Opinion | Rob Manfred swings and misses in defending the MLB lockout that never had to happen

This didn’t have to happen.

A furious Monday of back-and-forth, face-to-face bargaining over 15 hours led Major League Baseball to extend its deadline to reach a deal with its players to Tuesday afternoon, sparking optimism across the baseball landscape.

Tuesday, though, was a different story. The two parties went back to sending offers to each other, as opposed to spending serious time in the same room, and all the air that had been blown into the balloon the day before slowly leaked out.

Just before the new deadline of 5 p.m. ET, the players’ union turned down ownership’s last offer, and a few minutes later MLB commissioner Rob Manfred was announcing the cancellation of the first week of the regular season.

It will be the first time that MLB misses regular-season games for reasons other than a public health emergency since 1995. That year, the season was shortened to 144 games because, on March 31, Judge Sonia Sotomayor (now on the U.S. Supreme Court) ruled in favour of the players in the unfair labour practices complaint they filed against the owners, ending the strike that wiped out the 1994 post-season.

That strike happened because the owners wanted to unilaterally — and, as the judge ruled, illegally — impose a salary cap and the players wouldn’t stand for it.

This lockout happened for no good reason.

Manfred, who last month said that the cancellation of any regular-season games would be “disastrous,” tried to spin things in his announcement, but left open some big holes.

“We offered to raise the minimum salary to $700,000 (U.S.),” the commissioner said. That’s true. What’s also true is that figure would still be lower than the minimum salaries of the NHL, NBA and NFL.

“We offered to create an annual bonus pool of $30 million for the very best young players,” he said. The truth is that the players came up with the idea of the annual bonus pool, and asked that it be $115 million. The owners originally offered $10 million and came up to $30 million while the players dropped their ask to $85 million.

“The competitive balance tax is the only mechanism in the agreement that provides some semblance of a level playing field among clubs,” Manfred said. The last offer from the owners had a CBT threshold of $220 million for this season and each of the next two, up from $210 million for the 2021 season. In 2021, one team was over the threshold and only two more were even within $15 million of it. Eleven teams ran a payroll under $100 million.

“We are prepared to continue negotiations,” Manfred said. “We have been informed that the MLBPA is headed back to New York, meaning that no agreement is possible until Thursday.” The insinuation, of course, is that ownership is willing to hunker down for as long as it takes to get a deal done, but those darn players left town so there’s nothing they can do.

That was from Manfred’s prepared statement. Later, asked about the possibility of putting another deadline in place to get talks moving again, as they seemed to be on Monday, the answer on timing was a little different.

“Look, we’ve been through a really long nine or 10 days,” Manfred said. “We had a really late night last night and not a particularly productive day today. We need to regroup and figure out how we’re going to move the process forward.”

That doesn’t sound as though MLB will wait six weeks to make another offer, as they did after locking out the players on Dec. 2, but it doesn’t sound like they won’t, either.

From the beginning, the strategy of ownership has been to turn the public against the players, from suggesting that a lockout was necessary as a defensive mechanism, the best way to ensure the 2022 season started on time, to the optimistic spin on Monday’s long night of talks, a night in which the owners barely moved on items of major significance like the CBT threshold and the bonus pool, while also throwing in their desire for an international draft, which the players do not want.

Ultimately, none of this was necessary. With a new TV deal pumping tens of millions of fresh dollars into the coffers of each team, yet another new broadcast deal with Apple on the horizon and buckets of money to be made in newly legal gambling partnerships, the owners could easily give the players they larger slice of the pie they have earned without ever feeling the loss.

Ownership could lift the lockout at any time and tell the players to go back to work under the terms of the old deal while they continue to hammer out a new one. They won’t, of course, because the last agreement has a clause in it that says the competitive balance tax expires after the 2021 season and the owners need the players to save them from themselves. As they always do.

So instead, we get no baseball for a while.

If you’re a fan of posturing, though, you’re going to love these next few weeks.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness