Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Ross Stripling details how MLB lockout negotiations fell apart
As you know by now, MLB Opening Day has been postponed and the first two series of the season have been canceled. But, on Monday night and into Tuesday morning, there was a lot of optimism that a deal would get done.
That didn’t come to pass and, according to Toronto Blue Jays pitcher and Blue Jays MLBPA player representative Ross Stripling, there’s a reason why things didn’t come together.
Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Ross Stripling said MLB lockout negotiations fell apart for two reasons
Ross Stripling claims that while negotiations were continuing through the night on Monday night/Tuesday morning, the owners were fighting with each other.
“The owners were torn in some regards,” said Stripling to SportsNet, which is owned by Rogers, which owns the Toronto Blue Jays. “There are some teams that really didn’t want the CBT (competitive bargaining tax, which is also known as the luxury tax) to go up. There are some owners that just weren’t on the same page, so we’re fighting that when they’re fighting each other. And we held steadfast on what we believed in. We think it’s reasonable.”
Stripling also said that the owners were trying to pull stuff over on the players in the fine print.
“It got to be like 12:30 (A.M. E.S.T. on Tuesday morning) and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before,” Stripling said. “They were trying to sneak things through us, it was like they think we’re dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something. It’s like that stupid football quote, they are who we thought they were.
“They did exactly what we thought they would do. They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed, and then they tried to sneak some s*** past us at that deadline and we were ready for it. We’ve been ready for five years (since the last Collective Bargaining Agreement was ratified). And then they tried to flip it on us today in PR, saying that we’ve changed our tone and tried to make it look like it was our fault. That never happened.”
If what Stripling said is taken at face value, it shows that all of the MLB owners are not in lockstep on the issue that is, perhaps, the biggest holdup of a deal: the Competitive Balance Tax.
It’s easy to see why the owners could have differing opinions on this as the small- and middle-market owners, like Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort (one of the chief negotiators for the owners), likely want the luxury tax to be lower so that their teams can be more competitive.
Teams that have larger payrolls, like New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner (who was also heavily involved in negotiations in Florida), will likely want the tax threshold to be higher. If the threshold is higher, the big market owners will be able to spend more money on their payroll and not have to be taxed or be taxed at a lower rate.
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If the owners are divided (they need 23 of the 30 owners, or 75 percent, to ratify a CBA), it could be a long time until things are resolved with the MLB lockout. And it very well could be that just eight people are grinding everything to a halt and ruining the integrity of baseball in 2022 and driving thousands of fans away, many forever.