Rob Manfred, Tony Clark’s first MLB lockout meeting leaves glimmer of hope
JUPITER, Fla. — If you have spring-training tickets for March 5 through March 7, trash your plans and go get your refund.
If you have tickets for Opening Day? Don’t get excited quite yet. Take solace, however, in the fact that Major League Baseball’s players and owners actually took a step forward Friday.
With three days remaining before MLB’s proclaimed deadline to bang the scheduled March 31 opener, the two sides spent their longest day yet at the unsubtly named Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium. Commissioner Rob Manfred and MLB Players Association executive director Tony Clark held a one-on-one session that seemed to go decently and the representatives went a long way toward addressing the tanking issue with a draft lottery, multiple sources said.
The owners proposed what they believe to be the most aggressive draft lottery in any sport, which would put the top four picks in play for all non-playoff teams and also restrict the number of consecutive times a club can land one of those cherished platinum selections. Similar to the NBA lottery, the clubs with the three worst records would all carry the same odds to draft first, thereby providing a disincentive for a club to emulate the 2011-13 Astros, and the rest of the lottery would be weighted in inverse proportion to a team’s record (the better you play, the worse your chances of prevailing). The players countered, the first time we’ve seen such a swap of ideas in a single day, and while it couldn’t be determined how the counter differed (the players previously wanted to put the top seven picks in play), optimism emerged from the union that common ground was within sight.
Many, many issues remain unresolved, most prominently the competitive-balance tax, arbitration eligibility and revenue-sharing. Given how futile the first four days of this road-trip bargaining had proceeded, though, Friday’s events seemed to leave folks in a better state of mind.
Nevertheless, out of respect for the calendar, MLB announced the cancellation of three more days on the Grapefruit and Cactus League schedules. An announcement on Feb. 18 had spiked the first week of scrimmages, from Saturday through March 4. If a Basic Agreement can be completed by Monday, then the first contest would occur on March 8.
Manfred has largely sat out these negotiations, similar to some but not all of his predecessors (Bud Selig attended them more often, if far from all the time). He owns a home close to here, however, and apparently has been on site caucusing with owners, although he never made himself visible to the media standing outside the facility. Friday marked his first active involvement of the week. Manfred suggested the conversation, surprising the players, and he and Clark subsequently spoke for about 25 minutes.
That followed an initial round of bargaining that lasted about an hour and 20 minutes and featured Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner and his Rockies and Padres equivalents Dick Monfort and Ron Fowler, with new Mets co-ace Max Scherzer and Yankees pitchers Zack Britton, Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon among those on the players’ side.
After the Manfred-Clark tete-a-tete, the first publicized one-on-one between the sport’s two leaders since the 2020 efforts to restart the season following the COVID-19 shutdown, Manfred’s deputy Dan Halem and MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword met with the large player group for about 35 minutes.
They’ll meet again Saturday, racing against the clock … or not. The players are still not happy at all about the league’s threat to dock their pay if they can’t agree on the whole enchilada by Monday. The odds still favor chaos, anger and no baseball by the end of Monday’s business. Maybe, though, those odds dropped a tick or two on Friday.