Let’s play ball: MLB players accept labor deal and salvage 2022 baseball season
Players have voted to accept Major League Baseball’s latest offer for a new labor deal, paving the way to end a 99day lockout and salvage a 162-game regular season.
The union’s executive board approved the agreement in a 26-12 vote, pending ratification by all players, a person familiar with the balloting told the Associated Press.
MLB sent the players an offer Thursday and gave them until 3pm to accept in order to play a full season. The union announced the player vote around 3.25pm The deal was still pending approval by MLB’s owners. The deal will also set off a rapid-fire round of free agency. Carlos Correa, Freddie Freeman and Kris Bryant are among 138 big leaguers still without a team, including some who might benefit from the adoption of a universal designated hitter.
Opening day is being planned for 7 April, a little more than a week behind the original date on 31 March. The sport’s new collective bargaining agreement will also expand the playoffs to 12 teams and introduce incentives to limit so-called “tanking.” The league’s minimum salary will rise from $570,500 to about $700,000 and the luxury tax threshold will increase from $210m to around $230m this year, a slight loosening for the biggest spenders such as the Yankees, Mets, Dodgers and Red Sox. A new bonus pool was established for players not yet eligible for arbitration, a way to boost salaries for young stars.
According to ESPN, other parts of the deal will include the National League adopting the designated hitter rule; a draft lottery to discourage tanking; inducements to dampen appetite for service-time manipulation; and possible new rules including pitch clocks and larger bases in the future.
Commissioner Rob Manfred had set a Tuesday deadline for a deal that would preserve a 162-game schedule along with full pay and service time required for players to reach free agency. Talks spilled past the deadline and Manfred announced more cancellations on Wednesday, increasing the total to 184 of the 2,230 games.
After yet another snag, this time over management’s desire for an international amateur draft, the deal came together on Thursday afternoon and capped nearly a year of talks that saw pitchers Max Scherzer and Andrew Miller take prominent roles as union spokesmen.
Players had fumed for years about the deal that expired on 1 December, which saw payrolls decline for 4% in 2021 compared to the last full season, back to their 2015 level. The union had an ambitious negotiating stance in talks that began last spring, asking for freeagency rights to increase with an agebased backstop and for an expansion of salary arbitration to its level from 1974-86.
In the late stages, the level and rates of the luxury tax, designed as a brake on spending, became the key to a deal. Players think that too low a threshold and too high a rate acts tantamount to a salary cap, which the union fought off with a eight-month strike in 1994-95.
The agreement came after three days of negotiations between the MLB offices in midtown Manhattan and the players’ association headquarters, three blocks away. Despite hundreds of hours of threats and counter-threats, the sides are set to avoid regular-season games being canceled by labor conflict for the first time since the 1994-95 strike. Games originally announced as canceled by Manfred were changed to postponed, and MLB will modify the original schedule.
The deal came at a cost, though, with years of public rancor again casting both owners and players as money obsessed. Spring training in Arizona and Florida was disrupted for the third straight year following two exhibition seasons altered by the coronavirus pandemic. Exhibition games had been scheduled to start in late February.