Can you log negative miles on a treadmill? Can you travel backwards, add calories, while running in place?
That’s the sensation Major League Baseball created this week. What an absolutely terrible start to such a critical month.
The MLB Players Association announced Friday that it would not accept the owners’ request for an independent mediator via the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. The action reverts the sides to direct bargaining — unless the owners declare an impasse, a possible yet unlikely tactic at this juncture — and further cements the reality that spring training will not start on Feb. 16 as scheduled.
And really, the two sides’ struggles to generate any semblance of goodwill, to discover more than a sliver of common ground, should create bona fide anxiety right now, even with a few weeks’ room for error, about the regular season starting on March 31.
“Two months after implementing their lockout, and just two days after committing to Players that a counterproposal would be made, the owners refused to make a counter, and instead requested mediation,” the MLBPA said in a statement. “After consultation with our Executive Board, and taking into account a variety of factors, we have declined this request. The clearest path to a fair and timely agreement is to get back to the table. Players stand ready to negotiate.”
An MLB spokesman replied with this statement: “Our goal is to have players on the field and fans in the ballparks for Spring Training and Opening Day. With camps scheduled to open in less than two weeks, it is time to get immediate assistance from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to help us work through our differences and break the deadlock. It is clear the most productive path forward would be the involvement of an impartial third party to help bridge gaps and facilitate an agreement.
“It is hard to understand why a party that wants to make an agreement would reject mediation from the federal agency specifically tasked with resolving these disputes, including many successes in professional sports. MLB remains committed to offering solutions at the table and reaching a fair agreement for both sides.”
The players felt the owners’ request for mediation — which would have occurred only with both sides’ blessing and wouldn’t have been binding — served as a public-relations stunt, which is a fair interpretation. MLB’s offers to date have improved player life only at the margins, and media reports of mediators saving sports roll the eyes of those who actually did the work. Then again, it hardly ranks as the worst PR maneuver, and given how intensely the sides’ principals dislike and disrespect each other, a new personality would’ve needed to clear a pretty high (or low?) bar to somehow make things worse.
Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, who is a member of the PA’s Executive Subcommittee, tweeted on Friday: “We don’t need mediation because what we are offering to MLB is fair for both sides: We want a system where threshold and penalties don’t function as caps, allows younger players to realize more of their market value, makes service time manipulation a thing of the past, and eliminate tanking as a winning strategy.”
Those are all great asks, although if the players want to point to the uneven history of mediators — the deployment of one during MLB’s 1994-95 work stoppage proved a complete waste of time — they also should recognize that, historically, collective bargaining agreements change modestly, not dramatically, from one to the next. The players suffered a massive blowout loss in the 2016 CBA and they can’t make up the whole deficit in this one deal.
Maybe the two sides, having accomplished virtually nothing in such a critical week, will get back together in person on Monday. Perhaps the owners will huddle at their meetings in Orlando, Fla., next week before returning serve. Those sessions will conclude with a Rob Manfred news conference Thursday, at which point the commissioner will surely acknowledge that pitchers and catchers won’t report on time.
Something’s gotta give. After this week, the identity of that something or someone is murkier than ever.
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