JUPITER, Fla. — This is what changing the system looks like.
Baseball’s economic structure hasn’t been fair to players for a while now. Oh, it’s been great — once you’re out of the minors, anyway — but not fair. Especially for the younger players who increasingly shoulder the bulk of both the on-field production and the public marketability of the sport. Their compensation is prescribed by a collective bargaining agreement that is only rewritten a couple times every decade and not the market forces that turned baseball into a $10.7 billion industry. The way that teams operate has changed dramatically, and the way that players are compensated has not.