We finally hit the deadline MLB talked so much about last week: Monday, February 28.
The league said over and over again that if there was no collective bargaining agreement (CBA) deal in place by today, the league certainly won’t start on time, games would be lost and wouldn’t be rescheduled.
Instead of advancing towards an agreement, however, the weekend was apparently more of the same.
Despite the optimism of some journalists, there is no deal looming as of Monday afternoon.
And the owners, at least over the weekend, showed the kind of attitude that has earned them hate all around the baseball universe.
MLB Owners Only Like Things Unilaterally
They want to have most of the control and they love to impose things unilaterally.
According to Jeff Passan of ESPN, they also want to “shorten the window to unilaterally implement on-field changes to 45 days of notice instead of the one year it presently possesses.”
Passan also noted that, as The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal had explained, that move was not well-received by the Players Association.
Another item from today: League reiterated that it wants to shorten the window to unilaterally implement on-field changes to 45 days of notice instead of the one year it presently possesses. The proposal, as @EvanDrellich and @Ken_Rosenthal said, was not received well by players.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 26, 2022
The weekend was not successful regarding negotiations and a deal before Monday’s deadline is highly unlikely.
Fans are becoming increasingly frustrated, but perhaps not as much as players, who even threatened to leave the negotiation room at one point during the weekend.
They didn’t receive the owners’ response to their offer very well.
Now, in addition, they have to implement some silly changes to the game with a shorter window to notice players.
They seem to only enjoy to do things their way, without caring too much about everybody involved in the game of baseball.
Negotiations remain tense, as they have been for months.
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