January 25th, 2022 at 8:00 am 
by Ron Cervenka For the first time since Major League Baseball initiated its lockout of players on December 2, 2021, and after meeting face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) for the first time on Monday, MLB and the MLB Players Association will meet on back-to-back days on Tuesday in an effort to establish a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, thereby bringing an end to the (now) nine-week-old lockout.
That’s the good news.
The not-so-good news is that according to MLB Trade Rumor’s Anthony Franco, Monday’s meeting between the two factions was “contentious.“
Although so-called “core economics” continues to be at the top of the MLBPA’s want list, the union softened its stance on free agency and arbitration time limits during Monday’s session. However, and here again not-so-good-news, MLB made it abundantly clear that even though they believe that a new CBA can be reached before Opening Day on March 31, 2020, according to Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet (via Twitter), they are more than willing “to lose games.”
According to The Athletic’s Evan Drellich (subscription required), some members of the MLBPA see this as a threat to force their hand, to which MLB responded that Drellich’s message was “mischaracterized and not a fair representation of the discussion.”
Franco notes that even if MLB is willing to lose games, it would “hardly be surprising.” He adds: “Admitting it’s unwilling to face the possibility of losing games would deal a blow to the league’s negotiating leverage, after all. As the scheduled start to the season gets closer, both MLB and the MLBPA are incentivized to overstate to one another their resolution to hold out for concessions from the other party.“
Whether or not Drellich’s message was “mischaracterized and not a fair representation of the discussion,” fans may recall that just prior to MLB’s lockout on December 1, Manfred was quoted as saying: “I can’t believe there’s a single fan in the world who doesn’t understand that an offseason lockout that moves the process forward is different than a labor dispute that costs games.“
With Spring Training games scheduled to begin on February 26 and the regular season on March 31, it is tough to swallow MLB’s “mischaracterized and not a fair representation of the discussion.” pill. Although MLB players are not compensated for Spring Training, canceled regular-season games mean forfeiture of their (lofty) salaries. But MLB teams also stand to lose money in gate receipts and broadcast revenues for canceled Spring Training games; and a lot more for canceled regular-season games.
If this isn’t enough to put a wrinkle in fans’ jerseys, there is every reason to believe (and absolutely no reason not to) that should MLB and the MLBPA be unable to sign a new CBA before Spring Training is set to begin, there could – and probably would – be a players’ strike. And even though the last MLB players’ strike was 28 years ago (1994-1995) and a lot of water has passed under the bridge since, it took fans a quite while to warm back up to our National Pastime and return to the turnstiles when that strike ended.
Play Ball!
…please?
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Yet another example of how TERRIBLE Rob Manfred is as a steward of the game.
He’s very obviously ONLY interested in what benefits the owners and to hell with the players and especially the fans – who of course are what make the game continue to thrive. If he allows the season to be shortened or worse, cancelled he will be killing off part of his fan base forever. This happened to a degree in 1994/1995 and is about to happen again.
Holding fast on all the core issues from the owners side until it virtually forces the players not to play; hence a player “strike” serves to shift the blame to the players which is the owner’s strategy, in this case. I should write “strategery” ala SNL since it is such a cut-your-nose-to-spite-your face stoopid move.