MLB cancels opening day after sides fail to end lockout

JUPITER, Fla. (AP) — Major League Baseball's financial fight cost regular-season games for the first time in 27 years when often acrimonious talks to end a management lockout collapsed Tuesday and Commissioner Rob Manfred scrapped March 31 openers.

With owners and players unable to agree on a contract to replace the collective bargaining agreement that expired Dec. 1, Manfred canceled the first two series for each of the 30 teams, cutting each club's schedule from 162 games to likely 156 at most. A total of 91 games were erased.

“We exhausted every possibility of reaching an agreement before the cancellation of games,” Manfred said during a news conference in the left-field corner of Roger Dean Stadium as fans outside the spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals chanted: “We want baseball!”

Five miles away and 90 minutes later, the players’ association held its own news conference at a hotel, with union head Tony Clark and chief negotiator Bruce Meyer flanked by pitchers Max Scherzer and Andrew Miller — both members of the union’s eight-man executive subcommittee — and Noah Syndergaard seated among about a dozen players in the audience.

“This has been making in the years, seeing things that have happened over the course specifically of this last CBA," Scherzer said, "things that have happened to different players in certain situations, that we absolutely have to have corrections.”

Manfred vowed players will not receive salary or major league service for games missed, exacerbating already visceral anger of the roughly 1,200 players locked into a contest of will against 30 controlling owners. Manfred maintained daily interleague play made rescheduling impossible.

“To say they won’t reschedule games if games are canceled or they won’t pay...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/MLB-extends-deadline-to-salvage-openers-to-5-p-m-16967295.php