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.