MLB, MLBPA Agree to New CBA; Opening Day Expected to Be April 7

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Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement Thursday, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan. 

Thus ends a lockout initiated by team owners once the previous CBA expired in December. The league hadn’t seen a work stoppage since 1995, an especially long period of labor peace relative to history.

Per MLB Network’s Jon Heyman, the player vote was 26-12 to approve the new CBA.  The owner vote was unanimous to ratify the new CBA, per Bob Nightengale of USA Today. 

According to Evan Drellich of The Athletic, the new CBA will feature:

Drellich also noted there is a new level of the competitive balance tax, a third surcharge.

Heading into the offseason, fans expected tense negotiations between owners and players, and the lockout came as little surprise. The larger question was whether the situation would drag into the spring or potentially even jeopardize the 2022 regular season.

The first week of spring training was lost in mid-February. MLB drew a line in the sand and set Feb. 28 as the deadline for a new CBA in order to start the regular season as scheduled. As that deadline neared, multiple reports surfaced about the entire first month potentially being lost:

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced at the time that Opening Day was postponed until April 14 after the sides failed to reach agreement following an extended negotiation session. 

That came after Manfred previously announced March 1 the first two series of the regular season were canceled. 

Instead, if April 7 ends up being Opening Day, the start of the season will only be delayed by one week from its originally scheduled date of March 31. 

One of the main sticking points in the March 9 negotiations were the details about an international draft. The sides were able set some parameters on the issue during negotiations the following day:

Prior to the extended deadline, it looked as though MLB and the MLBPA were inching closer to a resolution. However, Toronto Blue Jays starting pitcher Ross Stripling, who represents his team with the MLBPA, contended to Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith that MLB wasn’t being entirely transparent with its CBA offer:

“It got to be like 12:30 and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before. They were trying to sneak things through us, it was like they think we’re dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something. It’s like that stupid football quote, they are who we thought they were. They did exactly what we thought they would do. They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed, and then they tried to sneak some shit past us at that deadline and we were ready for it. We’ve been ready for five years. And then they tried to flip it on us today in PR, saying that we’ve changed our tone and tried to make it look like it was our fault. That never happened.”

The drawn-out negotiations were emblematic of how significant the next CBA could be in shaping baseball.

This winter saw plenty of spending on marquee free agents before business abruptly halted, but the general trend has gone in the opposite direction in recent years.

Players concerned about the extent to which MLB owners were willing to spend probably weren’t enthused when owners tabled a plan last August to raise the salary floor to $100 million but lower the luxury tax from $210 million to $180 million, per The Athletic’s Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal.

The luxury tax emerged as an especially thorny issue, with many arguing it’s effectively a backdoor to institute a salary cap in MLB:

Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post wrote last December how “one of the widest gaps in these negotiations exists between the way the owners and players view the economics of the game.” Janes cited how MLB revenues were climbing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with player salaries declining:

“Both sides agree, in theory, on the reason for this discrepancy: Less experienced players and veterans who are not stars are compensated in a way that allows teams to lean heavily on cheap, young labor. That tendency comes at the expense of veterans; players who wait years to reach free agency don’t always find a market eager to pay them.”

However, MLB and the MLBPA were at loggerheads as to the best way to address the problem.

Overhauling how and to what extent players are compensated is the kind of thing that requires prolonged negotiations and plenty of posturing from both sides. As an example, Drellich and Rosenthal reported in November how one MLB proposal would’ve seen arbitration ditched in exchange for a system in which players were paid based on their wins above replacement.

In theory, a lockout gave MLB and the MLBPA a strong incentive to hammer out a new deal as quickly as possible. Beyond the threat of missing games, nobody benefits when the league removes individual player photos and reports a lot less on major stories around the game.

Manfred struck a somewhat positive tone and made the case in November that “an offseason lockout that moves the process forward is different than a labor dispute that costs games.”

But the NBA lost a portion of its 2011-12 season to a lockout, so it’s not some sort of magic bullet to expedite an accord. The NHL didn’t even stage a 2004-05 season at all before another lockout forced the cancellation of some games in 2012-13.

Manfred only needed to reach out to his counterpart in the NHL, Gary Bettman, to understand the long-term ramifications of a protracted labor battle. It took years for hockey to dig out of the hole it created for itself in 2005.

Baseball is America’s pastime, but MLB attendance and viewership were down for the 2021 season. That played into the perception the league is losing ground to other sports, with pace of play long cited as one area that needs a jolt.

“It’s the greatest crisis the game faces,” a league executive said to Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci in March 2021. “In the next five years we’ll either be the national pastime or a niche sport.”

Baseball fans will be happy to see the return of games, and the action on the diamond will inevitably help push the lockout further out of memory.

But the true cost of this labor dispute may not be seen for some time.