MLB players and owners’ Thursday meeting again produces little progress

MLB owners and players met again Thursday afternoon in Jupiter. (The one in Florida, silly, not the planet, although an agreement seems about as far away as Jupiter the planet is from Earth.)

Per tweets from various national baseball writers, the two sides caucused amongst themselves for about an hour, then met together for only about 30 minutes, then spent about another two hours caucusing.

Here’s what we know about what happened this afternoon.

That sounds like the basic creeping toward agreement that we’ve had over the last few days, in other words, not much movement at all. Jesse Rogers agrees:

Here’s a bit more detail on those MLBPA proposals:

And so, here we are, with now just four days to go before MLB’s self-imposed February 28 deadline:

That’s how I see this. “No substantive progress.” Not even a mention of the competitive balance tax today — obviously there were no proposals on that front, and there’s not going to be a deal unless there’s some form of CBT in the final agreement.

As always, we await developments.

And now, some thoughts to conclude this day.

A few years ago, I wanted to educate myself further on the 1981 strike. I did live through it, but given that happened 40 years ago, I wanted to refresh myself on the facts and see if the passage of time had changed my perspective. It did after I read “Split Season 1981” by Jeff Katz, and I would recommend that book to any of you. Here’s an interview done with Katz in 2015, complete with a photo of an empty Wrigley Field from the day the strike began. Yes, it’s relevant to today.

This tweet is from Katz:

And here’s a response to Katz’s tweet:

If the positions taken by me at this website seem pro-player... those are basically the reasons. I do try to present the facts as they are known as they are made public. You are free to draw your own conclusions.

Here is a Twitter thread by Jeffrey Flanagan, a retired Kansas City Royals beat writer who covered several previous baseball labor stoppages. It is well worth your time.

I will leave you today with this artwork by New York Times writer James Wagner, who’s clearly looking for something to do. If there’s no baseball this year... maybe art is in his future!