Late last week, Major League Baseball made a counterproposal in the ongoing labor discussions with the MLBPA, and this new proposal is what A's infielder Zack Gelof called a "non-starter" for the players. And with the current Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire in December, these proposals have a long way to go.

On Thursday, there was a closed-door meeting with the A's players and MLBPA representative Mike Myers, who serves as a liaison between the players and the Players Association. 

On Friday, Athletics Roundtable and Manolo Hernández spoke with Gelof, the A's player representative, about the latest proposal and the subsequent meeting.

"I think you can always be optimistic. I would say I'm more cautiously optimistic with how things have gone in the past," Gelof said of the possibility of things being solved without the nightmare of losing the 2027 season.

"Just seeing how things have gone on in the past and knowing who we're dealing with, and it's millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for the owners," Gelof continued. "So it's going to be tough for sure, but I feel like we just got to be strong together as players and stick together through an off-season that we're not really in the locker room every day, so the communication is important for sure."

MLB's counterproposal would implement an international draft, cut roughly hundreds of millions from signing bonus pools and eliminate an entire year of international signings — all of which Gelof called a non-starter. This plan would also prohibit players from entering the MLB Draft pool out of high school.

Four of the A's 13 offensive players — Tyler Soderstrom, Lawrence Butler, Henry Bolte and Max Muncy — were selected by the team out of high school. Two of those four have already signed extensions with the club and are part of its core heading into Las Vegas. 

"I know we're in the big leagues, but we're also looking out for the next generation of players," Gelof added. "I think you know the fans, it's tough to get behind when you're looking at billionaire owners and millionaire baseball players. But at the same time, these proposals are pretty obvious, it's all about owners saving money at the end of the day. They don't care about the betterment of the game.

"It's the international guys [who] are getting screwed over. Waiting until 18, in their proposal, is going to be basically delaying the international signing a year, where there's a one-year period that international guys have nowhere to go, and who benefits that from that? It's not the players. It's the academies that are taking 50% and then also the MLB that get another year of numbers and more leverage to sign guys that they're gonna have $300 million less in the [bonus] pool."

He went on to say that on the high school side, if a player wants to turn pro and go to the minor leagues, there shouldn't be a rule that prohibits him from doing so. 

Gelof also argued that this would also impact players on the back end, with elite athletes not being able to hit free agency until later in their career. After waiting to be drafted until they were 20 or 21, going through the minors, and then six years in the big leagues with one organization, you're going to see fewer players reach free agency before 30. 

The implication here is that front offices would be willing to pay them less at that point as well, given their age. So the latest proposal is largely a way to cut costs from both ends of a player's development. 

"They want prime years at a cheaper rate," Gelof said. 

Given that the A's have some former high school draftees on their team, Athletics Roundtable decided to ask them how this new proposal would have impacted them from a player development standpoint, getting into the minors at a later age. 

"I think there are some guys that are ready out of high school, and some guys that aren't," Muncy said. "I think having that opportunity to be ready is important, especially a guy like me. I don't know if I make my debut at 22 [years old] if I go to college until I'm 21. Obviously Nick [Kurtz] is a special player, but not everybody can make it to the big leagues in a year."

He added that tearing the cover off the ball like Kurtz did out of college is what he would have had to do in order to end up where he is now on the same timeline. 

"Right out of high school, the thing I needed the most was at-bats," Muncy continued. "Having guys that are ready [out of] high school is a real thing. It gives them an opportunity to get there sooner and help a big league club when they're ready, instead of waiting."

Bolte said he wanted to get into the pro ball journey early, and that having that option is super important. 

"I viewed it as going to school for baseball. It's like a trade school of baseball. We play three times as many games, I'm gonna get three times as many at-bats, and at an extremely high level. There's not really a night off [where] this pitcher is throwing 82-85.  I think just in terms of baseball growth, it's a very valuable thing to be able to get in and start that journey early."

With a luxury tax already in place, the players don't feel that there's a need for a salary cap in the sport. All they want is a free market for the players. 

"I think at the end of the day they're trying to make more money and have a good business model," Gelof said. "The reason a cap system is so scary for us is that once they get you in the cap system, they're never going to let go."

Gelof and the players like the idea of a salary floor, which would help keep all teams competitive on a year-to-year basis, but they believe that the owners would never agree to a salary floor without a salary cap.

"Their cap was super low," Gelof said of a previous proposal. "You look at the other sports, like even if it was a cap system, it seems like the window is really tight, and every team is near the top of the cap."

The players are after competitive balance, but in different ways than just cutting spending, which goes against their own incentives.

"We want owners of teams to want to win, and we want to incentivize that," Gelof said.

The big things that the players are pushing for are competitiveness, a higher minimum salary, expansion of the pre-arb bonus pool and an increase to the luxury tax threshold.

Gelof also added that if they could get a salary floor in there, that would be awesome. Given his discussion of the floor earlier, however, this sounded more like a wish list item. 

"Whatever we can do to maximize earnings for players early on who maybe won't play forever, we want to do that," Gelof said.

The goal in these CBA negotiations is to increase competitiveness and incentivize owners to spend, because of the correlation between spending and winning. 

"We want the best players on the field, and we want competition," Gelof said. "I know there's a looming lockout, but anything we can do to keep playing games, we want to do that."

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