Don't hold your breath or anything, but it sure feels like the MLB lockout is nearing an end. The league and the Players Association are close on the core economic issues and the two sides reportedly reached an agreement on the international draft Thursday morning, one of the final sticking points in a new CBA.
The players have agreed to the potential implementation of an international draft in 2024, in exchange for the potential elimination of the qualifying offer in free agency, per Jeff Passan.
MLB insider Jon Morosi said Thursday on the Stoney & Jansen Show that he's hopeful for a deal by the end of the week.
"I think they'll go back today and say, 'Listen, economically we’re pretty darn close. Let’s wrap up the economic stuff, let’s put a mechanism in the CBA to review the international draft going forward and then we’re on our path to a deal.' If we hold out hope for the next 24 to 48 hours, by the end of the week I really believe we could have a deal."
Morosi expects the next CBA to be five years in length, with the built-in possibility of reopening negotiations after three years. Why?
"Baseball wants to expand," he said.
Not immediately. Not necessarily in the next couple years. But MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred have long been in favor of expanding from 30 teams to 32, with Manfred going so far as to name new potential markets in 2018 like Las Vegas, Nashville and Montreal. Morosi thinks it's on the "mid- to long-term horizon."
"When you think about what expansion means, it means more jobs for the union and it means the expansion buy-in fee. If it’s $2 billion a franchise, which is not out of the realm of possibility given where franchise values are, and you add two franchises and divide that buy-in by the 30 teams, that’s a lot of money for every owner," Morosi said. "So I think that’s coming."
And the players, he said, might want to have the option of re-negotiating "some aspects of the deal once expansion is more of a present possibility."
"It's a long way of saying, there’s actually a lot of good stuff happening in the game," said Morosi. "We’ve got probably more great young stars than ever before. We just gotta play. That’s the key thing. Now we just gotta get the game back on the field.