Extend the Basic Agreement one season

With COVID-19 still a major concern, MLB labor talks should swing toward extending the existing Basic Agreement to allow for more stable negotiations.

The moment is approaching when Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association need to consider actually cooperating during the ongoing MLB labor talks aimed at hammering out a new Basic Agreement.

The Basic Agreement, the document that controls relationships between the institutional game and the players, expires at the end of the 2021 season. Serious negotiations on the terms by which that agreement would be renewed would not normally begin until the conclusion of the season.

More from Call to the Pen

• Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
• Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
• 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals

This, however, has never been a normal negotiation cycle. For several years MLBPA executive director Tony Clark has raised concerns about several areas of the agreement he feels need to be rethought. Those include such potentially contentious areas as arbitration rules.

Even in a normal negotiations cycle, Clark’s expressions would prompt alarms about whether the game might be headed for its first work stoppage in more than a quarter century. But this is highly unlikely to be a normal negotiations cycle. COVID-19 ensures that.

The extent of the 2020 revenue hit taken by MLB teams due to COVID-19 restrictions may be up for debate, but there’s no doubt it was significant. More importantly, there isn’t anything close to a guarantee that 2021 will mark a return to operational normalcy.

Local governments in most MLB cities have not yet loosened restrictions on public gatherings that would allow teams to re-open parks and in the handful of cases that have, attendance is strictly limited. That not only impacts ticket revenue, but also income from concessions and parking.

It also puts a severe crimp on one of the fastest-growing revenue streams, what might be termed “neighborhood revenues.” That’s the money generated by the environment immediately around the ballpark, in which teams such as the Cubs and Cardinals have invested heavily in recent seasons.

At this point, nobody can even be sure how many games will be played in 2021, much less how many fans will be able to view them. From a team standpoint, that makes projecting anticipated revenues virtually impossible.

In the midst of such fiscal uncertainty, how can MLB and the MLBPA logically hope to construct a serviceable agreement? They can’t and trying to do so would be unfair to both parties.

That’s why the two sides should begin to talk soon about a radical concept: cooperation. Specifically, they ought to agree on a one-season extension of the existing Basic Agreement, essentially pushing back the expiration date of the current deal to November 2022.

Whatever its flaws, the existing agreement has at least proved workable. But more importantly, delaying the expiration date by one year enables both sides to approach negotiations on a new agreement from an enhanced position of economic certainty.

By November 2022, both owners and players are likely to have a far better idea of both the amount and extent of damage done to the sports industry generally – and baseball in particular – by the events of the past year. That will allow the often-divisive MLB labor talks to at least begin on some sort of solid ground.

Obviously they’ll also know what cannot be known in the next few months, which is the duration of the COVID-19-induced restrictions.

There is precedent for extending an agreement. It was done in 1980 when the two sides were unable to agree on terms of a new one. When that extension failed to work out an agreement, the 1981 players’ strike ensued.

But 2021 is not 1980. In this case the problems are external rather than internal. They are also real, readily recognizable and consequential. Finally, their resolution is material to the potential for success of negotiations.

That’s why MLB and the MLBPA ought to begin discussions about extending the agreement for one year in order to allow the COVID-19 crisis – with all its attendant implications for baseball – to pass.