Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association plan to hold a bargaining session on Thursday, according to Jeff Passan.

MLB is expected to make a “core economics” proposal during the session. It will be the first between the sides since the lockout began.

MLB has been in a lockout since the league’s collective bargaining agreement expired on Dec. 2. The two sides were unable to come to terms on new measures to prevent teams from tanking and the hopeful elimination of service time manipulation.

Talks were stalled earlier this month but were always expected to resume in January.

The MLBPA eight-player subcommittee features two members of the New York Mets, Max Scherzer, and Francisco Lindor. Andrew Miller, Marcus Semien, Zack Britton, James Paxton, Jason Castro, and Gerrit Cole make up the rest of the bargaining group.

Scherzer believes the players union has never been stronger and all MLB players back the union demands.

Among those demands is the belief they can eliminate tanking strategies.

“When you look at how the 2016 CBA agreement and how that has worked over the past five years, as players, we see major problems in it, specifically, first and foremost, we see a competition problem and how teams are behaving because of certain rules that are within that,” Scherzer said in December. “Adjustments have to be made to bring up the competition. As players, that’s critical to us to have a highly competitive league, and when we don’t have that, we have issues.”

A core-economics proposal will have to meet the players’ demands for how owners should operate their teams. Scherzer said in January that players believe teams are treating the luxury tax as a cap on salaries rather than as a way to prevent breakaway spending as was negotiated in the last CBA.

“That’s the concept of how we should see the luxury tax function — to prevent one or two teams completely outspending the rest of the league,” Scherzer said. “That’s not what’s happening in the game today. Look no further than how many teams nuzzled just underneath the threshold in 2021.”

Players also feel the need to renegotiate a section they refer to as the “grand bargain.” Essentially there is an agreement that you will make less money earlier in your career so you can make more later in your career but teams have shown they’re not willing to pay for a players’ past production. If that is going to happen then the MLBPA wants to secure more money for players earlier in their career as teams chide away from middle-class free agents.

Likely MLBs proposal will be shot down during Thursday’s session. But at least the two sides are meeting.

No one currently knows if the season is starting on time but players are training to be good to go when Spring Training starts. Pitchers and catchers report in a little over a month.

Hopefully, the sides can agree to a deal and prevent a lockout from bleeding into the scheduled season.