I've never experienced baseball labor issues like this before, and it's as bad as everyone said.

For a generation that never experienced anything in baseball like this lockout, it's starting to make sense why labor issues are such a sore spot in the game.

I get it now.

Spend enough time around baseball and the work stoppages of yore inevitably come up. I heard about them on spring-training car rides, talked about them on speaking panels years before this collective bargaining agreement was due to expire, and didn’t really get what the big deal was.

Baseball’s last work stoppage was a terrible one, with the players’ strike cutting short the 1994 season and compounding the game’s long history of labor issues damaging interest in the sport. I have no recollection of that, and those who engage with the sport of my generation — early 30s and younger — have no experience with this side of baseball.

That’s not the case anymore. This one, even if games aren’t lost, is plenty substantial when it comes to indoctrinating another generation of fans to labor issues. I say this carefully, because I often have a low tolerance for hearing about how things were back when, but I think everyone might have undersold just how bad this is.

Circumstances change with every labor issue. A player’s strike to fight a salary cap they feel can restrict their earning power is on one end of the scale.

On the other is this winter, when the owners locked out the players in December upon expiration of the CBA to speed up negotiations then didn’t negotiate for weeks and haven’t come off any of their major positions despite a system that’s already slanted heavily in their favor.

Jeff Passan @JeffPassan

Five days before the deadline MLB says will postpone regular-season games, here's the gap between the sides in their latest proposals: CBT: $31M Pre-arb bonus pool: $95M Minimum salary: $135K/player Draft lottery: 3 picks That's a lot to cover in less than a week. Like, a lot.

There’s a binary win-loss dynamic at play, but there’s more than that to it. Teams have used past CBAs and features of them like the competitive balance tax to their advantage more so than ever recently. There’s no salary cap, but the competitive balance tax effectively serves as one. Combine that with teams’ data-driven ideologies about free agent contracts for players past their prime not being worth it, and salaries have gone down at a time when new revenue streams keep opening up for teams.

The minimum salary that the players want raised is a factor in that, too. It’s probably smart in the long-run for clubs not to give out big-ticket free agent contracts to anyone but a true star. But on the other end of the salary spectrum, minimum-salary players make so little that most teams choose to stomach a slightly diminished product for a rookie-type player than someone who might warrant a couple million dollars in the salary arbitration process.

Teams aren’t going to give up either of those beliefs—in the lack of value in massive contracts and the marginal value gained by paying the minimum over a mid-level player. So, players need to lock in money for those younger players to make up for that, and codifying it in a labor agreement is a lot harder than just setting and operating the market the way teams do.

Evan Drellich @EvanDrellich

Source: MLB’s only proposal so far today added $10,000 to minimum salary per year. 2022: $640k 2023: $650k 2024: $660k 2025: $670k 2026: $680k MLB also withdrew its proposal for an alternate minimum system that was tiered based on service time. They’re not done talking yet.

They’re negotiating, so perhaps stances are outsized. Maybe MLB taking a hard stance on this now but is willing to give ultimately because they’ll get something like expanded playoffs in return.

Expanded playoffs would mean even fewer teams would spend big money to try and win, because the playoffs are largely a crapshoot and more teams would get in, so players are right to try and secure as much money for young players who don’t have the promise of nine-figure free agent deals available to them.

It’s all just really fraught, and taking on the situation with any nuance is easy to do when there are no consequences. Losing games, as MLB has threatened if there’s not a deal by Monday, is a real consequence.

As proceedings get closer to MLB’s deadline Monday and games are jeopardized, there’s going to be a lot of energy on the outside for a deal to be consummated simply to avoid that.

That part makes me uncomfortable, because while it seems like the echo-chamber of my social media feeds is sympathetic to the players’ cause, it takes a lot of explaining and detail to those not in the weeds to communicate that.

It was fairly recently that MLB took an agreement guaranteeing players their prorated salaries in a pandemic-shortened season and created an ugly dispute by not honoring it. The players came out of that looking bad, and could have the same thing happen here, even though MLB can continue negotiating while lifting the lockout whenever it wishes, allowing players and teams to prepare for a March 31 Opening Day.

There’s plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence of the damage the last work stoppage did. Who knows if this will be the last straw for anyone who has seen this before and hoped they’d never again. But for a younger generation that, amid countless other options for their time, actively chose to invest in baseball and is desperately important to continuing to grow the game, this is quite an unpleasant experience that leaves plenty of questions.

Why does MLB seem so intent on cutting down the players that make their sport special? What kind of message is anyone supposed to take from all this? Where are the jack-hammer tweets of who has reported to spring training and is wearing No. 84? And why didn’t I listen when everyone said how bad this would be?