Colluding against ARod?

So MLBPA executive director Donald Fehr doesn’t seem too concerned about the possible fallout from Former Senator George Mitchell’s impending steroid report. But he is upset over rumors that came out of the recent general managers’ meetings relating to the sharing of information between clubs as to their plans regarding players. Baseball’s labor contract says that teams may not act in concert with regard to free agents. And specifically, Fehr and others are worried that commissioner Bud Selig is trying to hold down the price of Alex Rodriguez’s next contract. Although if Scott Boras isn’t even allowed in the room, perhaps no “collusion” will be necessary.

In baseball, management has a long history of screwing players over with the now outmoded “reserve system,” which was indentured servitude at its finest and lasted until the 1973 collective bargaining agreement (CBA), when the players union finally leveraged enough bargaining power to demand a salary arbitration provision from the owners. In fact, it was later written by Gerald Scully, in Pay and Performance in Major League Baseball for the American Economic Review in 1974, that until the ’73 agreement (which was later amended in ‘76 to include the six-year framework for player free-agency), on average players were (at best) paid only 15% of their market value by the owners!

It is interesting to note that in the 1980’s, players won three collusion grievances against management, cases that were settled for $280 million after arbitration. The practice (seemingly) more or less subsided then. But leave it to this year’s meetings’ co-chairs, Boston’s Theo Epstein and Florida’s Larry Beinfest, to thrust it back into the spotlight, allegedly flaunting the idea of management sharing information about their respective free agent plans, and defending the practice by arguing that many GM’s said they found it to be “useful.”

Well, duh. Of course it’s useful. But is what at least some general managers are allegedly doing bona fide “collusion,” in contravention of the current CBA? Check out sports law professor Rich Karcher’s post over at Sports Law Blog, where he weighs in on the subject, and also links to the recent TIME article on the matter where he is quoted. The key portion of the piece:

“To establish a collusion claim… would require fairly strong evidence that two or more teams were discussing in specific terms how much they would be willing to spend on a particular player or players generally. Discussions regarding team philosophies, priorities and overall objectives do not rise to the level of collusion. But there is somewhat of a thin line between information that teams can and cannot discuss, and it can also turn on which particular teams are having the discussions.”

So is that line being crossed? Again?

— Jason G. Wulterkens