Maury Brown of Biz of Baseball has an update on the Collective Bargaining Agreement talks, via Twitter. Brown notes that you shouldn’t hold your breath, but rumors are that MLB will announce a labor agreement tomorrow. Brown also adds that there could be a compromise on the hard slotting issue with a luxury tax.
We’ve heard a lot of updates in the past few weeks about the holdup to a new deal being the owners and Bud Selig pushing for hard slotting in the draft. We also heard that the union was pushing for the compensation system to be removed from Type A free agents. A resolution would have to come quickly on the latter, as the deadline to offer arbitration to departing free agents is November 23rd.
The big issue for the Pirates revolves around the draft slotting. Hard slotting would be a bad thing for the team. A luxury tax wouldn’t be ideal, but is definitely preferred to hard slotting.
Tim started Pirates Prospects in 2009 from his home in Virginia, which was 40 minutes from where Pedro Alvarez made his pro debut in Lynchburg. That year, the Lynchburg Hillcats won the Carolina League championship, and Pirates Prospects was born from Tim's reporting along the way. The site has grown over the years to include many more writers, and Tim has gone on to become a credentialed MLB reporter, producing Pirates Prospects each year, and will publish his 11th Prospect Guide this offseason. He has also served as the Pittsburgh Pirates correspondent for Baseball America since 2019. Behind the scenes, Tim is an avid music lover, and most of the money he gets paid to run this site goes to vinyl records.
Any chance that the compensation system may not go into effect until the 2012-13 offseason? That would make sense if it is going to happen as it would be a kick in the junk to low revenue teams that were planning on reaping the benefits of the system this year, the Pirates finally being one of them.