Major League Baseball and the MLBPA held their first round of collective bargaining talks on Tuesday, reports Jeff Passan of ESPN.com. The meeting took place according to a video conference and according to Passan ‘dozens of people’, including members of player leadership. It was the first time MLB and the union had negotiated since the players rejected the league’s proposal for a delayed regular season of 154 games on 1 February.
The current CBA expires on December 1 and if the two parties so far do not reach an agreement, the sport could experience its first strike since the 1994-95 strike. The relationship between the league and the players has taken a very controversial turn over the past few years, which would make it difficult to achieve labor peace by the beginning of December. At the same time, both parties understand that the failure to reach an agreement could cause serious damage to the $ 10 billion a year, Passan writes.
As the negotiations continue, according to Passan, the union will focus part of its focus on ‘spending and competitive integrity’. Along with the pressure on teams to spend more, the players want to make more money earlier in their careers – which could mean changes to the current service setup. According to today’s rules, a player must have six years of service in the big league to reach free agencies. With that in mind, many clubs’ talented prospects in the minors seem to have lasted longer than necessary to get a seventh year in control.
As far as ownership is concerned, there is still a desire to increase the number of play-off teams per season. More than half of the league’s teams (16 of 30) reached the play-offs during the shortened 2020 campaign, but the field returned to 10 this year after the union turned down an extensive post-season as part of the league’s proposal for 154 games.