MLB and the Players Association took another step closer to ending the lockout that has dragged on for more than three months when the two sides agreed to continue discussing the latest stumbling block — an international draft — until July 25, and have moved on to the rest of the collective bargaining agreement.
The next step on Thursday is for MLB to deliver a full CBA proposal to the MLBPA.
The international draft became a hotly contested issue on Wednesday, when the league told the players it needed to be resolved before they could resume talks on the remainder of the deal. The union fought back on this demand of agreeing to a draft for 2024 — in exchange for ending the qualifying offer — saying it hadn’t been on the table at other points in the negotiation.
Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who is on the executive subcommittee of the union, said on Twitter on Thursday — before the agreement was reached on the draft issue — that the two sides had not been negotiating the status of a draft.
The closed doors of the MLBPA offices in midtown Manhattan on March 8, 2022. Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post“The discussion of an international draft is about how to divide players,” Lindor wrote. “I’ve been in bargaining sessions for months. I was in Florida [for negotiations last month]. The PA kept us informed about MLB’s proposals, including when the league said the draft was worth nothing and some clubs didn’t even want it… The narrative being pushed also ignores a lot of history, including corruption from clubs. This issue is bigger than Latin players or amateur players. It’s about all players and about the future of the game. We need to get it right.”
The agreement on the issue came a day after commissioner Rob Manfred pushed back Opening Day again, this time to April 14, and cancelled two more series from the regular-season schedule.
It’s unclear if those games will be reinstated to the schedule, since the players want to be paid for a full 162 game slate.
Prior to the draft stalemate, the two sides had made considerable progress on the core economic issues that had created much of the friction during the lockout and gave some people cause for optimism that an end to the lockout was in sight.
