All operations within Major League Baseball, the premier baseball league in the world, have been halted and will remain so until the owners of the league’s thirty teams and the players’ union find a new collective agreement, after which the ‘last, agreed five years ago, expired at midnight on Wednesday. For MLB it is the first “lockout”, as this situation is called in the United States, in almost thirty years: the last one canceled an entire season and had big consequences.
The union asks for adequate compensation for younger players, greater contractual freedom and an increase in the so-called luxury tax for each team from 210 to 245 million dollars. It also calls for greater competitiveness within the league through a series of structural reforms. The owners instead believe that the players already enjoy one of the best contractual arrangements in American sport and have other needs, such as the expansion of the playoffs, to date played by ten teams. Commissioner Rob Manfred commented the start of the lockout saying, “It’s a tough day for baseball, but as I’ve said all year, there’s a path to a fair deal, and we’ll find it.”
To avoid being stuck for a long time, in the last day before the lockout, the teams of the league have invested a total of 1.4 billion dollars in the sale of players. The most important engagement was that of Max Scherzer, pitcher of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who joined the New York Mets for 130 million dollars in three years.
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