MLB Threatens Missed Games, Paychecks For Players If Deal Isn't Struck By Monday
By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- It's getting ugly in the "negotiations" taking place between Major League Baseball and its players' union.
Sure, things might always be ugly between the owners and the MLBPA, but a new level was struck Wednesday when the league -- by way of an anonymous spokesperson -- publicly declared Feb. 28 as an absolute deadline for a deal to be struck without regular-season games being lost.
The Associated Press said that the league gave the union this deadline on Feb. 12, and that the players "have not accepted Monday as a deadline and have suggested any missed games could be made up as part of doubleheaders, a method MLB said it will not agree to."
And so, for the second time in three years, it appears as though Major League Baseball is not all that concerned with delivering the Major League Baseball product to the fans.
Surely you'll remember the 2020 season, which was shut down during spring training due to the coronavirus. The season could have begun on the weekend of Independence Day, delivering an American celebration at a time when America really could have used it. Instead, the league and the union bickered and fought. The owners cried poor. Tony Clark somehow managed to make the players look bad. The league made no real attempt to make a 72-game season work. Both sides knew that a unilateral decision by the league to play a 60-game season was going to happen, thus chopping three weeks off the season and delivering less baseball to baseball fans.
That it happened at all was a shame. That it happened at a time when no other sports were being played, when most of the country remained at home instead of going out, when baseball could have seized a lot of eyeballs? Doubly shameful.
Now it seems as though the two sides are right back to an impasse yet again, with an arbitrary deadline set so that the league could cut games and hit the players in their wallets to try to spur action.
Of course, if the people involved wanted to avoid this situation, they could have met with some urgency over the past two months to try to work out a deal. Yet it just seems that whenever it's time for the league and the union to discuss anything, some bad faith discussions and unnecessary posturing are sure to follow.
Perhaps a miracle will happen and they'll solve all their differences by Monday. It's just more likely -- based on their history, based on their nature -- that MLB and the MLBPA will end up delivering less baseball in 2022 than they ought to. The fans, the businesses that surround ballparks, the workers affected by a lack of games, and anyone else who cares about the sport will once again just have to deal with it.
