One year ago, we didn’t know when, or if, baseball would be played in 2022. About a month earlier, moments after the collective bargaining agreement expired without a new one in place, the 30 Major League Baseball owners locked out the players and kicked off the first work stoppage in 27 years. We had no idea how long it would last, but we knew it would be ugly.
As we rang in the new year, MLB still had not made a new proposal on core economics to the players, despite commissioner Rob Manfred’s assertion that the league instituted the lockout “out of a desire to drive the process forward to an agreement now.” When that proposal came, 43 days after the lockout began, the players were insulted by the offer.
The two sides traded jabs back and forth in the press, with MLB threatening to declare that negotiations were at an impasse. We watched an entire Olympics. Still no agreement. A week of spring training games were canceled. Then another week. Still no baseball. Grainy photos of lead negotiators Dan Halem and Bruce Meyer replaced grainy photos of pitchers and catchers. Manfred set an arbitrary deadline for an agreement to put pressure on the players. If there was no deal by March 1, he said, he’d have no choice but to cancel regular season games. Of course, as SI’s Emma Baccellieri wrote at the time, Manfred did have a choice, and he would be the one making the decision to cancel games.
