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M.L.B.'southward Negotiations Hit the Route as Lockout Continues

Players gathered in a parking lot and meetings with the league were held at an empty stadium, offering new settings as both sides hammered abroad at familiar issues.

Credit... James Wagner/The New York Times

Feb. 21, 2022

JUPITER, Fla. — For over v hours here on Monday, several of the most important people in baseball gathered at Roger Dean Stadium, the jump grooming home of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Miami Marlins.

Spring grooming, which was supposed to brainstorm last week, hasn't started even so considering Major League Baseball game locked out the players on Dec. ii and a new labor bargain has still to exist reached. An on-time start to the 2022 regular flavor — scheduled for March 31 — hangs in the balance.

Sensing increased urgency, the sides agreed to gather in Florida this calendar week — perchance all calendar week should the talks prove productive — starting on Mon. Although Thousand.L.B. made incremental moves in the players' direction and many hurdles remain, the sides noted how helpful it was to talk confront to face up and agreed to meet again on Tuesday.

M.Fifty.B.'s latest proposal included relatively small-scale tweaks on ii matters: increasing the size of the bonus puddle for players who are not yet eligible for arbitration (from $15 million to $20 million for 30 players) and upping the number of amateur draft picks to be determined by a lottery (from the superlative three to the top four). The spousal relationship has proposed a bonus puddle of $115 meg for 150 players and a typhoon lottery for the height eight picks.

Among the other key areas in which there are sizable gaps: league minimum salaries, the luxury tax and its penalties, the revenue sharing system amid clubs and the number of players eligible for bacon mediation. Thou.50.B. has repeatedly insisted it will not touch the final two items, both of which the union has sought to alter or expand.

On Monday, the sides met for hours but caucused among themselves for longer. Non just were the bargaining teams for M.L.B. and the players' marriage present, but so were 10 players and two order owners. The owners were Dick Monfort, of the Colorado Rockies, and Ron Fowler, of the San Diego Padres. Monfort is the chair of M.Fifty.B.'s labor committee and Fowler is a former chair.

The players in attendance, all of whom concur leadership positions in the union: Max Scherzer, Francisco Lindor and Brandon Nimmo of the Mets; Jameson Taillon of the Yankees, Brent Suter of the Milwaukee Brewers, Whit Merrifield of the Kansas City Royals, Sonny Grey of the Cincinnati Reds, Taylor Rogers of the Minnesota Twins, Paul Goldschmidt of the Cardinals and Jason Castro of the Houston Astros. Other players joined the union's internal side sessions via Zoom.

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Credit... Ron Blum/Associated Press

Although several recent bargaining sessions were held in New York, where both M.L.B. and the union are headquartered, these talks were moved elsewhere. M.Fifty.B. accommodated the spousal relationship'south request to meet in Florida, where a big number of players live in the off-season.

A potential week of talks in New York would have made information technology harder for players to continue their workouts, hitting and throwing. And because the arrangements were finalized late terminal week and Mon was a holiday, a hotel couldn't be secured for the negotiating sessions. Then the sides turned to the coming together spaces at the unused Roger Dean Stadium.

Before the starting time meeting indoors at i p.one thousand. on Monday, union officials and players huddled in a stadium parking lot. Throughout the afternoon, as many as two dozen fans or autograph seekers stood outside the gates. 2 arrived with a sign that read, "We desire baseball!"

Overall, the union has been seeking a series of improvements to the economic structure of the sport, with a goal of helping younger players, improving competition among teams, curbing service fourth dimension manipulation and injecting more than spending. The league, though, believes that players have a fair organization without a hard bacon cap and sees information technology as a matter of wealth distribution — that star players are disproportionately commanding more others.

If the sides want to avert altering the regular-season schedule, this calendar week might be disquisitional.

On Friday, Thou.L.B. announced the showtime of jump grooming games, originally slated for Feb. 26, was postponed "until no earlier" than March 5. Before this month, Grand.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred said losing regular-season games would be "disastrous" for the industry.

He as well suggested that a minimum spring preparation length of four weeks — two weeks shorter than normal — made sense to avoid a spike in injuries, like the one before the pandemic-shortened 2020 regular season. As a issue, Thousand.L.B.'south stated preference for reaching a new collective bargaining understanding is Feb. 28.