Players and owners will meet two days in a row after progress was made on Monday

On Monday, the Players Association met with Major League Baseball’s owners to try and make some progress on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which needs to be agreed upon if there’s going to be baseball this season.

It doesn’t seem like Commissioner Rob Manfred was in attendance based on Evan Drellich’s tweet this morning:

As for what happened today, the players dropped part of their proposal which was implementing an age-based free agency system—allowing players who are 30.5 years old to reach free agency after five years instead of six. The players likely realized that under this system, it wouldn’t help out everyone (which should be their goal), including the younger players like Juan Soto who are getting to the big leagues at the age of 19 or 20. PLayers are reaching the majors earlier than they were years ago so most players wouldn’t really be affected by this system if it were to be implemented.

The big takeaway from this meeting is that the two sides will be meeting together again on Tuesday, which means that there is at least some sense of urgency or else there would be weeks between meetings. That isn’t the case here. I’m still not going to get my hopes up until a deal gets done because they haven’t even started talking about the rules yet. Additionally, Jeff Passan tweeted that the meeting was “contentious”. But progress is better than no progress, right?