labor Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Baseball Owners Want An International Draft Because They Want Absolute Control
For North America’s amateur baseball players, be they generational talents like Mike Trout or organizational filler like Mike Fish, the road to the majors begins in the same place: with Major League Baseball’s amateur draft. There is no such system in place for international players, at least not ye...
How Russell Wilson's Megadeal Allows NFL Owners To Keep Winning
The conventional wisdom on Russell Wilson’s record-setting contract extension is that it’s a win for both sides. Wilson is now the NFL’s highest-paid player, and he secured strong guarantees, the largest signing bonus in history, and significant early cash flow ......
Court Docs: SB Nation Bosses Detail How Much Money Team-Site Workers Could Be Owed In Lawsuit
What happens when workers demand fair compensation for the value their labor creates? In one little corner of the media universe, this is a practical question and it’s being slowly answered, mostly behind closed doors, as SB Nation team-site workers—more than 70 across two lawsuits—sue Vox Media ove...
The History And Future Of The Franchise Tag, The Bane Of The NFL's Best Players
The top of this year’s NFL free agent class was stocked with defensive linemen and edge rushers. Most never hit the market....
MLB Presents A Championship Belt To The Team That Keeps Salaries Lowest In Arbitration
An agent mentioned The Belt to me once, and I thought he was joking. This is not me doing that thing where reporters try to downplay someone else’s scoop by letting you know they already knew a thing, even though they didn’t report it, which makes them completely useless. This is me trying to convey...
Did Le'Veon Bell Make The Right Decision?
The Le’Veon Bell contract saga was always going to be about much more than Le’Veon Bell. Bell refused to play the 2018 season on a second franchise tag—after passing on a long-term contract offer from the Steelers that would have made him the league’s highest-paid running back, but was short on full...
Let's Check In To See How Some MLB Teams Are Treating Their Minor-League Players
A report from Emily Waldon and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic states that the Toronto Blue Jays have taken the novel approach of paying some of their employees fairer wages. Players in all eight of the team’s minor-league affiliates will receive a pay increase worth anywhere from 40 to 56 percent, as...
Scummy Sports Media Company Buys The Big Lead
The Big Lead, a sports website founded and run by Jason McIntyre of Fox Sports, may not be a particularly good or smart or relevant website, but one thing that it did have going for it was that it didn’t run on exploited labor like FanSided or SB Nation (Vox Media is facing two federal collective ac...
White Sox Send Good Player To Minor Leagues<em></em>
Yesterday, the Chicago White Sox sent Eloy Jiménez, probably their best player, to the minor leagues. While general manager Rick Hahn and manager Rick Renteria made unconvincing noises about how Jiménez needs to work on his defense and get his timing down, everyone knows that the team is sending hi...
An MLB Strike Threat Might Be The Players’ Only Leverage
There hasn’t been a strike in Major League Baseball for nearly 25 years. Not coincidentally, MLB’s owners and front offices are at this moment in arguably the strongest position they’ve occupied since before the Major League Baseball Players Association existed. They’re using it to implode free agen...
An MLB Strike Threat Might Be The Players’ Only Leverage
There hasn’t been a strike in Major League Baseball for nearly 25 years. Not coincidentally, MLB’s owners and front offices are at this moment in arguably the strongest position they’ve occupied since before the Major League Baseball Players Association existed. They’re using it to implode free agen...
Rob Manfred Must Think We're Morons
During a press conference with reporters on Sunday, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred stood in front of God and everyone and argued that the labor situation in baseball—a sport in which player payroll has declined as league revenues have gone up, more teams than ever are openly tanking, and two 26-year-o...
MLB's Luxury Tax Became A Salary Cap Because Of Decades Of Failures
Major League Baseball’s luxury tax was introduced as a compromise during collective bargaining in the late 1990s as a way to avoid implementing a salary cap, which had been one of the major points of conflict that led to the 1994 strike by the Major League Baseball Players Association. In the years ...
Le'Veon Bell Will Sit Out The Season. Now What?
Le’Veon Bell’s 4 p.m. deadline to report to the Steelers came and went, which means Bell cannot play at all during the 2018 season. It also means Bell has forfeited the entirety of the $14.54 million salary he was scheduled to make on the franchise tag, plus a reported $200,000 more in benefits. He...
The WNBA Players Union Is Headed Towards Labor War, But Its Leader Is Nowhere To Be Found<em></em>
Back in July, at the WNBA All-Star weekend in Minneapolis, a league official sidled up to me and asked me a question. Did I know how much money the WNBA had lost last season?...
More And More Wrestling Fans Are Wondering Why Wrestlers Don't Have A Union
On Monday, one of the biggest non-WWE stars in pro wrestling—if not the biggest—tweeted something that could, if you squinted and tilted and hoped a little bit, be read as a call to arms....
Why The NFL Dumped Its Anthem Policy
NEW YORK — The NFL was really feeling itself at this week’s fall meetings in lower Manhattan. Scoring is through the roof! Games are historically close! Ratings are up! Concussions are down! It was impossible to chat up a league official without being reminded of how swell things are going, and ain’...
Yankees Further Endear Themselves To Boston By Crossing Hotel Workers' Picket Line
Marriott hotel workers are striking in Boston, San Francisco, and San Jose this week. Unite Here Local 26, the union representing the striking hotel workers in Boston, has organized its members around the slogan One Job Should Be Enough, and after months of negotiating with Marriott, last month 96 p...
Q&A: Eric Dickerson On The Hall Of Fame Firestorm And Hating Those "Fuckers" At The NFL
Pro Football Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson has been making the rounds this week, ever since he spearheaded the drafting of a letter that demands better benefits for retired NFL players—at first, specifically Hall of Famers. The rollout of that letter and the fallout that has ensued has been messy, to...
NFL Hall Of Famers Are Already Backing Away From The Letter Demanding Better Retirement Benefits
The names of 21 NFL greats are listed at the bottom of the letter announced today demanding health insurance and pensions for Hall of Famers. By definition it’s an impressive list, but it’s getting less impressive by the hour: both Kurt Warner and Jerry Rice have now publicly disavowed the letter’s ...