Winning while Losing: Baseball, Arbitration and the Political Center

[cthulu2016]

After Curt Flood won the right to free agency (for baseball players to sell their services to the highest bidder rather than having to take whatever their current team felt like paying them) baseball and the Players Union tried to preserve some team stability while allowing players who couldn't change teams to get the money they deserved and would get if they could switch teams.

The Union reached a deal where after a time a player would still be bound to his original team, but could go to salary arbitration to make a case for how much he was worth.

The ingenious mechanism the players' union won was that arbitration would be winner-take-all. I say, "I am worth a million dollars." The team offers me a penny. The arbitrator has to pick one of those two numbers. No compromise.

The teams creamed the players in arbitration, winning something like 80% of arbitrations. But player salaries exploded.

The winner take all system, providing only two possible outcomes, forced the teams to offer a lot of money. In my example of a million dollars versus a penny, I would get a million dollars even if I wasn't worth it because some players were paid a million and nobody was paid a fricking PENNY. Throw out that absurd offer and the only other option available to the arbitrator is a million.

Players asked for a LOT and thus, by putting disaster on the table (a concept Republicans have made familiar), moved the center-point of negotiations toward the players.

The players' union had been very shrewd. (IIRC, the owners top demand in the next CBA became ending the system the owners had wanted in the first place.)

The Union saw that in the big picture, moving the center mattered more than "winning."


The "only two possible outcomes" arbitration is like our two-party system. One can "win" by conceding almost everything the other side wants, and one can pop the champagne over averting disaster.

Then you look back and see that your were actually losing ground.

[cthulu2016]

1. .

[cthulu2016]

2. I'm kicking this for a while because it's a cool system dynamics thing

For instance, does it suggest that as one party becomes more extreme, the other party should ALSO become more extreme, but less so?

If one said puts up a truly ridiculous arbitration number the other side has a little room to make their own number more extreme in the oposite direction as long as it remains more plausible than the other side

[gopiscrap]

3. Interesting Concept