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As midnight hit Thursday morning, a Major League Baseball owners’ lockout of the players became a reality.
As Max Scherzer said Wednesday afternoon, during a Zoom news conference to announce his three-year, $130 million agreement with the Mets: “The lockout seems like that’s a very likely scenario, let’s just say that.”
The lockout, timed with the expiration of the collective bargaining agreement that governed the sport for the five prior seasons, will institute a freeze on all transactions involving players on 40-man rosters: no free-agent signings, no trades. That won’t preclude the Mets and the A’s from filling their managerial openings or the Yankees from completing their renovation of Aaron Boone’s coaching staff. Nor will it stop such festivities as the Baseball Hall of Fame holding its annual elections and announcing those elections’ results. And for real diehards, the minor league portion of the Rule 5 draft, set to take place at next week’s Winter Meetings (which are expected to be canceled), will still occur.
Scherzer, a member of the MLB Players Association’s executive subcommittee, spoke from the Dallas area — where a collection of players, owners and labor attorneys from the respective camps attempted to find more common ground. Though the formal end of the Basic Agreement doesn’t mandate a lockout, the owners clearly regarded that as their optimal strategy to turn up the heat on the players in the interest of signing a deal in time to start spring training (or if that doesn’t occur, the regular season) as scheduled.
The two sides continued to exchange proposals, though they are not close on any of the core economic issues.
“When you look at the 2016 CBA … and how that has worked over the past five years, as players, we see major problems with it,” Scherzer said. “Specifically, first and foremost, we see a competition problem in how teams are behaving because of certain rules that are within that. Adjustments have to be made because of that in order to bring up the competition.
“As players, that’s absolutely critical to us to have a highly competitive league. When we don’t have that, we have issues.”
Scherzer’s agent Scott Boras has repeatedly criticized the draft-pool concept (actually born in the 2011 CBA) by which the worse a team finishes in the standings, the higher a budget — as well as the better the picks — it receives in the subsequent draft. However high-minded the players might be in terms of presenting a better product to their customers, of course, they also would benefit from a more competitive league by having more clubs spend money in the interest of contending for a playoff spot.
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