By Gabe Lacques | USA TODAY
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday announced he has canceled Opening Day and the first two series of the 2022 season, as the league’s lockout lurched into March with no new collective bargaining agreement – which could result in the first regular season games lost to a labor dispute since 1995.
The announcement comes 90 days after the previous CBA expired at midnight on Dec. 1, when MLB imposed a lockout of players and weeks of infrequent, haphazard and often brief and rancorous negotiations commenced.
With spring training games canceled and a semi-official MLB deadline of Feb. 28 looming to strike an agreement or cancel the March 31 openers, MLB and the MLB Players’ Association met for nine consecutive days in Jupiter, Florida, but the final flurry of negotations – covering 20 hours stretching from Monday morning into Tuesday afternoon – finally broke down.
The sequence began with MLB presenting an offer late Monday night that showed a modest increase in the luxury tax threshold – to $220 million for three years beginning in 2022, maxing out at $230 million in 2026. The players – locked in at $245 million in 2022 – countered with an offer of $238 million for the first year, increasing to $263 million in the final year of the five-year CBA. That prompted an MLB spokesman to tell reporters the players struck a “decidedly different tone” Tuesday.
When MLB countered that with what it called a “best” offer that made small concessions on a pool of money for pre-arbitration players and minimum salary – but no further movement on the luxury tax ceiling – there was little doubt the union would reject it.
