Sluggish talks guarantee camps won’t open on time
Major League Baseball made its long-awaited counterproposal for a new collective agreement on Saturday afternoon, and it was predictably underwhelming.
Commissioner Rob Manfred said this past week that his negotiating team was prepared to make a “good” offer to the MLB Players Association that he hoped would “move the process forward.” What his negotiators came up with this weekend left a lot to be desired.
According to multiple reports, MLB made slight improvements to its previous offer on contentious issues such as the competitive balance tax, minimum salaries and a bonus pool for pre-arbitration players. The proposal did not include changes to revenue sharing or service time, two priorities for the union.
From the players’ perspective, the offer was better than the one in mid-January, but still not nearly good enough. After taking approximately three weeks to make a counterproposal, the league appeared more content to dig in its heels than to offer concessions.
Per the Athletic’s Evan Drellich, owners offered to set the competitive balance tax at $214 million (U.S.) from 2022-23, $216 million in 2024, $218 million in 2025 and $222 million in 2016. The previous proposal was $214 million from 2022-24, $216 million in 2025 and $220 million in 2026.
The league also removed a previous proposal that would force taxpaying teams to surrender a draft pick. Three-tiered tax rates of 50, 75 and 100 per cent remain in the proposal, compared to the previous system which had charges of 20 per cent with escalating costs for repeat offenders.
The players remain philosophically opposed to the tax because they argue teams treat it like a salary cap. While they would love to see the system removed entirely, they likely would be open to a higher threshold with fewer punishments for big-budget teams. The tax threshold in 2021 was $210 million.
There wasn’t much movement on minimum salaries, either.
The league previously proposed straight salaries of $615,000, $650,000 and $700,000 for players with zero to three years of service. As reported by ESPN, the owners upped the third-year offer to $725,000 on Saturday, plus an alternative where all zero-to-three players would earn a minimum of $630,000. Both offers are well short of the $775,000 minimum sought by the union.
The players had yet to issue an official response as of late Saturday — and it’s expected they will take some time to go over the 130-page document before doing so — but early rumblings out of New York suggested the union wasn’t impressed.
Another proposal should be coming soon, this time from the players, but it has become painfully obvious they remain far apart. That can change in a matter of hours with a productive bargaining session, but it certainly didn’t happen Saturday.
The clock is quickly running out. While spring training has yet to be officially delayed, camps were set to open over the next four or five days and that’s no longer possible. Unless some progress is made over the next two weeks, we’ll soon be saying the same thing about the regular season.
Manfred promised to move the negotiations forward Saturday. If they moved at all, it was by an inch or two. Not exactly the strides baseball fans had been hoping for.
Clock’s ticking on opening day after another round of minor concessions by owners