‘It’s go time’: Upcoming MLB talks could offer pathway out of stalemate

TORONTO – Pathway to a breakthrough or a prelude to escalation?

Those will be the stakes in New York next week when Major League Baseball and its locked-out players hold their first set of continuous in-person negotiations toward a new collective bargaining agreement.

Spurred along by a Feb. 28 ownership deadline to rescue opening day, and a union threat to scrap expanded playoffs this year if regular season games are lost, the meetings are the first signs of urgency in an oft-moribund process that Friday led to the cancellation of spring games through March 4.

Though the sides made little headway while exchanging proposals from MLB last Saturday and the players' association Thursday, the latter in an ominously brief session, Toronto Blue Jays player-union rep Ross Stripling wants to be “optimistic about what that means.”

"I know (Thursday’s meeting) has taken a lot of flak for just being 15 minutes long," Stripling said. "But all we did was we sent over a proposal, they didn't really say anything one way or another about how they felt about it, at least on the Zoom call that I was on, and then within a couple hours we heard that they're going to meet in person all next week.

“Obviously, on paper it's not a lot of progress, but it feels like maybe our proposal at least got the ball rolling and saying, 'OK, it's time to get serious.' I don't know. I'm probably choosing to be a little bit more optimistic than what it is, but it feels like progress.”

How those discussions go will ultimately decide that, but the first pressure of an actual deadline may finally prompt some real movement now that opening day is legitimately in danger.

Brinkmanship has largely marked negotiations to this point, and now “it's go time,” as Stripling quite aptly put it.

“Economic issues are certainly the main part of this CBA, but there's a thousand other moving parts," he said. "We haven't gotten to playoff expansion, international draft, COVID protocols, drug testing, all that kind of stuff has to get settled, as well. So we are 100 per cent at the threshold of needing to get this sucker done.”

Owners may not have felt that same urgency since April games are typically the lowest-revenue dates for teams, while payroll costs are spread evenly across the season. That makes sacrificing the first month much more palatable to MLB than to players, prompting the union to link expanded playoffs in 2022 to a full season at full pay.

A pivotal lever in the upcoming talks is how far owners are willing to move the Competitive Balance Tax, or CBT, threshold, which in 2021 was set at $210 million and in recent years has turned into a de facto salary cap.

In its offer last Saturday, which commissioner Rob Manfred described as “a good-faith, positive proposal” before it was sent, MLB set the luxury tax at $214 million, $214 million, $216 million, $218 million and $222 million over a five-year deal, with more stringent penalties than those already in place. The union is countering at $245 million and the gap there has been a source of frustration for players because “we have made (it) obvious that is our biggest issue," Stripling said.

“Manfred talked and acted like the proposal that they were going to send over was going to be real progress. We got the proposal on Saturday, and when they were done we told MLB straight-up, we were underwhelmed,” Stripling added. “It feels like we’re the ones continuing to make concessions, we’re the ones who want to continue to try to push the envelope forward. We knew that’s how it was going to be, we knew they would use time against us, try to sweat us out. But we continue to make these changes to try and get them to come to the table and bargain with us.”

The players had previously withdrawn their request for age-based free agency – a total non-starter for owners – and in Thursday’s proposal, they scaled back their ask for expanded arbitration. They had sought eligibility to begin once a player reaches two years of service time, but now they're seeking arbitration rights for 80 per cent of players between two and three years of service.

“Over the course of a CBA, hundreds of millions of dollars are saved by not having everyone go to arbitration after two years,” Stripling said. “It's a big financial move and the thought is they should reciprocate with a big move on CBT or on some of these other things.”

Among the other things is the bonus pool for pre-arbitration players, a concept both sides agree upon but are divergent in total dollars. MLB is offering $15 million, while the union increased its ask from $100 million to $115 million Thursday.

“A lot of people were saying, why are we making another concession?” Stripling said. “A lot of people are asking good questions that even our subcommittee and our union reps were battling with, as well. This proposal was kind of hard to put together, and it’s good to see that even some of our youngest players are stepping up in that group chat, asking questions, are involved and want to know what's going on. That's really what we need. Everybody in the loop and communicating. You don't have to be on board with every little thing that happened, but once we send something over, we’ve got to all be on the same page.”