Tomorrow, Major League Baseball and the Players’ Association will meet for the first time since last week’s heated session which ultimately led to the league and the owners withdrawing their upcoming proposal and calling on a third party mediator for assistance.
Yesterday, commissioner Rob Manfred addressed the media, and to everyone’s surprise, Manfred stated that he has no plans to delay Spring Training. Instead, he expressed optimism that a new agreement will be put in place in time for Opening Day, which is March 31.
“You’re always one breakthrough away from making an agreement,” Manfred said. “That’s the art of this process. Somebody makes a move. And that’s why we’ll make additional moves on Saturday that creates flexibility on the other side and what seemed like a big gap on this topic or that topic isn’t such a big gap anymore.”
Manfred also stated that losing regular season games due to the lockout would be “a disastrous outcome.”
So with another session happening tomorrow, what can we all expect? Have the owners made some compromises? Is this going to be a “good faith” offer like Manfred has suggested?
As fans, we can only hope so, but I would caution all baseball fans to not get too excited about this. We’ve been through this exercise before, where the owners say that they believe their offer is a good one that will impress the players, but it ultimately has the opposite effect.
The most recent example of this was during the 2020 return to play negotiations. The owners had gone back on their word of giving the players their fully prorated salaries. They had decided that they wanted to split the revenue with the players 50-50, and they had made proposals with such a goal that the players ultimately didn’t like.
In mid-June, the owners proposed a 72-game season and agreed to pay players 70% of their prorated salaries. At the time, the owners called it their best offer yet, but the players didn’t see it that way.
So if we go with that logic, fans probably shouldn’t expect much from tomorrow’s proposal. However, Manfred did say that losing regular season games is something he and the owners want to avoid. Perhaps if they want to avoid that scenario, they finally understand that they’ll need to make some sacrifices in order to come to the middle.
Again, we can only hope for the best. Tomorrow is a big day for negotiations, and this is really the last chance to reach an agreement before the season is shortened.
For more MLB coverage, click here.
