Earlier on Sunday, MLB reportedly offered the MLBPA a proposal to delay the start of spring training and the season by one month, allow a 154-match season and give players the full 162-match payout. .
According to a follow-up article in The Athletics written by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich, there is reason to believe that the players will reject the league’s proposal on Monday. If that does happen, it’s likely that spring training will start in mid-February, with the Mets’ regular season starting on April 1st.
There are various reasons why the players do not find the proposal acceptable. Among them are the following:
There is no guarantee that all 154 matches will be played, as the season will be compressed (although it will take two weeks longer than originally planned). If games are postponed for some reason, it will be harder to make it up. The commissioner may have the authority to cancel, as opposed to the postponement of unplayed games, which may affect the proposal for the full player’s salaries. There is no real guarantee for full payment in the proposal.
The players feel that the delay could affect their typical training sessions, and that it could set the stage for injuries during the season.
The universal DH remains a bargaining panel and a point of contention between the two sides. The league is willing to offer a universal DH (which could lead to some highly paid roles for players like Marcell Ozuna and Nelson Cruz) in exchange for extended play-off matches. The MLBPA is not in favor of extended play-offs, as it fears the format will be a deterrent for teams to spend on players, as more teams will qualify for the post-season. The league offers $ 80 million to the player pool for extended playoffs (the league put $ 50 million into the pool in the shortened 2020 season), which is the same amount as the 2019 season, the last full season with fans on the tribunes were played.
And then there is the biggest problem of them all, the expiry of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) after the 2021 season, and the need for a comprehensive negotiation before the 2022 season. The players may be reluctant to agree to extended play-off matches now (apparently the main issue for the owners), preferring to keep the high-value slide for use when the parties sit down to discuss a new CBA. Players are expected to take measures in the next CBA to increase overall competition, such as a reverse luxury tax that will effectively serve as a required floor on the team’s payrolls.
If you’ve been a baseball fan for a while, you know that the sides simply do not trust each other. As noted by Rosenthal and Drellich, the players fear that Commissioner Rob Manfred would be free to cancel games if conditions (COVID) were deemed unsafe, double heads were imposed and otherwise measures would be taken that would have an impact on the players’ pay and service time. .
If the players turn down the MLB offer, with the time so short before the expected start of spring training, it is unlikely that a new proposal that could affect the start of camps can be made. The DH issue can be agreed upon before the start of the season, just as with extended play-off matches (much has been agreed on the latter near the start of the 2020 season).
It’s almost unfathomable that we’m 17 days away from pitchers and catchers, and there’s still doubt about the reporting date and the rules under which the season will be played.
Again, after the labor issues that have plagued baseball’s landscape since the early 1970s, it may not be such a big surprise.
