Ugh. Still no deal. The lockout drags on. Today’s meeting got heated and went south, which means it’s all but confirmed now that Spring Training won’t start on time.
On a positive note, the Player’s Association made some concessions. According to Evan Drellich of The Athletic, the players dropped their request for pre-arbitration bonus money from $105 million to $100 million. The union also dropped the number of players who would be awarded a full season of MLB service time. Drellich stated that the previous proposal was to grant service to players in the top 30 or top 10 according to WAR depending on the position. It’s now down to top 20 or top seven.
So while that’s all well and good, there still wasn’t any compromise from the owners’ side of things, which is what really needs to happen soon if we’re going to start the season on time. The two sides remain quite far apart, and a deal is not close.
It’s hard to get excited about anything baseball related at the moment. The sport is in jeopardy. Fans are losing interest. One fan on Twitter said, “it took this long to recover (from the 1994-95 strike) and the younger demographic has already turned away at this point. Look at (the) average baseball fan age in 1994 vs. now.”
The next meeting between the two sides to discuss core economics is yet to be scheduled, as Drellich notes. We can be grateful that there was a little progress made, but it just isn’t enough to get fans back into the sport or speed up the process of hammering out a new CBA. That’s still going to be a while.
I’ve gone back and forth with my predictions on how many games the season will be. For a while, I was optimistic that we would avoid the cancellation of games altogether. That seems like wishful thinking at this point. I then thought maybe we could get 110-150 games in, but the fact is, there’s been little progress, and this is only going to keep dragging out until the last minute, which means this may last well into April.
Fans just want baseball back. Everyone’s tired of all the posturing and lack of progress. We just need the grand old game back to help us forget our troubles. It’s not like we don’t get that with other sports, but we need all sports running in full force.
Please, Rob Manfred. If you see this, end the lockout ASAP. We miss our National Pastime.
