The Major League Baseball Players Association presented its newest proposal to the league on Thursday, and the meeting ended after 15 minutes.
Fifteen minutes every six days is kinda like doing 15 pushups every six days. It's better than doing nothing, but you wouldn't expect results, either.
Specific to these 15 minutes, the players moved on their demand for all two-year players being eligible for arbitration, instead proposing that 80 percent of such players would be Super Twos. That'd probably be the end of the Super Two name, lest it sound like everybody gets a trophy, but if MLB has its way, it won't be a discussion. As Evan Drellich relayed:
And apparently, those meetings are going to come fast and furious over the next week in New York. As the podcast's resident optimist for a season starting on time, figuring the sides were arguing over too little revenue to risk losing games, it wouldn't surprise me if the last 2½ months were merely preamble. The league merely wanted to run enough time off the clock to prevent the union from making headway on any of its more ambitious aims, and the time pressures of a full-enough spring training are enough to make like the Tampa Bay Rays and turn far less threatening non-starters into openers.
In the other sport-rattling news from Thursday, former Angels communications director Eric Kay was convicted of distributing fentanyl via counterfeit oxycodone pills that caused the death of pitcher Tyler Skaggs in 2019. Kay faces a minimum of 20 years in prison.
It's a messy story, not just because Kay and Skaggs has or had opioid addictions, but because it also roped in several other ballplayers. Matt Harvey, C.J. Cron, Michael Morin and Cam Bedrosian said that Kay had provided them with oxycodone. Harvey's testimony generated the most news, where he admitted cocaine use and said that he'd supplied Skaggs with Percocet pills in the week before Skaggs' death.
This may be an isolated incident in terms of severity, but given that pain management is at the core of every sport and opioid addiction knows no boundaries, I'd assume that front offices and managers around the league have to wrestle with new worst-case scenarios.
