IRVING, Texas — It was striking and yet unsurprising that Major League Baseball and the Players Association could describe the start of a lockout so differently.
Take, for instance, the final day of collective bargaining on Wednesday, when talks broke off in the afternoon more than 10 hours before the owners moved for a work stoppage.
“We made a proposal yesterday that I believe if it had been accepted, would have provided a pretty clear path to make an agreement,” commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday.
But the union’s lead negotiator, Bruce Meyer, said that the union didn’t view Manfred’s offer from Wednesday as even an actual proposal.
“They proposed to make a proposal, if we would in advance agree to drop a number of key demands before seeing what was in their proposal,” Meyer said.
In a statement Manfred issued shortly after midnight, he called the players’ pursuits “collectively the most extreme set of proposals in their history.” He cited several union objectives, including a desire to raise the luxury-tax thresholds, and to shorten the length of time it takes players to reach free agency, as well as a plan to reduce the amount of money that flows between owners via revenue sharing. Players believe that clubs can too easily make money without having to invest in their on-field product, and want to reduce revenue sharing to tighten the spigot.