Major League Baseball (MLB) locked out its players early on Thursday morning, after months of deadlocked talks with the MLB Players Association (MLBPA) failed to make progress toward a new labor contract.
It marked baseball's first work stoppage since the 1994-95 players' strike and it's MLB's ninth work stoppage in its history.
If the lockout drags on for long enough, it could imperil the 2022 season. The two parties reportedly disagreed on free agency, revenue sharing and luxury tax thresholds for clubs. The two sides can still negotiate these terms during a lockout, but teams can't sign players to new contracts.
The collective bargaining agreement (CBA), a negotiated accord that governs most aspects of the working relationship between players and team owners, expired on Thursday and a new CBA wasn't agreed on.
In a statement on Thursday, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred expressed his "disappointment" with the lockout, but said he believes it was "the best mechanism to protect the 2022 season".
Addressed to MLB fans, the letter from Manfred said: "Despite the league's best efforts to make a deal with the Players Association, we were unable to extend our 26-year-long history of labor peace and come to an agreement with the MLBPA before the current CBA expired. Therefore, we have been forced to commence a lockout of Major League players, effective at 12:01am ET on December 2."
"We hope that the lockout will jumpstart the negotiations and get us to an agreement that will allow the season to start on time. This defensive lockout was necessary because the Players Association's vision for Major League Baseball would threaten the ability of most teams to be competitive. It's simply not a viable option. From the beginning, the MLBPA has been unwilling to move from their starting position, compromise, or collaborate on solutions."
The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) called the shutdown "a dramatic measure."
"It is not required by law or for any other reason. It was the owners' choice, plain and simple, specifically calculated to pressure Players into relinquishing rights and benefits, and abandoning good faith bargaining proposals that will benefit not just Players but the game and industry as a whole," it said in a statement.
"These tactics are not new. We have been here before, and Players have risen to the occasion time and again – guided by a solidarity that has been forged over generations. We will do so again here."
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The deadlock between the two parties is over a number of factors, mainly concerning how the league's revenues will be divided up. The players want to address their decreasing share, while the owners want to avoid that.
One of the major sticking points for the players is to fight to lower the threshold for free agency – when a player has played out their contact or is no longer under contract with a team for some other reason. There have been several players over the years who have found it hard to transfer between sides because teams increasingly prefer cost and team-controlled players – who are not legible for salary arbitration or free agency. At the moment, players with six full years of major league service are eligible for free agency, but players want to lower that threshold.
There have also been disagreements over when and how much young players get paid, due to a salary system that is driven by tenure instead of capability. The MLBPA is trying to fight for a significant increase in the minimum salary for younger players, who are currently entitled to no more than the major league minimum until they have served in MLB for three years.
For, example AL MVP finalist Vladimir Guerrero Jr. made just $605,400 this season, only $30,000 more than the minimum salary and just 15 percent of what the average player makes, according to Bloomberg. The Players Association would argue that he was underpaid by tens of millions of dollars.
Guaranteed Contracts
In the letter, Manfred pointed out that baseball players already have no salary cap and aren't subjected to a maximum length or dollar amount on contracts. He added that MLB has guaranteed contracts that run 10 or more years, and in excess of $300 million and the league hadn't "proposed anything that would change these fundamentals."
"While we have heard repeatedly that free agency is 'broken' – in the month of November $1.7 billion was committed to free agents, smashing the prior record by nearly 4x. By the end of the offseason, Clubs will have committed more money to players than in any offseason in MLB history," he said.
Manfred also said the league offered to establish a minimum payroll for all clubs to meet for the first time in baseball history and allowed them to make the majority of players reach free agency earlier through an age-based system that would eliminate any claims of service time manipulation. He said the league also offered to increase compensation for all young players, including increases in the minimum salary.
He accused the Players Association of coming to the bargaining table with "a strategy of confrontation over compromise."
He said 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. The commissioner said that those terms would make the game less competitive.
He said: "Delaying this process further would only put Spring Training, Opening Day, and the rest of the season further at risk – and we cannot allow an expired agreement to again cause an in-season strike and a missed World Series, like we experienced in 1994. We all owe you, our fans, better than that."
