Saturday late p.m. lockout update: Everything is bad

The players and owners met for a second session this afternoon, and things did not go well.

In fact, from the reports from the baseball writers on Twitter, things went very poorly.

The players reduced the amount of players who would be eligible for Super Two arbitration status to 35%, a significant drop, and dropped their revenue sharing demands, it was reported. They also moved slightly on the Collective Balance Tax, reducing the line where the tax would start being paid by $2 million per year.

Per the folks on Twitter who are out there and talking to people, the owners took that offer as a slap in the face. Apparently, the owners view was that Super Two eligibility was not going to change, period, so the union didn’t actually make any concession there, and revenue sharing wasn’t going to change, so that also wasn’t a concession. So the owners felt like, despite the union making what the union, not unreasonably, believes to be significant concessions, those concessions were irrelevant and the players basically didn’t move.

So the owners came back and agreed to raise the CBT threshold by $1 million in one year, and slightly reduce their proposed penalties for exceeding the tax, even though those penalties are still significantly more than what they are now, with no other real changes from where they were previously.

At this point, it appears that the owners are willing to delay the season and cancel games in order to try to keep the CBT threshold for the next five years at essentially the same level it was in 2021, despite significant growth in revenues, and despite revenues growing at a much greater rate than the CBT has risen since it was first implement — and, while keeping the threshold static, increasing the penalty for going past it.

Things don’t look promising right now.