With no deadline deal, MLB’S lockout begins

IRVING, Texas — For the first time in nearly three decades, Major League Baseball is in a work stoppage.

After the owners of MLB’S 30 clubs and the players failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement before the expiration of the previous five-year pact at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Wednesday, the league enacted a lockout. It was the latest chapter in fraught labor relations between the sides in recent years.

While a lockout was not a requirement, the move is the owners’ cudgel and it had previously been used by owners in the four major men’s North American professional sports leagues in similar instances. After a flurry of free agency activity leading up to Wednesday, a lockout brings the sport to a standstill. Teams are not allowed to talk to players, make major league signings or swing trades.

“We believe that an offseason lockout is the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote in a letter to fans posted at 12:01 a.m. Thursday.

“We hope that the lockout will jump-start the negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time. This defensive lockout was necessary because the Players Association’s vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive. It’s simply not a viable option. From the beginning, the MLBPA has been unwilling to move from their starting position, compromise, or collaborate on solutions.”

The union vehemently disagreed. Its statement read, in part: “This shutdown is a dramatic measure, regardless of the timing. It is not required by law or for any other reason. It was the owners’ choice, plain and simple, specifically calculated to pressure players into relinquishing rights and benefits, and abandoning good faith bargaining proposals that will benefit not just players, but the game and industry as a whole.”

This is the ninth work stoppage in MLB history, and the fourth lockout. The last time owners locked out the players was before the 1990 season. None of the previous three lockouts led to the cancellation of regular-season games. In 1990, the 32-day lockout eliminated most of spring training but the full schedule of regular-season games was played, simply starting a week later than usual.

The last time a work stoppage damaged the regular season, though, was the 1994-95 players’ strike. It prematurely ended the 1994 campaign, canceled that year’s World Series and bled into the next season, costing the league more than 900 games.

Players successfully staved off the implementation of a salary cap with the strike but the episode left lasting damage on the sport. Still, there was labor peace over the following decades. And baseball grew into an $11 billion a year industry, with superstar players continually breaking records for contract size.

But the mistrust between team owners and players has increased over the years. Two years after the now-expired CBA was enacted before the 2017 season, the players’ union hired a new lead negotiator, Bruce Meyer, a veteran labor litigator who had worked for or with the players’ unions of the NBA, NHL and NFL. The expired baseball CBA is viewed as having further tilted the balance in the owners’ favor, with changes such as harder caps on international spending and stricter penalties for higher payrolls.

Since then, the union and players have become increasingly vocal about what they considered flaws in the system. The tension between the owners and players came to a head last year during bitter negotiations over staging the 2020 regular season after play had been suspended during spring training by the coronavirus pandemic.

Throughout this year, MLB and the union have met virtually and in person, with each side offering proposals and tweaks. The union’s first proposal on core economic issues came in May, while the league’s was in August. They found little common ground — strongly disagreeing on proposed changes to revenue sharing, service time accrual and free agency — even during face-to-face sessions on the day the CBA expired.

This week, MLB officials and the seven club owners who comprise the league’s labor policy committee came to Texas to bargain directly with the players during the union’s annual offseason executive board meetings. MLB made a new proposal on core economic issues last week, while the union made another Tuesday — both of which the other side rejected.

Although the groups remained significantly apart, the season is not yet in jeopardy and negotiations between the sides can continue during a lockout. Spring training is scheduled to start in mid-february and opening day is scheduled for March 31.

“This hard but important step does not necessarily mean games will be canceled,” Manfred wrote. “In fact, we are taking this step now because it accelerates the urgency for an agreement with as much runway as possible to avoid doing damage to the 2022 season. Delaying this process further would only put spring training, opening day and the rest of the season further at risk — and we cannot allow an expired agreement to again cause an in-season strike and a missed World Series, like we experienced in 1994. We all owe you, our fans, better than that.”

Players have wanted a series of improvements, some of which have been rejected by MLB: getting young players (who are cheaper and have been relied upon more) compensated sooner in their careers, allowing players to reach salary arbitration and free agency sooner, raising luxury tax thresholds (from $210 million now to $245 million), reducing revenue sharing among teams and ways that could curb service time manipulation, and forcing teams to be more competitive through a handful of measures, including changes to the amateur draft.

Owners, on the other hand, believe MLB players have the best deal in professional sports. Manfred said that despite complaints that free agency was “broken,” $1.7 billion was committed to free-agent players in November and that clubs were on pace to set an offseason spending record. He also said the union “never wavered” from “collectively the most extreme set of proposals in their history.”

MLB had said it also wanted to improve the competitive balance among teams but had proposed different ways to accomplish that than the union.

Among its proposals, some of which have been rejected by the union: an Nba-style lottery format for the first three picks in the draft that could help prevent so-called tanking, a club payroll floor ($100 million) along with a lower luxury tax threshold ($180 million) — or more modest luxury tax threshold increases (starting with $214 million) without a floor but with steeper rates for going over, overhauling the salary arbitration system, smaller increases to league minimum salaries, making free agency based on age and expanding the playoffs (from 10 to 14 teams), which would net more revenue.

In recent proposals, MLB has shown a willingness to get rid of the qualifying offer system, which attaches draft picks to certain free-agent players, while the players offered a 12-team expanded postseason.