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No deal. The MLB lockout continues.
Major League Baseball has announced the delay of the 2022 regular season after the MLBPA player leaders agreed unanimously not to accept MLB’s final proposal before the league’s 5 p.m. ET deadline.
What’s next? Will Opening Day really be pushed back? Why can’t the owners and the players come together? How much longer is this mess going to last?
ESPN baseball experts Alden Gonzalez and Jeff Passan tackle the biggest questions surrounding MLB’s ongoing labor dispute.
They’ve had three months to get a deal done; why haven’t owners and players been able to agree on a new CBA?
There are several macro reasons this hasn’t gotten done — the players’ deep-seated mistrust of ownership, a desire to make significant gains on a Collective Bargaining Agreement that was gamed by savvy front offices, a nationwide penchant by corporate billionaires to maximize profits no matter the blowback — but here’s a micro one: At the onset of negotiations, owners expressed a willingness to reallocate the money that goes to players but not to increase it. In other words, the pie could change but not grow any larger.
The owners’ position ran in stark contrast with the union’s ambitions. It’s why every counter from the league seemed to include a back-end component — like a salary floor with a significantly lower ceiling — and why proposals around minimum salaries, the luxury tax threshold and the amount of money that would fund a new player pool were nominal at best. The league waited three months to counter the union’s first core-economics proposal, then six weeks to circle back after imposing the lockout in December — clear signs to the union that owners were motivated to drag this out in hopes of making the players cave.
The real negotiations didn’t take place until the final week of February. By that point, the union had given up on its demands for earlier free agency and revenue-sharing cuts and made significant concessions on the percentage of…
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Source : espn
