Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have agreed to move this year’s deadline for teams to tender contracts to arbitration-eligible players up from December 2 to November 30 at 8:00 pm EST, according to reports from Robert Murray of FanSided and Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic (Twitter links).
The decision moves the tender deadline before the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement, which is scheduled to happen at 11:59 pm EST on December 1. If a new agreement is not reached within the next eight days, it’s generally expected that the league would institute a lockout and subsequent transactions freeze. The MLBPA recently put together a 36-page document outlining the potential parameters of a lockout for players and their representatives, according to a report from Evan Drellich and Rosenthal.
Leaving the tender deadline on December 2 would’ve left arbitration-eligible players in a state of limbo over the course of a potential transactions freeze. Many could’ve been left with uncertainty about whether their current clubs intended to bring them back next season while awaiting a bargaining process that could take weeks or months to resolve.
Against that backdrop, the final few hours of the current CBA could present a hectic time for teams eager to finalize moves before the potential transactions freeze. Certain players, meanwhile, might feel pressure to sign contracts for 2022 rather than risk having to linger in free agency over the course of a lockout and face a potential rushed free agent period were CBA negotiations to linger near or into next year’s Spring Training. By forcing teams to make the final call on their arbitration-eligible players early, some non-tendered options could look to catch on with a new club on December 1 and avoid that uncertainty altogether.
So it begins
The owners got Mega
Billions off of their television contracts. And the owner still cry poverty. Nobody watches television to see owners play baseball.
Please provide a link where the owners are crying poverty. Fact is no one is watching players play baseball without the owners either as MLB wouldn’t exist. It’s not like the players aren’t getting paid either. It’s a labor negotiation, both sides need to come to a common sense agreement.
mlb exists because dumb congress gave the owners monopoly protection. other/new pro baseball leagues would run million times better than current mlb regime were it not for the protection,
@Buddy MLB owners have been crying about loosing billions like since ST of 2020. Fangraphs broke down the 4billion loss claim last year along with the other reported revenues. Just Ask Jeeves kid. Fact is, until the owners open up books nobody truly knows the losse. This is done on purpose by the owners for CBA negotiations amoung other things as it’s thier money in thier eyes…..
blogs.fangraphs.com/parsing-mlbs-claim-of-a-4-bill…
We’ll, it kinda is their money, so…. And them crying poor is posturing in public, just like anyone else would do.
Eh, they say that all the time mlb goes on strike or a lockout. “I’m going to start a new league” never comes to frutrition. Soccer has several leagues. Nobody watches them. Who won the last ncaa basketball final four? More people know that than who won the last college world series.
Yes, Al, please provide that link. I imagine you are a union guy that hates ownership.
Nonsense.
When they did in the old days here and there, break away, sometimes the players formed their own leagues. Usually the old team owners would lure them back, or use underhanded tactics to muck up the offshoot leagues.
How’s that boot taste?
Actually, the Supreme Court gave MLB the anti- trust exemption in a ruling where they held that baseball was not a business. Congress could pass legislation to correct that at any time, but have failed to do so.
Congress struck down the anti- trust protection in terms of labor laws in the Curt Flood act of 1998, but the provisions regarding franchise movement remain.
There would be no MLB without the owners. There would be no 350 million dollar players contracts without the owners. If I were any kind of a business owner I would be trying to maximize sales and profits. It is the American way. I don’t care where you work, if the business is not profitable you don’t have a job.
Kinda dumb saying nobody watches TV to see the owners. Frankly, I don’t want to watch a bunch of millionaires play baseball either. Salaries should be permanently rolled back to sane levels. Top salary $10 million. Then maybe owners can lower prices of tickets, , concessions and beer to sane levels. $600 for a family of 4 to see one game is absolutely ridiculous.
So owners should get like 60-70% of the total revenue pie?
watch aa games, stitch.
Sooo…. You think the owners would lower ticket prices even if there were buyers willing to pay more??
I got some bad news about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny for ya bud.
Thats because owners don’t want you at the game. They want the people who treat it as an event and spend money on the concessions and could care less who wins or loses. They know the die hard will be watching home regardless therefore raising the ratings and the owners making more off the tv contracts.
Ticket and concession prices are determined by supply and demand, not cost. If salaries were slashed and the quality of play remained the same, there would be little or no reduction in prices teams charge. Owners would be happy to pocket the extra money.
I dunno Al…. who wouldn’t like to see Steinbrenner pitching to Crane? I wonder how that’d turn out.
The concept could be fun. Stick owners, pbos gms, agms, in the lineup on a mandatory basis. Fill out the teams with misc interns.
I’d watch some.
Way to ruin an offseason.. Millionaires fighting about cents.
They’re fighting over massive sums of money. Absolutely nobody should be surprised.
Only thing I’m surprised about is that given what’s at stake they leave it to the last minute.
Billionaires who serve no real specific purpose siphoning money off players who represent both the laborer AND the product in their industry. They’ll run a full court press to convince you it’s just rich people squabbling, to avoid admitting it’s actually ultra-rich people nickel and diming.
What’s the average net profit per team?
Seriously? I don’t know.
owners are not letting it out except the braves. you can google that.
Start your own baseball league, Candy, and you can be as generous with the players as you’d like to be.
Raise a few hundred million to build a stadium, might need a couple hundred million more as seed capital to pay the players until you attract enough fans, sell TV rights, and sell enough merch. You’ll need at least 9 others to do the same thing so you can have a league.
You do have a real purpose besides insulting others, don’t you?
Well if German football (soccer) has taught us anything, it’s that it isn’t that hard to do. First, have the season ticket holders have a majority share on the board. Then have cities receive income from the stadiums that they help fund, as well as a slice of the ownership of the team.
Then instead of an owner, you have a chairman, whose job it is to insure a quality product is put on the pitch, or else they get fired.
See, you don’t need actual billionaire owners to run a team for profit.
candy cannot start a new baseball league because there is a monopoly protection for mlb.
How does the shoe polish taste down there on ownership boot?
Owners aren’t “generous” or “not generous” with players. They owe everything to them. A ticket holder and player owned model could survive and thrive just fine. A league without players could not. I’m so f-ing sick of this billionaire sycophantic worship. They’re glorified middle men, turning teams into their ATMs by siphoning off money that should be going toward the product. And they’re so powerful, that they can literally afford massive media apparatuses to push their propaganda to convince clowns like you of their side, and spend billions doing so, and know they’ll STILL be profitable.
I have no patience for your ilk. It’s pathetic beyond words. Bye, skippy.
Can’t do that half the country will be up in arms
That there is socialism
Green Bay Packers
Candymaldonado. The players can’t do it or it would have already been done. You need massive amounts of money to start and run a team these days. I would like if they opened their books too but it is not required.
They can’t because there’s a monopoly at this point, because the rich protect their own. Not because the model wouldn’t survive.
Found the commie
It’s a two way road. Simply blaming the owners and not the also multimillionaires that are playing/PA isn’t the answer. Both sides have good and bad arguments, the problem is neither are willing to compromise and rather bicker.
See you Robert Gsellman or so I hope.
I think his time in Flushing is done. I could see Colorado taking a chance on him.
Why doesn’t dope Manfred and dope Clark agree to a one year extension of the current agreement and hash out everything over the next year so there’s no lockout or strike at all?
I mean.. didn’t they just have 5 years to do that?
really now…
One could argue Covid screwed up initial negotiations that would normally take place.
That’s fair but I would argue that COVID negotiations gave them a chance to get started on the CBA, even if that meant extending the current one a year given the COVID effect. The reality of it is something completely different, both sides sat down at the table and did nothing more then blow a popcorn fart and waste time.
covid negotiations made them far apart and players angrier than ever!
@Vizionaire – We are all aware of that as it was the subtext of what I was saying.
Jesus. Figure it out!!
They’ve had a long a$$ time to do this. Come December 2 they should have it hammered out.
There’s absolutely no reason to have a lock out ruining the off-season. The last year and a half has sucked bad enough as it is. Get your shot together guys.
Ok teams know who they want to keep anyways no big deal
Initially interpreted the headline as the MLB and MLBPA agreeing to a soft, gentle, and affectionate deadline.
No one, and I mean no one, wants see a lockout. It’s bad for everyone involved. Get your stuff together and let’s have a bad mf offseason.
I’d much rather have a lockout than no CBA. The alternative is players striking during the season and that 100 times worse than a lockout.
george w.. bush would be million times a better commissioner than manfraud!
Dubya
Dude, you and I BOTH would be better than this joke of a commish!
Did you come on here and compliment Manfred on how he virtually stopped foreign substances on baseballs in a matter of hours? Did you rip the players Union for fighting him? I didn’t think so.
The only reason so many pitchers were using the foreign substance in the first place was because of the new balls he implemented. The seems are lower and the leather is slicker. Wait til you see all the injuries now because they can’t use the sticky stuff. You though TJ was rampant before wait and see how many careers get cut short from shoulder injuries now.
MLB bought the baseball manufacturer and started messing with the baseballs. If i set my house on fire, then put it out all while rescuing my pet, am i a hero?
Not sure why this is gotten this far, MLB labour relations have been the envy of most leagues, and now that Covid involved, really surprising that they wouldn’t at the very least just postpone everything for a year, why risk frustrating and alienating fans alienating fans
Buzzer – There are no risks of alienating fans. No matter what transpires, the fans will be back at whatever time an agreement is made. The fans have proven this over the years. MLB took a slight hit after 1994, but guess what? The fans came crawling back and will do so again. It took me five years, but I eventually came back. All baseball fans are slaves to grown men playing a little boys game.
I just hope the players don’t use that worn out excuse that they are doing this for the fans. That “stuff” got painfully and extremely old real fast every time they’ve used it. They never do anything for the fans. Owners alike.
So sit back and listen to wealthy people (on both sides) cry about money. Sit back and not sweat about a lockout. You will be back immediately after the dust settles, because you are a loyal fan.
With a 94 strike you had the Blue Jays coming off of back to back championships poised to push for a third World Series appearance with an amazing Montreal expos team
Canadian baseball fans were not so quick to come back
In fairness the dismantling of the Expos immediately after the strike and the Blue Jays descent into mediocrity for over a decade probably had far more to do with the erosion of the Canadian fanbase.
But they did come back…
The expos had their best year that year as well. They were poised to have an all Canadian WS.
It’s not 1994.
Kids have never had so much choice for entertainment, video games, streaming, esports, social media etc all at their finger tips and available to them whenever, wherever.
Baseball is already struggling to hit the next wave of season ticket holders and fans, a strike wouldn’t alienate existing fans but it’s going to be detrimental to acquiring new fans
Dusty – I agree, but because of the timing of that particular strike, baseball fans were forced to look elsewhere for entertainment and easily discovered something better. I was one of them. That is why I mentioned it. Like I said, I did come back. However, the passion had died and my following has been declining ever since.
Baseball will eventually kill itself.
I’m in the same boat as you JerryBird. I came back slowly after the strike. Got dismayed again with the steroid saga, came back slower and less enthused. Then the cheating scandal(s) dropped the enthusiasm to the lowest it’s been in my 5 decades of being a fan. A strike will knock me back again. But I’m sure I’m come crawling back eventually. Just sucks the sport continues to zap the fan base.
Clemens won 2 Cy Young’s!
Carlos Delgado!
Early Roy Halladay!
People paid attention, it was always the first sport on my radar, but it wasn’t just fringe fans that were lost, It took a long time to build the fan base back
I here ya, Cursed Rangers. We appear to be kindred spirits. Another strike and this old boy will likely be done. The only thing I will do is sit here on MLB Trade Rumors and complain, much like I do now.
Do people remember in 2011 both the NFL and NBA had lockouts? The NFL fortunately didn’t cost regular season or playoff games (I believe the HOF game was cancelled), but the NBA had a 161-day lockout which began on July 1, 2011 and ended on December 8, 2011. It delayed the start of the 2011–12 regular season from November to December, and it reduced the regular season from 82 to 66 games.
The downstream affects were tremendous and I honestly don’t think the league has fully recovered (marketing, city relations, etc.) even 10 years later.
Sucks for everybody else… Braves are champions forever!
But if there are no games, that flag won’t fly ever.
or nobody there to see.
Just lucky
And here. We. Go.
They actually agreed on something!!! Still totally expecting a lockout, but it’s nice to know that agreement is actually possible.
Completely agree with you, @hyrax. This agreement shows a willingness to work together and gives rabid fans, like we have on here, some idea of the direction their respective clubs are heading. I’m thankful that we won’t have to wait indefinitely to see which guys we’ll be pulling for this coming season.
I cannot afford to pay for cable and don’t live near a major league city. There is no free tv and games are not on local radio. I have not watched a mlb baseball game in at least 10 years. I look at box scores and read articles. Mlb Baseball is not accessible to me. Mlb does not care.
There is this cool thing called the internet. I think Al Gore invented it, if you go to mlb.com you can watch a free game of the day.
I cannot afford internet. I have a limited phone data plan. I am old, disabled and broke. Internet and pay tv is a luxury for the rich. Local fox does not show weekends games
Local fox does not show games except Allstar and World Series. I live in a baseball desert
McDonald’s has free wifi.
Internet is a luxury for the rich? That’s rich.
Nowadays internet is essentially considered an essential service. For seniors and low-income persons it’s subsidized. Just need to do a bit of research.
No access to do the research? Go to your public library where you can use a computer and internet for free.
Also, too poor to afford the internet and yet your ready articles and posting here?
Got to troll better. This is amateurish.
MLB.com has a free game streaming online every day. There’s also a game streaming on Youtube every week. Fox also occasionally broadcasts games, including the World Series, on broadcast tv, no cable required. For $120, you can watch all the games through MLB.TV. Teams also generally have their radio streaming online for free, I know the Angels do.
Where do you live in Siberia ???
@bucsfan0004.. no kidding hey! Play ball! Cmon! Figure this shut out!
@bucsfan0004.. no kidding hey! Play ball!
So sick of this BS. Play ball!
See, this just makes me beg the question: why wasn’t the CBA deadline after the non-tender deadline to begin with? That would seem to have been an easy thing for them to set up ahead of time, just to be safe, and would have saved them the trouble of having to make adjustments on the fly now.
“Major League Baseball and the MLB players association have agreed…”
It’s so rare and refreshing to read those words.
The owners want to break the union and will not agree to a new CBA until they gain more control over player salaries and movement. They’re not going to play fair and will be willing to sacrifice the season next year as a short term loss in order for them to win long term. Hope I’m wrong but get ready for a long drawn out fight here!
The players play fair? Since when?
From what I have read the owners are not bargaining in good faith but they still should lock it down until an agreement is reached. If the players strike during the season, the results will be similar to 81 and/or 1994. That can’t happen again.
Get it done.
From what I’ve read the mlbpa isn’t doing much bargaining at all.
No legit proposals, just a couple barren demand lists. No back andnforth, no concessions on anything, no counter proposals.
The players have made two proposals. One in May and one in October.
The owners made one proposal in August that was laughable. Complete non starter.
We don’t know all of what is in the offers, but we know the subjects and the parameters.
The players want higher minimum wage, which is inevitable and is even in the owners’ proposal.
Earlier arbitration eligibility
End service time manipulation
Alter the calculation of service time for purposes of free agency
Increase the luxury tax thresholds along with increasing revenues
Stop teams from tanking. Add a salary floor and changes to the draft.
All these are things they’ve done in the past.
Owners want expanded playoffs and an international draft. They can get both once they give the players enough in return.
NO SPORT has had a player strike since 1994. All work stoppages have been due to lockouts.
Halofan is correct that they will not allow players to strike during the season, depriving the owners of their big revenue in the playoffs.
But I don’t agree that it’s good to lock the players out and freeze transactions without having made a single serious proposal that brings us closer to a new agreement.
Alot of whining and not enough cheese on these post
While everyone is entitled to make as much $ as possible, the players salaries are spiraling out of control. As far as a lockout or strike, with the ridiculous amounts of $ players make, will they be willing to lose it or will they cave in?
“spiraling out of control?” Player salaries have stagnated the last few years. If the players make less, owners won’t reduce prices, they’ll pocket more money.
If the solution is for the players to make less and the owners to keep more that’s not going to work.
If there is a plan to make the game more accessible across the board, (lowering ticket prices, merchandise, drinks etc) and both the owners and players take a hair cut, that’s something that would make a lot of sense. Sadly it’s not going to happen, no matter who wins, the fans will lose
YES!!!!!
Fans shouldn’t have to pay half of what they pay going to a football game when there are ten times more home games for them to make money.
In 2021, it cost $253 for a group of 4 to attend a baseball game (81 home games) vs. $553 per football game (8 home games).
Let’s say average attendance per game of both sports is 20,000 (5,000 groups paying the respective amount)
Baseball:
$253 x 5,000 = $1..265 million
$1.265 million x 81 = $102.465 million
Football
$553 x 5,000 = $2.765 million
$2.765 million x 8 = $22..12 million
That’s an $80 million dollar difference! And they wonder why people are losing interest in the MLB!
The average attendance for an NFL game is not 20k, it’s more like 60k-65k.
And owners in both sports will pay what the market will bear. Supply and demand.
And mlb teams have more costs to run and overhead than NFL teams.
There is so much competition for attention and dollars now a days. Baseball needs to fight harder than ever to get new fans and keep them.
A lock out would really hurt the growth of the game, way worse than 1994. Wouldn’t kill the sport, but if both sides aren’t careful, the pie they are fighting over could get much smaller
These replies. Sheesh.
At this point it’s just petty.
Not only is it rich people fighting other rich people for money, but there’s so much vitriol between the two sides that it more closely resembles a high school clique war than business negotiations. I think the bottom line is:
– Clark and Manfred both need to go, start fresh with a new pair of leaders as this current pair has taken baseball to hell and made it arduous to continue to be a fan of it.
– The league has to stop catering to the “purists” who are mainly north of 60 years old and have been out of touch with reality since the 80’s (not suggesting all older people are out of touch, just a loud group of baseball purists who are incapable of adapting)
– Owners need to stop being so involved and let the baseball operations people do what they pay them to do because, newsflash, you made your money outside of baseball and know less about the sport itself than some of the commenters on this website, Stop making the people of cities like Pittsburgh, Colorado, Philly and Cleveland suffer year in and year out because you have a big ego.
– Then simple rule changes: Just my ideas (I’m not negotiating the CBA and really don’t care if you hate these), add a salary cap and floor, international draft, universal DH’s, allow ties after 11 and make the service clock start when added to the 40-man roster to prevent clock manipulation and allow players to become free agents earlier.
As a “purist”, any suggestion of ties is a no go. The number of games that go past 11 innings it’s been a skill. it’s not worth changing the game for a few people going to get bored to easily. If you don’t like the game go away. and by the way I don’t really care whether you like my opinion or not.
Baseball games should never end in a tie
Have zero confidence in Manfred after the way he let the Astros steal a word championship in exchange for a few draft picks. The fact that he didn’t punish the players involved demonstrates that he’ll be a pushover for the Player’s Association. It’s rather disappointing that the players and the owners simply don’t trust each other enough to get a deal done. The owners could give the players the moon and the players would reject it because they’d be suspicious of what the owners had up their sleeves. Although I am not overly supportive of the owners, I will say that the players just wear me out sometimes acting like a bunch of spoiled brats. C’mon and play ball!
Can we move on past the narrative that blames MLB for not punishing players for the trash can scandal?
Players did not break any rules. Team management broke rules that came in the form of a memo from the commissioner to owners and GM’s. There was no mechanism for penalizing players for receiving signals. The people who could be penalized were.
The players have made two proposals in this round of talks. The owners have only proposed abolishing the arbitration system and delaying free agency for some of the game’s elite players. They have yet to make a serious offer.
Prepping for sports dystopia.
Sigh.
Just can’t wait for the endless drama between millionaires and billionaires none of whom are interested in dealing in good faith with each other, the media, or the fans. The only way to deal with the next weeks and months is to assume that every one of them, owners and players alike, are looking only to enlarge their pieces of the pie and that every word uttered by every one of them is dishonest and disingenuous as a matter of course.
Now cue indignant responses from people who think one side or the other should be given the benefit of the doubt. Um… no. Never.
***NOTE: Despite my contempt for both the owners and the players as institutional groups, I love this sport and whenever they play again, be it a week late, a month late, a year late or right on time, I’ll be watching. No lockout of any length will diminish my enthusiasm for the sport.
I completely agree with this sentiment. We don’t see this in the NBA because both sides work together. Is that to say every owner and player is without their flaws, of course not. For every Chris Paul you get a Patrick Beverly and for every Mark Cuban you get a Josh Harris, but they make it work and that’s the reason that the NBA is one of, if not the fastest growing sports league in the world.
Cooperation is so important!
No the NBA has only 15 ppl per team that needs to be paid and it’s played at a time of the year where fans are for the most part coupes up in the house due to weather in most parts of the country so people watch more games .
Baseball is played in a time of year where fans have more options to draw them away from watching and they have thousands of players that get paid across multiple levels
It’s apples and oranges
The NBA has the inmates running the asylum with every year a new super team gets built and the days off the players take
Explain to me how getting paid $450,000 a game is getting out of hand
*Insert* “Oh boy, here we go” gif here. (Jim Carrey, Me Myself and Irene)
I think any new CBA should have a clause that doesn’t allow Angel Hernandez to be an umpire anymore. We all agreed?
Implement the DH in the NL, so pitchers can sit and rest !!!! More business for DH tule of hitters as well !
Mighty nice of the owners to give players 24 hours to find a new team after their old teams let them go because they don’t want to pay them what they could get in arbitration.
Perfect scenario for owners. “You’ve been released. You’re unemployed. Here, take it or leave it, you have 24 hours”.
Meanwhile, the owners have yet to make a serious proposal to the players to avoid a work stoppage.
This is not a “both sides are to blame” situation. At least not yet.
there is always barca futbol to watch!
Why don’t they just go to binding arbitration and both sides give and take?
Wise call to move up the tender deadline. Unfortunately, both sides appear to be embracing an impending lockout.
This is all Biden’s fault.
I hope both sides can reach a new 10-year CBA through 2031.