Royals’ Whit Merrifield on MLB lockout: Players waiting for owners ‘to engage again’
Major League Baseball’s lockout began on Dec. 2, and since then little has happened.
As ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported Wednesday, “the league and players haven’t had a single substantive negotiating session since the work stoppage began and ... spring training is fast approaching without an iota of progress toward a new collective bargaining agreement.”
It’s a little more than seven weeks until the Royals are scheduled to play their first spring game in Surprise, Arizona, and it’s anyone’s guess if that will happen as scheduled.
Royals second baseman Whit Merrifield was on MLB Network Radio SiriusXM on Tuesday night and was asked by Jeff Joyce and Chris Gimenez about the lockout.
Specifically, does Merrifield talk with teammates and his friends in baseball about where things stand in the labor dispute?
“Yeah, that’s on me, I’m our player rep,” Merrifield said. “So I’m involved in these calls and it’s my job to relay it to our team and let our team know what’s going on.”
Merrifield hasn’t had much to report to his Royals teammates.
The ESPN story notes that “after 36 days of silence since the lockout began, there remain no plans for the sides to talk about the core economic issues that cleave them.”
But Merrifield said the players union is ready to get back to the negotiating table and hammer out a deal so everyone can return to work.
“I mean, we’ve talked on our side as much as we can, really, and it’s been pretty quiet for a while,” Merrifield said. “So we’re hoping that doesn’t last very much longer, but, you know, we feel like we’ve talked until we’re blue in the face and we’ve done pretty much what we can do.
“And so now it’s just pretty much time to wait and see, you know, when they’re willing to engage again.”
This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 10:42 AM.
