JUPITER, Fla. — If only Major League Baseball and the players’ union could cover the distances between them at the negotiating table as briskly as they’ve walked between meeting rooms.
Negotiators for both sides traded in last week’s sun in Florida for the stage of New York City, last week’s walk within Roger Dean Stadium to an 8-minute stride around Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. But they tread a familiar path. A deadline created by the owners spurred negotiations — and reports of progress — late night and on into the early morning Wednesday.
The sides agreed to resume talks Wednesday morning, announcing as such around 3 a.m. New York time, 17 hours after their first talks of the day.
Major League Baseball advertised that it would come to an agreement with the players’ union by Tuesday or the lockout would continue and more regular-season games would be canceled. In that group set to be canceled was the Cardinals’ April 7 home opener at Busch Stadium against Pittsburgh. If the two sides were able to reach an agreement by an unspecified deadline Tuesday, the commissioner’s office said a full season, all 162 games, would be possible. Tuesday came and went, some more midnight oil burned, another deadline with added elasticity, and MLB delayed any decision on games until Wednesday.
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An agreement would kick the industry into warp speed with spring training camps opening as early as this weekend and more than a hundred appealing free-agents hitting the open market for teams to bid on in a mad dash to fill rosters.
The lockout reached 98 days Wednesday with the two sides still talking over their latest proposals and the union mulling a counteroffer to bring them closer. It is already the second-longest work stoppage in baseball history. The sides are trying to avoid it becoming the first lockout in history that leads to a loss of regular-season games.
Throughout the process, the union has preached caution, and sources have detailed how some of the overtures the owners have made in the union’s direction have come with fine print that wasn’t as palatable. A recurring one has been how the owners were to expedite rules changes, increasing the commissioner’s power to do so sooner than one year and, perhaps, with less involvement of the union. Some of the rules changes explored included a pitch clock, larger bases to invite more steals, and outlawing extreme defensive shifts. A universal designated hitter has been adopted as a given by both sides.
In their exchanges Tuesday there was movement — and there were apparent tagalongs. The owners again made a stride toward the union when it comes to upping the minimum salary. The owners revisited an offer to raise it to $700,000 for the coming season, up from $570,500 in 2021. That minimal salary would grow to $770,000 through the course of the five-year Collective Bargaining Agreement. The owners also reportedly laced their proposal Monday night with other benefits for younger players, and the MLB Players’ Association had sought for more than a year to secure ways for young players to get paid a higher salary earlier in their careers.
The owners adopted the union’s proposal for a bonus pool to be used to reward pre-arbitration players for top performances. The union sought a $115-million pool, then came down to $80 million in a recent proposal, while the owners covered the ground from a $10 million pool at one point to discussing one around $30 million, per several reports. The owners also offered players who finish first or second in Rookie of the Year voting a full year of service time and draft-pick incentives as a way to address service-time manipulation.
All of those mechanisms serve to give younger players a higher price point when entering the arbitration system, and thus prime the system with future salary gains.
The tradeoffs for the union continue to be the rub. The owners have sought an international draft and tied incentives the union desires to accepting that. There is a large group of the union’s membership that has been resistant to accepting an international draft, and some agents have expressed concern especially if it suppresses bonuses to lower than the domestic draft.
An MLB spokesman told reporters in New York that the union requested more time to speak with its constituents early Wednesday morning.
Any international draft proposal would be central to that conversation.
The owners want a 14-team playoffs, but much of the discussion over the past week has centered on a 12-team format because the union wants to protect the spoils of winning a division. To reduce the benefit of tanking — something both sides wanted to see — there has been growing agreement on a draft lottery for at least the first five picks in the draft.
Early in the negotiations, the owners sought to create harsher penalties for spending over the luxury tax, and on Tuesday The Athletic reported that the owners expanded those to create a steep price for a “runaway spender.” The owners want protection against the rogue with a thick wallet that warps the open market — in other words they want some limits in place on New York Mets owner Steve Cohen. The CBT, or Competitive Balance Threshold, continued to be a major gulch the two sides had to bridge to reach any agreement, and what either side tried to attach to its movement was critical to talks.
The talks Tuesday came at the same time Apple announced a new exclusive partnership — and lucrative deal for owners — with Major League Baseball to broadcast a doubleheader on Fridays through its Apple TV+ streaming service.
For the second time in as many weeks, Major League Baseball set a deadline for an agreement before it would cancel additional games in the regular season.
This week’s deadline came with a twist.
After meetings concluded in Jupiter without a deal, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season and insisted that the year would be shortened by a labor dispute. The owners cannot unilaterally impose a shortened season on the players for 2022, and sure enough — a full season of a 162 games, full pay, and full service time was reanimated as a possibility this week, one week after they weren’t. Major League Baseball alerted the players’ union Monday that an agreement made by Tuesday could restore the full season, even if it required a delayed start to allow for a 28-day spring training.
That brought some added urgency to the talks and some familiarity as for the second consecutive week the discussions went late into the night.
When facing a deadline to start the season on time on Feb. 28, the two sides spent nearly 17 hours at Roger Dean Stadium shuttling between meetings and swapping proposals that began with hypotheticals. The two sides left as 3 a.m. local time approached and Major League Baseball announced that enough progress was made to delay that deadline. Talks slowed and then went sideways the next day when MLB offered its “best and final offer.” That offer rejected, the commissioner extended the lockout and postponed opening day past the scheduled March 31. Many of the negotiators left Florida for New York believing the owners’ deadline for a full season had passed.
Not so fast: seven days later, the sequel.
Representatives from the union and owners met in person at least twice Tuesday, one side trekking from the MLB offices on 51st Street and Sixth Avenue to the MLBPA offices on 49th Street. The negotiators had many other conversations by phone, and as 10 p.m. New York time approached, details of MLB’s proposal to the union began surfacing.
Over the past week, as they created deadlines, the owners inched up the luxury tax threshold in their offers. This past season, the Competitive Balance Tax landed on teams that spent more than $210 million. Two did. But several teams stopped on their spending on a dime to avoid the tax — illustrating the union’s concern that the CBT had become a soft salary cap. The union wanted the cap to expand, to mirror the increase in revenues or inflation, and the owners were resistant. Their initial offer was $214 million for the first year, and at one point, according to sources, they offered a $220-million threshold but it was static for three years. The union had wanted to see the tax trigger to start at $238 million in the first year and rise to $263 million by the end of the five-year agreement.
In their offer late Tuesday, the owners proposed starting at $230 million, according to The Athletic, and raising the CBT to $242 million over the five-year span of the agreement.
The Cardinals hosted Day 2 of their minor-league camp Tuesday. With more than a dozen major-league players in the area and some of them working out together in Palm Beach County, the club planned and positioned itself to open camp as soon as MLB gives the green light that a deal has been struck.
Watch now: Videos of Cardinals minor-league players at spring training in Jupiter