What Restoration Can Learn From The Ballplayers

Right now, with their labor agreement heading toward expiration, Major League Baseball's owners and players are back at the bargaining table, and it is contentious. The owners have proposed a hard salary cap for the first time in a generation. The players have rejected it, as they have rejected the idea every time it has come up across decades. A lockout looms when the current deal runs out. It is easy to read all of this as a fight about money, and on the surface it is. But underneath the cap fight is something more fundamental, and far more useful to anyone outside baseball who is paying attention.

The players' central objection is not simply that they dislike a cap. It is that you cannot fairly agree to split revenue you are not allowed to fully see. The players point out that the league's accounting leaves some revenue out of the picture and deducts other amounts before the split, so a headline "even split" is not really even. Their position, stripped to its core, is that there can be no fair deal without transparency into the actual numbers. Six decades into one of the strongest unions anywhere, the fight still comes down to the same thing it always has: who is allowed to see the books.

The Imbalance Is Always About Information

It was ever thus, and the history makes the point cleanly. For most of baseball's history a clause bound each player to a single club indefinitely, and just as importantly, no player really knew what anyone else was paid. Each man negotiated alone and in the dark, while the other side of the table knew the entire market. The imbalance was not mainly about talent or even about the rules. It was about information, and the information ran one way.

When the players organized in the 1960s, the first real work was unglamorous. It was not speeches or threats. It was gathering what every player privately knew, pooling it, and letting each of them finally see what the market actually paid for what they did. Only after that could anything else follow. The leverage came after the information, and because of it. That sequence is the whole lesson, and it is easy to get backward. The players did not gain power and then learn the numbers. They learned the numbers, and the power followed.

It is worth being careful about which lesson to take, because the wrong one is close at hand. The breakthrough was never solidarity for its own sake, and it was certainly not about coordinating to fix prices, which is a different thing entirely and not what this is about. It was about using a shared view to close an information gap that had kept individuals weak. An operator negotiating alone, with no view of what the rest of the market sees, is in much the same position the ballplayers were in before they pooled what they knew: capable, valuable, and bargaining half-blind.

Where Restoration Sits On The Same Problem

Restoration operators face this on more than one front, and naming them plainly helps. With carriers and third-party administrators, the data advantage has long run in one direction. The party across the table tends to know more about the broad pattern of costs and outcomes than any single operator can, simply because they see across many operators while each operator sees mostly their own work. With vendors, equipment, and software, the same dynamic holds in miniature. Each operator negotiates their own price, and almost no one knows what comparable businesses actually pay for the same thing, which means everyone is negotiating against a number they cannot check.

None of this requires anyone to be acting in bad faith. It is just the natural shape of a market where one side can see the whole field and the other side can see only its own corner of it. That asymmetry is not a grievance to nurse. It is a gap to close, and the way you close it is the same way the ballplayers did: by assembling a shared, trustworthy view of the numbers that no single participant could build alone.

What Becomes Possible With A Shared View

Close that gap and real, legitimate wins follow, and none of them have to be adversarial. The cleanest example is buying. When operators can see what their peers pay, fair pricing stops being a mystery, and collective purchasing, the kind that franchise networks and buying groups already do well, becomes considerably more powerful, because it is informed by what good actually looks like. With carriers and TPAs, the win is quieter but just as real. An operator who knows where their own numbers sit against a credible peer cohort negotiates from knowledge rather than from hope, and is far harder to talk out of a position that the data supports.

The point is not coordination for its own sake, and it bears repeating that it is nothing resembling fixing prices, which is both wrong and illegal. It is informed dealing, plain and simple. Even baseball's players, with all the leverage a powerful union gives them, are not asking to set the owners' prices. They are asking to see the real numbers before they agree to anything built on top of them. That is a reasonable thing to want in any negotiation, and it is the thing operators have most consistently lacked.

What More Consistent Data Could Unlock

The natural conveners already exist, and they already do real work here. The industry association and the franchise systems organize operators, run national vendor programs, hold meaningful data of their own, and advocate for their members. None of that is missing, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. The open question is not whether they have data. It is how much further their work could go if the data across the industry were more consistent and comparable from one operator to the next.

Think about what consistency would add to work that is already happening. A national buying program is stronger when the prices underneath it can be measured against a wider, anonymized benchmark, so the program knows whether the deal it negotiated is genuinely good or merely familiar. Member advocacy is sharper when it rests on figures drawn the same way across thousands of operators, rather than assembled differently in every corner of the industry and therefore hard to compare or defend. The willingness and the organizing are there. What has been missing is a common set of numbers for all of it to stand on.

That consistency is the ingredient worth building, and worth building neutrally: an independent layer that makes operator data comparable across the industry, anonymizes what it pools, never sells that data to the counterparties operators deal with, and answers to operators through its governance. It does not replace the conveners or compete with them. It gives them, and every individual operator, a shared and trustworthy set of numbers to work from. Baseball's players needed someone to gather the numbers into one place before any of the rest was possible, and sixty years on they are still fighting to see the whole set. Restoration has willing organizers and real data already. The question is how much more becomes possible when that data is consistent enough for everyone to stand on it together.

A Question Worth Carrying Into Your Next Negotiation

You do not need to organize anything or join anything to take something from this. You only need to notice, the next time you are negotiating, how much you can actually see.

The next time you sit across from a vendor, a carrier, or a TPA, ask yourself one honest question before you start: how much of what I need to know does the other side already have, and how much of it can I check? When a vendor quotes you a price, do you know what businesses like yours pay for the same thing, or are you taking the number largely on faith? When a counterparty makes a case about what is reasonable, can you test it against where you actually stand among your peers, or only against your own gut?

There is no judgment in the answer, and for most operators, on most of these questions, the honest answer is that they are working with less visibility than the other side. That has been true for the whole industry for a long time, and it is not a reflection on anyone's skill. The thing worth sitting with is simply this: the ballplayers did not become better negotiators overnight. They became better informed, and being better informed made them better negotiators. The facts come first. Whatever operators might one day choose to do with them comes after, and it starts with being able to see the numbers as clearly as the people on the other side of the table already can.

Related Reading

• Why Benchmarking, And Why Now
• A Benchmark Is Only As Good As Its Sample
• The Data You Already Own