Major League Baseball is officially in a winter freeze.
An industry source confirmed early Thursday morning that the owners locked out the players, as expected, in accordance with the expiration of the industry’s collective bargaining agreement at midnight Wednesday into Thursday. There will be no transactions involving players on 40-man rosters until the lockout gets lifted, which the owners don’t intend to do until they hammer out a new deal with the MLB Players Association.
“Simply put, we believe that an offseason lockout is the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season,” commissioner Rob Manfred wrote in “A letter to baseball fans,” published on MLB’s website. “We hope that the lockout will jumpstart the negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time.”
It marks baseball’s first halt since the 1994-95 debacle that canceled the former year’s World Series and saw replacement players populate the latter year’s spring training before the federal courts created order. Whether it constitutes an actual “work stoppage,” this being the sport’s offseason, is up for debate, though it obviously could lead to compromises of spring training and the regular season despite Manfred’s stated desire to avoid that.
Major League Baseball is officially shutdown after its collective bargaining agreement ran out at midnight on Thursday. Charles Wenzelberg/New York PostThe lockout won’t preclude the Mets and the A’s from filling their managerial openings or the Yankees from completing their renovation of Aaron Boone’s coaching staff. Nor will it stop such festivities as the Baseball Hall of Fame holding its annual elections and announcing the results. And for real die-hards, the minor league portion of the Rule 5 draft, set to take place at next week’s Winter Meetings (which have been canceled), will still occur, although the more familiar major league portion will not.
Manfred, in his statement, described the maneuver to lock out the players as “defensive,” calling it “necessary because the Players Association’s vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive.” While contending that baseball players “already had a contract that they wouldn’t trade for any other in sports,” the commissioner added that his side had made a number of proposals covering such issues as player compensation, service-time manipulation and the elevation of the luxury-tax threshold.
“Regrettably, it appears the Players Association came to the bargaining table with a strategy of confrontation over compromise,” Manfred wrote. “They never wavered from collectively the most extreme set of proposals in their history, including significant cuts to the revenue-sharing system, a weakening of the competitive balance tax, and shortening the period of time that players play for their teams. All of these changes would make our game less competitive, not more.”
MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said in a statement: “This drastic and unnecessary measure will not affect the Players’ resolve to reach a fair contract. We remain committed to negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement that enhances competition, improves the product for our fans, and advances the rights and benefits of our membership.”
New Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, a member of the PA’s executive subcommittee, said on Wednesday afternoon from the Dallas area, where the two sides had been meeting, “When you look at the 2016 CBA … and how that has worked over the past five years, as players, we see major problems with it. Specifically, first and foremost, we see a competition problem in how teams are behaving because of certain rules that are within that. Adjustments have to be made because of that in order to bring up the competition.
“As players, that’s absolutely critical to us to have a highly competitive league. When we don’t have that, we have issues.”
Scherzer’s agent, Scott Boras, has repeatedly criticized the draft-pool concept (actually born in the 2011 CBA) by which the worse a team finishes in the standings, the higher a budget — as well as the better the picks — it receives in the subsequent draft.
“I remain optimistic that both sides will seize the opportunity to work together to grow, protect, and strengthen the game we love,” Manfred concluded. “MLB is ready to work around the clock to meet that goal. I urge the Players Association to join us at the table.”
