JUPITER, Fla. — A marathon negotiating session managed to keep Major League Baseball’s full 2022 season on life support.
Now all the owners and players have to do is finish the recovery in six hours’ time.
The clubs and the MLB Players Association spent 16 ½ hours Monday into Tuesday at the unsubtly named Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium, covering enough ground to convince the owners to move their deadline for starting the season on time to Tuesday at 5 p.m. local time. The two sides will restart their talks at 11 a.m.
“We made progress and we want to exhaust every possibility,” an MLB spokesperson said. If a new Basic Agreement isn’t completed by 5 o’clock, the league stressed, then Opening Day, scheduled for March 31, will be canceled and players’ pay docked. Of course, the owners had made identical threats about Monday being the deadline, only to relent upon closing the divide with their adversarial partners.
In all, the groups held a total of 13 meetings, and the most significant one proved to be the second, according to a union source. When commissioner Rob Manfred and his deputy Dan Halem gathered with the PA’s executive director Tony Clark and his deputy Bruce Meyer, it kicked off an era of relatively good feelings after the day began with tension.
While nothing in a collective bargaining agreement is official until everything is official, the two sides made headway on a postseason featuring 12 teams, the players’ preference, rather than 14, which the clubs preferred for maximum revenue. That likely will lead to a lower competitive-balance tax threshold than if 14 teams qualified for the playoffs, although the tax rates appear to be set as similar to the just-completed Basic Agreement. The players and teams had previously made progress on a draft lottery and methods to mitigate service-time manipulation.
However, a source said, significant gaps remain in three major categories: 1) The CBT threshold, as the clubs want to set it at $220 million for 2022 (an increase from prior offers) and the players have been at $245 million; 2) the minimum player salary, where the teams are at $675,000 and the players $775,000; and 3) the pre-arbitration bonus pool, where the teams have raised their proposal to $25 million whereas the players’ last known package called for $115 million.
If that’s a lot of bargaining to do in six hours’ time, the work they did Monday made Tuesday possible. They earned themselves a second straight day of crunch time.