Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday announced he has canceled Opening Day and the first two series of the 2022 season, as the league’s lockout lurched into March with no new collective bargaining agreement – which could result in the first regular season games lost to a labor dispute since 1995.
The announcement comes 90 days after the previous CBA expired at midnight on Dec. 1, when MLB imposed a lockout of players and weeks of infrequent, haphazard and often brief and rancorous negotiations commenced.
With spring training games canceled and a semi-official MLB deadline of Feb. 28 looming to strike an agreement or cancel the March 31 openers, MLB and the MLB Players’ Association met for nine consecutive days in Jupiter, Florida, but the final flurry of negotations – covering 20 hours stretching from Monday morning into Tuesday afternoon – finally broke down.
The sequence began with MLB presenting an offer late Monday night that showed a modest increase in the luxury tax threshold – to $220 million for three years beginning in 2022, maxing out at $230 million in 2026. The players – locked in at $245 million in 2022 – countered with an offer of $238 million for the first year, increasing to $263 million in the final year of the five-year CBA. That prompted an MLB spokesman to tell reporters the players struck a “decidedly different tone” Tuesday.
When MLB countered that with what it called a “best” offer that made small concessions on a pool of money for pre-arbitration players and minimum salary – but no further movement on the luxury tax ceiling – there was little doubt the union would reject it.
And so MLB moved to announce, for now, Opening Day’s cancellation along with two series for each team, covering March 31-April 6 and 7. The declaration comes three months after Manfred, in an “open letter to fans,” called a lockout “the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season.”
Tuesday, he stepped to the podium at Roger Dean Stadium after that approach failed badly.
“Our failure to reach agreement was not for lack of effort by either party,” says Manfred, who said players will not be paid for any cancelled games. “The unfortunate thing is the agreement we offered players had huge benefits to fans and players.”
Manfred said with the MLBPA set to leave Florida for New York, the earliest possible negotiations would occur Thursday. Given a five-day lag time between an agreement reached and camps opening, he said a March 8 start to spring training would not allow enough time for teams and players to ramp up for Opening Day.
The MLBPA said in a statement that Manfred’s “defensive lockout” was “a culmination of a decades-long attempt by owners to break our player fraternity. As in the past, this effort will fail.”
The failure to reach an accord speaks to the mistrust existing between the parties, particularly since at this point, gaps that exist are merely dollars, and not massive philosophical wedges. Players dropped their demand for free agency after five years of service time instead of six and arbitration eligibility after two years instead of three early in bargaining.
But distrust of ownership goes back multiple years, when free agent markets collapsed on players both itinerant and elite – superstars Manny Machado and Bryce Harper did not sign contracts until March 2019 – and players seethed as numerous owners pocketed profits while showing indifference toward improving their rosters.
Tuesday, Manfred shifted the blame for deliberate negotiations to the players.
“Throughout the five-year period there was a lot of rhetoric with dissatisfaction with the deal that they made,” said Manfred, whose side did not tender an offer to the players until 43 days into the lockout. “A lot of rhetoric was negative with respect to the clubs, the commissioner’s office, me. That environment, someone else created. It’s an environment in which it’s tough to build bridges.”
Countered Clark: “The reason we’re not playing is simple: A lockout is the ultimate economic weapon. Let me repeat that – a lockout is the ultimate economic weapon. In a $10 billion industry, the owners made a conscious decision to use this weapon against the greatest asset they have – the players.”
Despite the lingering animus, momentum had built toward an agreement late Monday evening when the sides agreed to expanded, 12-team playoffs as owners agreed to walk back more onerous penalties for exceeding the luxury tax.
Yet while players sought significant changes in myriad corners of the game, the luxury-tax ceiling promised to be the sticking point in negotiations, and it did not disappoint.
Players have gradually seen the luxury tax evolve into a de facto salary cap over the past two decades, and were determined to make up ground lost in previous CBAs. The luxury tax ceiling has grown just 18% since 2011, from $178 million to $210 million, a period during which industry revenues grew 70%, from an estimated $6.29 billion to $10.7 billion in 2019, the last season untouched by pandemic.
Before Friday’s proposals, the two sides’ last exchange on the luxury tax left them a total of $204 million apart, with the union seeking a tax ceiling of $245 million in 2022 up to $273 million in 2026; MLB’s last formal proposal was $214 million in 2022, up to $222 million in 2026.
Both sides closed that gap Tuesday, though a significant chasremains on an issue that seems a curious one to torpedo a season, given the relatively small amount of teams it directly affects.
Just two teams – the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres – exceeded the $210 million luxury tax ceiling in 2021, and massive-revenue teams like the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers dip and dive under and over the threshold, passing on high-end free agents hoping to reset their penalty rates.
A higher tax ceiling would allow them and upper middle class franchises more room to maneuver for impact players. That’s in part why a hawkish wing of smaller-market owners is determined to keep the ceiling low, although a lower limit certainly won’t ensure they’d bid on the sort of players likely to send a club’s payroll past the tax threshold.
If nothing else, the past decade has proven smaller-market teams such as the Tampa Bay Rays and Kansas City Royals can advance to and win the World Series while passing on the highest-end players.
Meanwhile, the term of the next CBA will cover a period during which more lucrative national TV deals will come online and MLB’s relationship with sports gambling will grow ever cozier. That means future revenues should only continue rising, which further compelled players to fight for both higher minimum salaries for young players as well as loosened governors on spending for veterans.
Both sides managed to agree conceptually on shifting greater salary to younger players by establishing a pool of bonus money for high-performing players with less than three years of service time.
Yet that speck of common ground only produced another yawning gulf by Tuesday afternoon – the players are seeking $85 million per year, with $5 million annual increases, while owners proposed $25 million per year, with no increases.
On minimum salary, the difference was much slimmer: MLB is offering $700,000 in the first year, with $10,000 increases per year. The union is seeking $725,000 with $20,000 raises for the first two years.
The disagreements amount to relative peanuts compared to more drastic shifts the players originally sought, and doesn’t seem so vast as to nuke
regular season ballgames, but here we are. MLB last suffered a work stoppage in 1994-95, when players went on strike in August 1994, fearful that owners would unilaterally impose a salary cap following the expiration of the CBA at season’s end.
The 1994 World Series was canceled and the rift extended into the next year, when owners tried using replacement players to break the union. Not until Judge Sonia Sotomayor – now a Supreme Court justice – issued a preliminary injunction forcing owners back to the bargaining table did the ’95 season commence. That was shortened to 144 games.
And what of the 2022 season? We only know it probably won’t consist of 162 games nor start on March 31, and if and when it does commence, will do so with an immeasurable loss of good will from fans who have seen this before – and many younger ones who have not.
The clock will continue to tick on the season and the players’ resolve, as the days continue to melt away on their finite careers.
“Games were cancelled today,” says Clark. “During the course of a player’s career, you don’t get many opening days.”
Source: usatoday
