Colorado Rockies CEO Dick Monfort was expected to be joined by Deputy Commissioner Dan Halem (the clubs’ lead negotiator).
Bruce Meyer, the union’s chief negotiator was expected to be joined at some point by players. The location of negotiations is approximately 3 miles away from Max Scherzer of the New York Mets, who is one of eight members of the union’s executive subcommittee.
The ballpark is normally the spring training home for the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins. However, workouts didn’t start on Wednesday because of baseball’s ninth work stoppage. This was the first such since 1995.
Monday’s session on core economics will be the seventh since Dec. 2 when the lockout began. The sides have only met once in consecutive days, that was Jan. 24 and 25. MLB stated Friday that it would meet with the union every day for the next week.
Monday marks the 82nd day of the lockout. MLB cancelled spring training games between February 26 and March 4 on Friday.
Zoom has been used by players and owners, but only Monfort (a free-agent reliefr) and Andrew Miller attended a Zoom session in person.
All talks in the lockout were held up to now in New York, at the offices MLB and the players’ union.
MLB informed the union that February 28th is the final day for an agreement to allow openings on March 31 . This was in light of the need for four weeks’ worth of training and extra time to ratify the agreement and have players report at camps in Arizona and Florida.
After the disruptions to spring trainings in 1990 and 1995, both sides agreed to reduce training time.