6:35 pm: Newsday’s Tim Healy reports (Twitter link) that the league and the federation have also agreed to a series of games or tours in various destinations outside the United States and Canada. During the upcoming CBA, they will be organizing events in Mexico, Asia, Puerto Rico, London, Dominican Republic, and Paris.
5:25 pm: Jared Diamond reports from The Wall Street Journal (on TwitterStarting in 2023, the schedule will be adjusted so that each team plays all 29 competitors in each season. The exact format will be determined, but these games will be accompanied by a decrease in the number of games within the divisions that you will play. Previously, teams played 19 games per season against all four of their opponents in the divisions.
2:34 pm: With the new collective bargaining agreement in place, the opening day will be set for April 7, as first reported by Bob Nightengale of USA Today (Twitter links). It will be a 162-game season with full player pay, with the end of the season pushed back three days and two heads put in place to make up for a one-week late start. The Spring Training Games will begin around March 18th.
Players will be able to report to Spring Training tomorrow, Tweets Jeff Bassan from ESPN. The mandatory spring report date is Sunday, March 13th according to Chelsea Janes from The Washington Post.
MLB announced yesterday that it will cancel matches through April 13. However, progress in negotiations today has led to the league retracting that position. Nothing has been made official at the end of the league – most likely, this is pending ratification of ownership this evening, which is expected to be a formality. At that point, the league makes an official announcement about the schedule. Supposedly, it brought back the originally scheduled games that were nominally eliminated yesterday, but there’s been no word on that yet.
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