Jupiter, Florida – If you have tickets for spring training from March 5 to March 7, cancel your plans and go for a refund.
If you have tickets for opening day? Don’t get excited yet. Still, take solace in the fact that baseball players and owners took a step forward on Friday.
With three days left before the announced deadline for the MLB’s opening match scheduled for March 31, the two sides spent their longest day to date at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium. Multiple sources said Commissioner Rob Manfred and MLB Players Association CEO Tony Clark held a one-on-one session that appeared to be going decently and the representatives went a long way toward tackling the tank problem with a draft lottery.
The owners have proposed what they believe to be the most aggressive sweepstakes of any sport, which would put the four best picks in play for all non-playoff teams and also limit the number of consecutive times a club can be relegated to one of those cherished platinum selections. . Similar to the NBA lottery, the clubs with the three worst records will all carry the same draft odds first, providing an incentive for the club to simulate the 2011-13 Astros, and the rest of the lotteries will be weighted in inverse proportions to the team’s record (the better you play, the better your chances of winning worst). The players responded, the first time we’ve seen such an exchange of ideas in a day, and while it’s not possible to say how the counter differs (players previously wanted to put their top seven picks in play), optimism emerged from the union that common ground was on the horizon.
Many, many issues remain unresolved, most notably the competitive balance tax, arbitration eligibility and revenue sharing. Given how useless the first four days of road-trip haggling seem, Friday’s events seem to have left people in a better state of mind.
However, in deference to the calendar, the MLB announced the cancellation of three more days in the Grapefruit and Cactus League schedules. The February 18 announcement was up in the first week of brawls, from Saturday to March 4. If the basic agreement can be completed by Monday, the first competition will take place on March 8.
Manfred largely sat in these negotiations, following the example of some but not all of his predecessors (Budd Selig attended frequently, albeit far from all times). He does, however, own a house not far from here, and appears to have been on site meeting the owners, though he never showed himself to the media standing outside the facility. Friday was his first active post of the week. Manfred proposed the conversation, surprised the players, and he and Clark then spoke for about 25 minutes.
It followed an initial round of haggling that lasted about an hour and 20 minutes, which saw Yankees general managing partner Hal Stenbrenner and his Rockies equivalents, Padres Dick Monfort and Ron Fowler, with Max Scherzer and Yankees pitchers Zach Britton and Gerrit. Cole and Jameson Tylon are among the players.
After the Manfred-Clark tete-a-tete, the first singles game between the sport’s captains since 2020 efforts to restart the season following the COVID-19 shutdown, Manfred’s deputy Dan Halim and executive vice president of baseball MLB Operations Morgan Sword met with the large player group for 35 minutes Almost.
They’ll meet again on Saturday, and race against time…or not. Players are still not at all happy with the league’s threat to take a pay cut if they can’t agree on a full enchilada by Monday. The odds are still chaos, rage and no baseball game by the end of Monday. Perhaps, however, those odds dropped a point or two on Friday.
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