Why MLB’s Labor Negotiations Have Gone Nowhere

Major League Baseball's lockout

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MORE THAN A month into Major League Baseball’s lockout, well aware that the league and players haven’t had a single substantive negotiating session since the work stoppage began and that spring training is fast approaching without an iota of progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement, a longtime baseball man very calmly said into his phone earlier this week, “What the f— are we doing?”

This man is not an alarmist. He has intimate knowledge of how the relationship between the league and the players’ union works — or rather, doesn’t work — and he has grown increasingly cynical about the parties reaching a deal anytime soon. He’s not yet ready to say baseball will lose games on account of its labor war, but he’s not ready to say baseball won’t lose games, either.

He sees it happening again — the same thing that happened in 2020, when an attempt to strike a deal for the season fell apart. Then and now, the players and league don’t negotiate so much as talk past each other.

For all the rhetoric about the animosity between the parties not mattering as much as the substance of the issues they’re discussing, they can’t even get to the substance of the issues because the relationship is so toxic. Read more.

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