Manfred and Clark have reportedly met multiple times in recent months to discuss several issuesGETTY IMAGES
MLB is "staring at its greatest threat to labor peace" since the '94 strike despite the fact that its current CBA "doesn’t expire" until '21, according to more than a dozen league and union officials, owners, agents, players and front-office personnel cited by Jeff Passan of YAHOO SPORTS. Despite the perceived strife, MLB and the MLBPA "aren’t yet at war." Sources said that MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and MLBPA Exec Dir Tony Clark have "met multiple times in recent months, talking about sports gambling and the possibility of MLB officials sitting down with players to discuss on-field issues." The list of grievances on each side "grows nevertheless, with the union questioning the league’s motivations after a brutal free-agent market for players last winter and the league frustrated over the mixed messages it believes the union regularly sends." Clark said, "While we have some concerns about the program, we expect to work through them with MLB." Passan wrote for two sides that have "trouble agreeing on the color of the sky or the day of the week, how that work manifests itself will drop another tea leaf into a cup already overflowing." Both parties look at the other "seeking clues on what’s truly important as they position themselves for negotiations that won’t begin in earnest for well over a year." But yet they "know that with a relationship this tenuous, with frustrations high on both sides, the smallest gripes have time to metastasize if ignored" (SPORTS.YAHOO.com, 8/30).
