MLB says talks ‘deadlocked’ after players tie pace-of-play rules changes to luxury-tax gains

If progress isn't made over the next few days, additional regular-season games could be canceled.

MLB negotiators -- led by deputy commissioner Dan Halem, front -- arrive Sunday at the New York office of the Players Association for collective bargaining talks.Read moreRon Blum / AP

Published March 6, 2022, 6:10 p.m. ET

How much are on-field changes worth to Major League Baseball?

The Players Association essentially posed that question Sunday, as collective bargaining talks resumed in New York five days after MLB nixed a week’s worth of regular-season games — and with additional games likely on the chopping block this week.

But while commissioner Rob Manfred said recently that pace-of-play initiatives are “sorely needed ... to improve the entertainment value of the game on the field,” the owners won’t bite on swapping additional economic gains to the players to get them, according to an MLB spokesperson, who described the talks as “deadlocked.”

In a roughly 90-minute meeting between MLB negotiators and union officials, the players proposed to allow Manfred to implement a pitch clock and larger bases (but not the automated strike zone, a.k.a., “robo-umps”) and ban defensive shifts after a 45-day heads-up beginning in the 2023 season, sources familiar with the discussion said. (Manfred had to give the players a year’s notice under terms of the expired agreement.)

The players’ pitch didn’t include changes to their most recent proposal on the luxury-tax thresholds and monetary penalties, or the minimum salary, or their bid for 12-team expanded playoffs, a source said. They did offer a $5 million decrease in the pre-arbitration bonus pool to $80 million this year, proportional to MLB’s recent $5 million increase to $30 million.

“We were hoping to see some movement in our direction to give us additional flexibility and get a deal done quickly,” MLB spokesperson Glen Caplin said in a statement. “The Players Association chose to come back to us with a proposal that was worse than Monday night and was not designed to move the process forward. On some issues, they even went backwards. Simply put, we are deadlocked. We will try to figure out how to respond but nothing in this proposal makes it easy.”

The Players Association disputed the characterization that its latest proposal moved the talks “backwards.”

It wasn’t immediately known when the sides will return to the bargaining table, although a source suggested it may be early in the week. Based on MLB’s timeline for a four-week spring training, another batch of games could be erased this week. More cancellations would put April 15, the celebration of the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut, in jeopardy.

Monday will mark the 96th day since the owners locked out the players and kick-started the second-longest work stoppage in MLB history.

The sides remain far apart on most core economic issues, especially the luxury tax. The owners didn’t budge on the tax thresholds in either of their last two proposals, holding at $220 million for the first three years of the agreement, $224 million in 2025, and $230 million in 2026. The players last week proposed a $238 million mark in 2022 followed by $244 million, $250 million, $256 million, and $263 million.

Some players and union officials were surprised when MLB reintroduced the pitch clock and other on-field changes into the bargaining talks last week in Jupiter, Fla. Upon enforcing the owners’ lockout in December, Manfred said MLB planned to table discussion of those issues until after the CBA was settled because the economics were going to be contentious enough. In other words, MLB wanted to prevent the players from using pace-of-play changes as bargaining chips.

With the owners unwilling to move on the luxury tax, the players hoped negotiations on rules changes could be a breakthrough in the negotiations.

“For months, we have told the league that players are more than willing to talk about the types of things that you, the league, think that we should be talking about with regard to on-field,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said last week. “That dialogue has been open and available as a part of the overarching conversation for a long time. The fact that it manifested itself in the last 72 hours is strange.”

In general, players have seemed more resistant to on-field change than the commissioner, if not the owners that he represents. Last week, Clark talked of “timers on the field in a game that is timeless.” But both sides concede that baseball must make changes that create more action. It isn’t so much that the average length of a game last season was 3 hours, 10 minutes. It’s that within those games, an average of nearly four minutes went by between balls put in play.

Expanded playoffs didn’t come up Sunday, according to a source. The sides agreed last week to a framework for a 12-team format. The owners prefer a 14-team arrangement, which would bring in $100 million from ESPN.

Could the players revisit the 14-team idea as a way of getting the owners to move on the luxury tax? It’s possible, although players expressed concern last week that allowing nearly half the teams into the postseason would actually drive down the owners’ spending.

New York Mets co-ace Max Scherzer suggested that creative changes to a 14-team format, including a “ghost win” provision that would give division winners an automatic 1-0 advantage in a best-of-five first-round series, may mitigate the competitive concerns.

“With our proposals, we spent a lot of time debating the merits of various playoff formats,” said reliever Andrew Miller, a leader in the players union. “But we’re not going to do anything that sacrifices competition in the season. Anything that points to mediocrity, that’s the antithesis of our game and what we’re about as players.”