The daily collective bargaining sessions between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association continued this afternoon. The MLB submitted a basic economic proposal on Monday, which the union responded to yesterday. Neither side was pleased with the other’s latest bid, and the league doubled down on previous assurances that regular season matches will be canceled If a new CBA is not agreed upon by the end of the month.
Last week, MLB notified the union that it is considering February 28 as a deadline for an agreement that will not affect the regular season. The MLB has instituted the unilateral shutdown and can lift it at any time, but there is no chance of it doing so and relinquishing the union’s negotiating leverage. After today’s negotiations, a spokesperson for the association told reporters (Including Hana Keyser from Yahoo! Sports) Regular season matches will be canceled if the CBA is not in place by Monday. The league said it had no plans to make missed matches possible at a later time, and indicated that players would not have the opportunity to recover missed match checks at the event.
Jared Diamond from The Wall Street Journal Tweets That MLB also does not intend to rearrange the schedule if the Games are cancelled. If the regular season is delayed but an agreement is eventually reached, the league will simply choose where the current schedule dictates when matches begin.
It’s possible that the league is simply trying to exert influence in an area where it feels it has the upper hand, given that missing out on early games of the season would be more detrimental to the players than it might be to the owners. The MLBPA asserted that if players lost any portion of their salary due to the game being cancelled, they would refuse to agree to an expansion of the playoffs in 2022. Post-season expansion was a major goal of the league throughout the process, as it would have benefited greatly from the potential sale of additional rounds to television partners.
Meanwhile, the two sides continue to bargain over the economy. MLB responded to the league’s latest offer with a marginal raise in today’s minimum salary. Previously, MLB would suggest a fixed minimum of $630,000 or a tiered minimum based on a player’s service time ranging from $615,000 to $725,000. The league has scrapped the idea of different minimum wages depending on time of service and today offered to raise the league-wide minimum to $640,000 next season, Athletic’s Ivan Drilech first reported (on Twitter). That would jump by $10,000 per season for the rest of the CBA, as follows:
2022: $640,000
2023: $650 thousand
2024: 660 thousand dollars
2025: 670 thousand dollars
2026: 680 thousand dollars
It’s a very small step for the players, but one that is unlikely to impress the federation. MLBPA actually more The league’s minimum required in yesterday’s proposal (to MLB’s dismay), seeking a $775,000 figure next season that would rise $30,000 a year to $895,000 by 2026. The association coupled this with a slight dip in its efforts to expand arbitration, but the league refused Strictly considering the possibility of Super Two qualifying on an entirely broader scale.
Last season, the league minimum was set at $570.5 thousand. Class like Travis Sauchek calculated Last month, the threshold should be set at $650,000 in 2022 to keep pace with inflation, compared to the terms of the 2016-21 CBA. Today’s MLB show isn’t that far off (at least for this year), but getting players paid early in their careers has been an overarching goal for the league throughout this round of collective bargaining. Thus, it seems unlikely that MLBPA would respond favorably to the suggestion.
There is clearly a lot more to be done in the coming days – on issues ranging from minimum salary and competitive credit tax to players pushing for broader refereeing and needed expansion in the Knockout League – if the regular season is to start on time. It remains to be seen if either side will budge from their stated positions if any kind of progress is made later this week, but given the icy pace in talks so far, the potential for losing regular season games appears greater on a daily basis. They will meet again tomorrow and are expected to talk every day until the end of the month.
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