Garrett Whitlock was perhaps the most unexpected story on the Red Sox in 2021. A 2017 18th-round draft pick of the Yankees, he’d never pitched above Double A, underwent Tommy John surgery in 2019, missed all of 2020 while recovering, then got plucked in the Rule 5 draft by the Red Sox.
Whitlock did not merely stick with the Red Sox for the full season. He emerged as one of the most valuable pitchers on the team, a multi-inning bullpen force who delivered many of the most important outs. For that, he earned a salary of $570,500 — the MLB minimum.
If Whitlock had played in the NBA, he’d have earned at least $925,258 in his rookie season. Had he been in the NHL, he’d have taken home at least $750,000. In the NFL, his rookie minimum salary would have been $660,000. But as a baseball player, despite the years of meager minor league salaries that preceded his arrival in the big leagues, Whitlock made less than a rookie in any other sport.
MLB hasn’t always resided at the bottom of the early-career earnings scale. As recently as 2012, MLB’s $480,000 minimum was higher than those of the NFL ($390,000) and NBA ($473,604) while falling just below the NHL minimum ($525,000).
But since that time, the MLB minimum has gone up just 19 percent, while those of the other major sports have jumped 43 percent (NHL), 69 percent (NFL), and 95 percent (NBA).
It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. The other sports have salary caps, while baseball technically does not (even if the luxury-tax threshold has served as one). Meanwhile, both the NHL and NBA have max contracts for players, their unions having decided to ensure that a larger percentage of payroll goes to the league’s rank-and-file and not just to stars.
Even without a cap or a max salary, baseball in recent years has seen its minimum salary flatten in a way that bucks historical patterns.
In 2021, the final year of the now-expired collective bargaining agreement, the minimum was up $63,000 from 2016, the final year of the prior CBA. That 12.4 percent increase over the life of a CBA marked a significantly lower rate of growth than had been typical.
Historically, CBAs have delivered major jumps to the MLB minimum, starting with the first agreement between players and owners for the 1968 season that raised the minimum from $6,000 to $10,000 (a 67 percent increase). From 1985 through 2006, five consecutive CBAs raised the minimum by at least 60 percent.
That growth rate slowed to 26.6 percent in the 2007-11 CBA and 22.6 percent in the 2012-16 CBA before tumbling to that 12.4 percent over the life of the just-expired CBA. Adjusting for inflation, the major league minimum salary actually went down over the current CBA. (The 2016 minimum salary of $507,500, adjusted for inflation, would have translated to roughly $573,000 in 2021.)
Players failed in the last CBA to negotiate the sort of increase to the minimum salary that had been typical of nearly all past negotiations. That failure, in turn, affected a huge pool of players, given that just under half of the players on Opening Day rosters in 2021 had not yet qualified for arbitration — and thus, in most instances (including Whitlock’s), were paid at or near the MLB minimum.
The Players Association appears determined to make up for the oversight. The union has proposed a $775,000 minimum for 2022, which would represent the largest single-season increase ever in dollars ($204,500), though it’s worth noting that the proposed 36 percent increase would not be as large by percentage as the first-year increases of the five CBAs reached between 1980 and 2002, which produced 38 to 50 percent bumps in their first year.
Owners have countered with two proposals. One would pay players with less than one year of service time $615,000 in 2022 (7.8 percent about the 2021 minimum), $650,000 for players with at least one but less than two years of service time (13.9 percent above the 2021 minimum), and $725,000 for players with at least two years of service time who are not yet arbitration-eligible (27.1 percent above the 2021 minimum). The other would create a flat $630,000 minimum (10.4 percent over 2021) but give teams discretion to pay more than that.
Both owner proposals represent improvements over the recently expired CBA, but fall short of the standards for the growth of the minimum in every previous CBA. Both sides are discussing a new mechanism to increase the earnings of young players who perform at a high level.
The Players Association has proposed the creation of a bonus pool of $115 million for the top 150 pre-arbitration-eligible players by a mutually agreed-upon WAR standard. MLB has countered with a $15 million proposal for the top 30 players in that class.
The gaps on both subjects — the minimum and the bonus pool — are immense, contributing to the sense that it will be difficult to bridge them in time to start the season on schedule (so long as owners continue their lockout).
All the same, the fact that both parties have shown openness to increasing the minimum and creating bonus pools suggests that there are grounds for negotiations that will see players like Whitlock realize bigger gains in an eventual CBA than they’ve had in years, and perhaps decades.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.