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Split Decision on the Final Day of Salary Arbitration

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

Oliver Perez won his arbitration decision today when panel members Robert Bailey, Elizabeth Neumeier, and Steven Wolf selected his figure of $6,500,000 over the Mets offer of $4,725,000.
Neumeier and Wolf were also busy yesterday with Stephen Goldberg hearing the Francisco Rodriguez case. The three arbitrators sided with the Angels in that case. Rodriguez will receive $10,000,000 for this year tying the highest awards in arbitration history with Ryan Howard and Alfonso Soriano.

Management ended up taking the title versus the players again this year. The final tally for the 8 hearings was 6 wins for management and 2 wins for the players. The two hearings move Robert Bailey?s panel decisions to 3-2 in favor of the player with Steven Wolf at an even 3-3. Stephen Goldberg is now at 25-17 in favor of the team by my count and Elizabeth Neumeier is 12-8 in favor of the team.

According to my information, there have now been 3,043 cases filed since arbitration began in 1974. This number is subject to challenge because I have been trying to reconcile different numbers in different sources for the early years. Of the 484 hearings, teams have won 279 or 58% and players have won 205 or 42%.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on February 22, 2008 (boomark / email).