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Fans across the country waited on Twitter to hear Jeff Passan and Jon Heyman tweet "The MLB and MLBPA have agreed to terms to end the lockout", but it was Bob Nightengale who kept the crowd informed. As the clock struck midnight, unfortunately a deal was not made, but progress was happening.
Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association reportedly made progress toward an agreement for a new CBA that would end the owner-imposed lockout. The original deadline that the owners gave was midnight of March 1st, but that has now been pushed to 5pm, so that there was any canceling of regular-season games and postponing 2022 Opening Day.
After days of meetings, the MLB and MLBPA spent over 16 hours inside Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Florida. They called it last night at around 2:30 am EST. What has been agreed on is a 12 team expanded playoff format, which was a good start to begin pushing past the goal line. The league also offered to raise the minimum salary, pre-arbitration pool ($25M), and the luxury tax ($220M), while lowering its demands. In return, the players union dropped its proposal to expand the salary arbitration class and keep it at two years, with the top 22% of the two-year service class. A league spokesman stated, “We made progress, we want to exhaust every possibility to get a deal done.’’
Although progress was made, and a deal could happen tonight, the two sides are still apart on a few topics. Luxury Tax being a main component, where owners would like to keep the CBT threshold low and penalties high, while the players would like the threshold to be in the $230M range.
The MLBPA would like to raise the league's minimum salary to above $700K, where the MLB has said they would go as high as $675K, which is about 100,000 over the current state. The players weren't budging, saying the would be willing to miss a month's worth of games to get what they want.
The Nightengale in Shining Armor
It was a crazy scene last night where Twitter actually loved what Bob was tweeting. He went from one of the most wrong and controversial reporters, to a beloved hero. Quite the character arch to say the least. The USA Today MLB columnist went from this...
To this...
Let's hope that he can report the deal ASAP, and let's hope a deal gets done, because we all miss baseball.