualties of the inequitable-salary war. If every now and then an Orlando Hudson has to be sacrificed so that the whole (seemingly) benefits, so be it.
How would it work? Well, similarly to the way the collusion damages were awarded: you figure out how much everyone affected should have gotten in a “normal” market. With the collusion damages, they had 280 million dollars in the kitty to distribute. So, they had a number to work against. In the current case, if the MLBPA figures that the players who signed deals in 2009-10 signed for 100MM$ less than expected otherwise (number just for illustration), where is that money going to come from? Well, the current players would have to pony up. Let’s say the guys with existing contracts are going to make a total of 2000MM$ in 2010 above the 0.4MM$ minimum, then you take 5% of everyone’s salary above the minimum, and redistribute it to the guys who are getting market-corrected in 2009-10. It recalibrates everyone to where they should be.
The NHLPA basically did this with their new agreement, when they scaled all the salaries by 24%. If they didn’t do that, then there’d have been no discretionary money to spend on the free agents. Indeed, the idea of the escrow account also helps in this regard: by giving teams more maneuvering room in terms of “chips” to spend, the salaries of all players will get rescaled to wherever the revenues say they should go.
But, seeing how hockey players seem to be oblivious to what an escrow account is, the idea of baseball players redistributing their own money will be impossible to sell.
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