NEW YORK — Major League Baseball is walking right into the so-called “disastrous outcome” that nobody wants, but one that looks like it will happen anyway.
Pitchers and catchers were scheduled to report to spring camps on Tuesday. Instead, the Players Association is constructing its latest counterproposal to the league toward a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. The players’ next offer is not expected to move negotiations into the final stage, by any means. MLB and the players union remain far apart on core economic issues as the owners’ lockout settles into Day 77.
Here’s how Francisco Lindor, a member of the union’s executive subcommittee, answered when asked if he thinks the lockout will lead to the delay of a March 31 opening day.
“If that’s what it comes down to,” Lindor said to reporters in Tampa last week. “We don’t want to do it. We want to play the full season. But if that’s what it comes down to, we continue to come to the table and continue to bring good things.”
Now we have both sides stating the obvious: owners and players would prefer not to miss games because that amounts to a loss of revenue and paychecks. Commissioner Rob Manfred is already on record saying the league would prefer four weeks of spring training — which is still less than the scheduled six weeks players would get to warm up and avoid injuries if there was no lockout in place.
But four weeks of camps means the lockout must end — or a new CBA must be agreed upon, whichever comes first — by the beginning of March in order to avoid missing regular season games. That leaves the sides with just about two weeks to close the gap between their largest economic disagreements.
MLB’s latest proposal, which was delivered on Saturday, was the league’s first offer of February. The progress of the negotiations remains painfully slow, a pace that the owners set after they waited 43 days to respond to the union’s initial, pre-lockout, offer. So while Manfred accurately claimed that missing regular-season games would be a “disastrous outcome” for the sport, it’s critical to remember that the league is not sprinting to the bargaining table to reach an agreement.
Multiple reports state that the players are frustrated by the league’s lack of movement on key issues. Last Thursday, Manfred framed the league’s upcoming proposal as a “good” one, implying it would be enough to get the players to agree in time for spring training to start as scheduled. But the league’s position barely changed in Saturday’s meeting, which ended after less than an hour.
Up until this point, the players have moved swiftly in their delivery of counteroffers. A report from The Athletic pointed out that some players are beginning to think their speed might be working against them. The union believes MLB is moving too little to consistently warrant counteroffers, and if players continue taking concessions in an effort to meet the league in the middle, they’re essentially bidding against themselves.
All of which leads us to the present day: the week that pitchers and catchers would be reuniting in warm weather and fans would be getting excited for next month’s opening day. With the NFL’s Super Bowl over it is, after all, officially baseball season. Except it’s not. It is unnervingly quiet around baseball. There is still no official date set for the next round of negotiations.
The baseball calendar will eventually pressure the two sides into striking a deal. For now, that pressure has yet to reach its boiling point. In a couple of weeks, we may find out that losing regular-season games won’t be the critical turning point, either. But the longer this lockout drags on, the more disastrous it is for the industry. At least Manfred was right about that, even as the league isn’t doing anything significant to avoid that disaster.
