MLB owners and the MLBPA are going to try it again today

Last Saturday was the day of the last meeting between MLB owners and the MLB Players Association to try to make a deal so that the 2022 baseball season could get under way. It did not go well; it lasted less than an hour and not much happened.

Now, the parties will meet again later today:

Well, that’s good. Players have taken several days to get this proposal together. Obviously, we don’t yet know what’s in it. Whether it will move the needle with owners is yet to be known, but given some of the things we’ve heard recently I’m skeptical that it will.

What all this has done is put 2022 Spring Training and the regular season in some kind of weird limbo. It’s obviously clear to everyone that Spring Training won’t start on time; pitchers and catchers should have reported already and position player report dates were originally by the end of this week, with MLB spring games scheduled to begin nine days from now. That’s not going to happen — but no official announcement of a delay or postponement has been made. Nothing, not even a week after Rob Manfred had a news conference which supposedly was going to announce a delay. This is disrespectful to the very people MLB needs the most to be nice to — its customers, baseball fans. There are people with tickets and travel plans for these games and they’ve been told nothing. On some related topics, this Jeff Passan tweet sums some important things up well:

Passan is right about his last point there (all of his points in that tweet, in fact), but that’s exactly why baseball moguls ought to treat fans better. Without us, there’s no “big-money operation” at all.

I hope for better later today, but I have a feeling this is going to be the result:

Tomorrow, in that tweet, obviously referring to today. Incidentally, per this tweet today’s meeting will be this afternoon at 1 p.m. ET:

As always, we await developments. If there’s any further news or talks progress, I’ll post separately on the front page.