Categories: News

Rob Manfred announces cancellation of first two series of 2022 regular season

Rob Manfred is the commissioner of baseball. (Arturo Pardavila III)

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced Tuesday evening that the first two regular season series of the 2022 regular season have been cancelled, as the owner-imposed lockout continues.

For the Philadelphia Phillies, that means that their three-game series in Houston and a two-game series in D.C. are now cancelled. An MLB spokesperson previously had said that cancelled games would not be made up.

That means that the first game on the 2022 schedule for the Phillies right now is April 8 against the Oakland Athletics at Citizens Bank Park. Seemingly, though, that series and those that follow in it are in jeopardy if the league and MLB Players Association cannot reach a deal in the coming days.

While there had been some indication that maybe the two sides were progressing towards a new collective bargaining agreement as recently as this morning, the MLBPA leaders “unanimously” rejected the final offer that the league was prepared to make before beginning to cancel regular season games.

ESPN‘s Jeff Passan obtained some of the details of the final offer:

When you compare that with the most recent offer from the MLBPA, you start to understand how far apart the two sides are:

A “player leader” told Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic that the proposal that the players rejected was “a slap in the face,” adding that the league’s owners “want players to lose pay.”

Because both sides are headed from Florida back to New York after failing to reach an agreement, Manfred added in his press conference Tuesday that “no agreement is possible until Thursday.”