As Pete Crow-Armstrong authors his breakout season and Chris Sale side-eyes Laz Diaz, the battle for the future of baseball rolls quietly on in the background. On Thursday, MLB delivered to the MLB Players Association its latest set of proposals for the next collective bargaining agreement. This is news for nerds and diehards — you either have to love the minutiae of labor relations or have a vested interest in the structure of the Rule 5 draft to get excited about this stuff.
Fortunately, I know what my audience is.
MLB’s new proposals concern three areas: The creation of a weekly roster change window, a more aggressive Rule 5 draft, and the creation of free agent blackout periods during the offseason.
Let’s deal with each in turn.
Currently, teams set their active roster daily, and can make changes before and after every game. MLB wants to change that to a weekly structure; every club would have to set its 26-man roster on Monday and live with it throughout the week. This proposal is full of exemptions — injury, bereavement and paternity leave, the restricted list — for processes that exist now, but absent those special circumstances, teams could only promote and demote players on Monday. Teams would also be allowed to carry 14 pitchers on their 26-man rosters, up from the current limit of 13.
The injured list would change to reflect the new roster rules. Where we have a day-based IL now (7-day, 10-day, 15-day, and 60-day), MLB wants to go to a one-week, two-week, or 12-week IL to match the weekly transaction window. Position players would have to spend one full week on the IL, pitchers two weeks. The current 60-day IL, which allows players on long-term injured reserve to be exempt from 40-man roster limits, would change to a 12-week IL. (For those of you who don’t want to do the math, 60 days is eight and a half weeks.)
The next pillar of MLB’s proposal is the Rule 5 draft. The Rule 5 draft exists to prevent teams from hoarding major league-ready prospects indefinitely. If a prospect isn’t added to the 40-man roster within a certain period of time, any team can draft him for a nominal fee, and if they can keep him on the big league roster all year, they get to keep him.
MLB wants to do away with the requirement to keep the player on the big league roster and shorten the timeline for prospects who enter pro ball through the Rule 4 (i.e., the first-year player) draft. Players who enter affiliated ball before age 20 would be eligible for the fourth Rule 5 draft after they sign; players who turn pro at 20 or older would be eligible for the third Rule 5 draft.
Finally, MLB wants to create a free agent signing window that starts on Day 1 of the Winter Meetings and lasts until December 21. Anyone who doesn’t sign by then would have to wait until the first week in February. Teams could still make trades or re-sign their own pending free agents before the Winter Meetings, and the five-day window after the World Series to exercise or decline a contract option would remain in force. But between the end of the first signing window and the start of the second, no major league transactions would be allowed.
MLB says these proposals are designed to limit midseason roster churn, encourage a return to more traditional big league playing roles, and spark interest in free agency, like what we see in the NBA every summer. Those goals seem uncontroversial enough, but this being a labor dispute in postmodern America, it’s important to look for the catch, because there always seems to be one.
Having laid out the broad strokes of MLB’s plan, I’ll offer four points of analysis.
First, and most important: None of this matters. Every one of these measures was proposed contingent on the MLBPA accepting a salary cap. The Rule 5 proposal additionally works in concert with MLB’s proposal to limit the amateur draft to 12 rounds and make it college-only.
I’ve said over and over that the MLBPA’s stance on a salary cap might as well include the phrase “over our dead collective body,” as it has for almost 60 years. In his post on these proposals, Evan Drellich of The Athletic quoted a statement from interim MLBPA executive director Bruce Meyer: “The suggestion that the only way to limit roster churn, or incentivize earlier free agent signings is with a salary cap is entirely unserious… Players have proposed changes that would address these priorities, but the league is not interested in any changes that don’t directly reduce the rights of all players and shift leverage to the owners.”
It’s still early, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, it’s not a good sign when one of the principals of a negotiation uses the phrase “entirely unserious” on the record.
My position on the general shape of this CBA negotiation remains unchanged: Only one Big Four sports league has imposed a salary cap on its union in the 21st Century. The NHL got its salary cap, and severe salary rollbacks, but not until it broke the union. And that took canceling an entire season, which damaged the sport in ways from which it still has not recovered 20 years later.
It’s going to take at least one lost season to break the MLBPA, maybe more, and I have no idea whether the owners have the stomach for that intense a fight. I’m not sure the owners themselves know at this point; that’s the kind of thing we won’t be able to get a read on until next February or March at the earliest. Until then, we can treat any proposal that’s contingent on a cap-and-floor system as DOA.
Point no. 2: I understand why Manfred is licking his chops at the idea of a free agent bonanza every offseason. This all dates back to 2023, when everyone went to the Winter Meetings in Nashville and twiddled their thumbs waiting for Shohei Ohtani to sign. Manfred, his people, and a lot of the national newsbreakers had a freakout because the market was waiting for Ohtani, and Ohtani’s agent wasn’t leaking anything publishable.
That’s where this signing window nonsense started. As a general principle, I tend to be highly skeptical of proposals to make systemic changes to combat past problems of idiosyncratic origin. Remember when the refs blew a pass interference call in the NFC Championship game, so the NFL made pass interference reviewable for a year? Let’s not do that to free agency because the weirdest superstar in recent baseball history cut off the content spigot for four days. I was there, I was bored out of my mind too, but let’s not do anything rash.
There are elements of this signing window I don’t mind. I don’t mind giving teams an extended exclusive negotiating window with their own pending free agents. It wouldn’t change much, with the open market right around the corner, but fans would probably appreciate anything that gives their team an advantage when retaining homegrown players.
A transaction blackout around Christmas and New Year’s is probably healthy, too. The NHL has one, and Formula 1 has an enforced summer break in the middle of the season where factories have to shut down. In the past, the threat of a major trade or signing has made for a useful excuse for me to avoid my relatives around the holidays, but I can think of something else.
But keeping that window shut until two weeks before camp opens would only create artificial pressure on free agents to sign. Meyer nailed this in his statement — I’m sure Manfred wants an NBA- or NFL-style free agent bonanza, but it’s especially useful as a Trojan horse to install a deadline that reduces free agents’ leverage. It’s not as draconian as the trial balloon that would’ve limited free agents to one-year deals past the deadline, but players would be forced to sign before Christmas or risk remaining unemployed until the start of spring training.
Besides, I remain unconvinced that four days of frenetic action is preferable, from a standpoint of mainstream interest, to a steady trickle that lasts three months. Manfred might look at other sports and covet what they have, but making an NBA, NHL, or NFL structure work for baseball is more easily said than done. Manfred himself must’ve learned this lesson from his efforts to promote the draft.
It’s not all bad news in this proposal, though. Point no. 3: I love the idea of allowing teams to keep Rule 5 picks in the minors. Over the past decade, organizations have gotten so good at self-scouting that the Rule 5 draft has basically become meaningless. Would-be Shane Victorinos don’t change hands like that these days.
Nevertheless, prospect-rich teams — including everyone’s bogeyman, the Dodgers — are still collecting more talent than they can use. Any measure to break up those gluts would be an advantage to teams that struggle to draft and develop players and give prospects a faster path to the major leagues. I doubt this proposal would end up in a CBA that doesn’t include a cap-and-floor system and the 12-round all-college draft, but if it did, I’d approve.
The same goes for the weekly roster change window. Our Jon Becker crunched the numbers; on average, there have been 96 promotions and demotions per week this season, distributed more or less evenly across the days of the week.
| Day of the Week | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Promotions/Demotions | 334 | 353 | 298 | 234 | 348 | 287 | 291 |
Forcing teams to set their rosters every Monday might cut down on some of that roster churn, and if we were designing major league baseball (lowercase) from scratch, a weekly roster system might be the way to go.
Personally, I’d go with the system they use in soccer: Each team has a season-long squad of players to choose from, and before each game they pick a subset of those players to be available for selection. So the entire 40-man roster (or however many men) is available, but you can only dress 18 or 19 players for each game: 10 starters, four reserve position players, and four or five relief pitchers.
A weekly roster limit of 26 players with 14 pitchers isn’t the balance I’d choose, but I understand why MLB proposed it — expanding the active roster to 27 players would introduce 30 more full-time major league salaries to the owners’ costs, and they don’t want that.
Most fans probably wouldn’t notice the change; even going from a 60-day IL to a 12-week IL would be fine. That designation is (or ought to be) for extreme long-term injuries — Tommy John surgery, torn ACLs, busted rotator cuffs — where the difference between eight weeks and 12 is academic.
Weekly roster eligibility, a more aggressive Rule 5 draft, and schedule tweaks to line up free agent news with the Winter Meetings are all interesting ideas. Any or all of them could make life easier on players and front office workers, more profitable for the league and the media outlets that rely on baseball news, and more fun for fans. In a world in which the rules were set by a deliberative body with the best interests of the sport in mind, these proposals would be worthy of discussion and examination.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world, so all of these reforms are tied to a salary cap, which is a total nonstarter with the union. Until one of two things happens — either the cap is off the table or the union implodes — all of this is a thought experiment, and nothing more.
* This article was originally published here
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