Welcome to a live edition here of Nothing Personal.

This is David Sampson and we are coming to you following Commissioner Rob Manford, the

Commissioner of Major League Baseball has made an announcement for the first time since 1994-95.

There will be regular season games that will be missed during the course of a season.

We have a work stoppage in Major League Baseball and I want to address it from the beginning,

from A to Z, what happened, how did we get to this day?

To understand this day, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of this last collective

bargaining agreement. In 2016, I was still with the Marlins. We signed a deal with Tony Clark

as the main negotiator for the players union. During the course of that negotiation, it became

very clear to us from the management side that the players were very interested in things that

involved their comfort. They wanted chefs in the kitchen, they wanted earlier game times,

they wanted easier travel, they wanted things that we felt were very easy to give and in order

to give them, we got things in return that were far more meaningful as they related to, for example,

the competitive balance tax. The CBT is something that you have heard about for the last five years,

it's something you heard about a lot today. I want to tell you what it practically is,

so I'm going to take a quick live detour. The CBT is the only way for teams who aren't name the

raise, who have very low payrolls because their revenue is low because their TV markets are smaller.

Detour, there's no shared local broadcast revenue in Major League Baseball. It's not like the

National Football League where the Green Bay Packers get the same TV money as the New York Giants.

In Baseball, the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox or the Los Angeles Dodgers get hundreds of

millions of dollars more per year than teams like the Pirates or the Guardians or the Marlins or the

Rays and that money is not shared. Therefore, those teams have the ability to have higher payrolls.

...