Ross Stripling said MLB owners ‘tried to sneak some (expletive) past’ the players late in lockout talks

It gets worse.

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced on Tuesday that the league would be canceling its first set of regular season games after players and owners failed to agree on a CBA before the league-imposed deadline.

The news was sad for all fans of the sport, especially when there was some late optimism Monday night/Tuesday morning. But the reports of progress turned out to be an insincere move by the owners to shift blame to the players. And Blue Jays pitcher Ross Stripling revealed just how disingenuous the owners were in the late-stage negotiations.

Stripling, who is the Blue Jays’ player-union rep, said that once the negotiations went past midnight, the owners tried to “sneak” things into the deal that weren’t even discussed. He said via sportsnet.ca:

“It got to be like 12:30 and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before. They were trying to sneak things through us, it was like they think we’re dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something. It’s like that stupid football quote, they are who we thought they were. They did exactly what we thought they would do. They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed, and then they tried to sneak some (expletive) past us at that deadline and we were ready for it. We’ve been ready for five years. And then they tried to flip it on us today in PR, saying that we’ve changed our tone and tried to make it look like it was our fault. That never happened.”

At the same time this was going on, the owners were playing off the negotiations as nearing an agreement before abruptly pinning stalled talks on a change in the union’s tone. No wonder the players were upset at how poorly the talks went in Jupiter, Fla.

And if what Stripling said is true, it shows just how far things have to go before a good-faith negotiation can even take place.

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