What is mlb arbitration

If the club and player have not agreed on a salary by a deadline in mid-January, the club and player must exchange salary figures for the upcoming season. After the figures are exchanged, a hearing is scheduled in February. If no one-year or multi-year settlement can be reached by the hearing date, the case is brought before a panel of arbitrators.

After hearing arguments from both sides, the panel selects either the salary figure of either the player or the club but not one in between as the player's salary for the upcoming season. The week prior to the exchange of arbitration figures is when the vast majority of arbitration cases are avoided, either by agreeing to a one- or multi-year contract.

Multi-year deals, in these instances, serve as a means to avoid arbitration for each season that is covered under the new contract. It will be difficult for clubs and players to argue their proposed salaries as there is no previous comparable season. The next issue with baseball salary arbitration is the arbitrators. Pitchers are evaluated on the simplest statistics such as innings pitched and earned run average ERA.

However, the arbitrators do not understand those numbers. Also, there is only a short amount of time for the player and club to present to the panel, so it would be wasted time explaining the advanced statistics to the arbitrators. Thus, they will never really know how valuable these newer statistics are in proving how good a player is for a club.

Therefore, it might be time for the league to rethink the panel of arbitrators. Perhaps players and clubhouses will propose that the arbitrators be lawyers who specialize in sports law or be other professionals who work in baseball exclusively. This would ensure that they have a more advanced and current expertise level of baseball. Another solution could be to require the current labor lawyers to acquire a baseline of baseball knowledge and its most valuable performance measurements.

This would bring the arbitration process more up to date with the current culture of baseball. At the end of the season, there will be a new MLB collective bargaining agreement negotiated. Presently, players who take their salary disputes to arbitration have their salaries determined by an arbitration panel. In that process, the player and team each submit a proposed salary for the upcoming season, and the panel picks one or the other -- no splitting the difference between the two proposals.

Each side is allowed to argue for its chosen figure, which in essence means that the team must diminish the accomplishments of the player in question. Under the owner's latest proposal, the salaries of arbitration-eligible players -- i. Drellich and Rosenthal write:. This time, MLB is offering to pay players based on performance, specifically on a calculation of wins above replacement, or WAR. A player's career WAR would be part of the calculation, weighted for recency.

Whether a player has been in the majors for three-plus, four-plus, or five-plus years would affect the calculation.

You can read more about WAR here , but the short version is that it's an all-encompassing metric that aims to measure a player's total value in all phases of the game. It's a blunt instrument, to be sure, but it remains useful and illuminating in the proper context.