We’re officially in the full-court press portion of the lockout, folks. MLB recently made a February 28th deadline to reach a deal so the regular season can start as scheduled. So, Monday began the first of what will likely be daily negotiations between the league and the players association.

What came of these negotiations in Florida on Monday? Well, both sides were in the room talking about issues for a while, but not much progress has been made yet. MLB made an offer with a couple of small tweaks, with an emphasis on “small”.

One adjustment was the league bumping the pre-arbitration pool by $5 million, pushing it to $20 million overall. That sounds cool, but it’s still about $100 million off from what the MLBPA has been proposing. The league also proposed moving the draft lottery from three to four picks, while the players union is proposing it to be for the top eight. There was no new proposal for the Competitive Balance Tax because the league is waiting for the players to counter what they most recently presented.

Understandably so, the players were underwhelmed by what they saw in Monday’s proposal since it still seems as if both sides are far apart. But, let’s look at the bright side — negotiations lasted way longer than 15 minutes, and there even seems to be some optimism by the sole fact that everyone could stay in a room and talk for a prolonged period of time.

Evan Drellich of The Athletic reported some interesting backtracking done by the league, as well:

In the following tweet, Drellich did say this doesn’t mean MLB can’t just impose the changes they want unilaterally since MiLB doesn’t have a union. But still, this seems like a good thing for the time being.

There’s still lots of work to be done before a deal can actually be reached. The next week will probably feel about 10 years long, and it wouldn’t be surprising if a deal doesn’t get agreed to until a day or two before the league’s deadline. Instead of waiting days or weeks to meet again, though, both sides will pick up negotiations at 1 pm EST on Tuesday. So let’s hope more progress gets made. Either that or someone locks everybody in a room a throws away the key until some momentum is created.

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