By RONALD BLUM AP Baseball Writer
LAS VEGAS (AP) — With a lockout looming and team executives vowing to take a business-as-usual approach to the offseason, the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres are among six teams set to meet with top free-agent pitcher Tarik Skubal.
Skubal’s planned meetings were disclosed to The Associated Press by a person familiar with negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity because those details had not been announced. The person did not disclose the other teams.
Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement is scheduled to expire at 11:59 p.m. EST on Dec. 1, and management is expected to immediately initiate the sport’s 10th work stoppage since 1972.
“From my perspective, I look at this as a business-as-usual offseason until they tell us otherwise,” Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns said. “So we’re going through this as though we’re going to have a full, complete offseason, and I think that’s the best way to operate.”
Major League Baseball has proposed a hard cap of $258.2 million for 2028 and a floor of $180.2 million, using luxury tax payrolls with average annual values. A team would be allowed to remain as low as 90% of the floor in 2028, which would be $162.18 million, but would have to spend the entire amount of the floor over a three-year period.
Eight teams would have to reduce current payroll by a combined $528 million to get under the proposed 2028 cap, according to MLB: Boston, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the New York Yankees and Mets, Philadelphia, San Diego and Toronto.
Players have vowed never to accept a cap and say they are prepared to fight one for as long as it takes, as they did during a 7 1/2-month strike in 1994 and ’95 that led to the first cancellation of the World Series in 90 years.
Agents have expressed worry that anticipation of a cap might cool the free-agent market. Trades and signings will be frozen during a stoppage, as they were during a 99-day lockout in 2021-22.
On the day before the lockout began in 2021, there were 27 announced contracts that totaled more than $1.4 billion.
“In terms of our process of evaluating players, valuing players, talking to agents and individual players, we’ve been kind of doing what we do every offseason and put ourselves in position to make decisions,” Padres president of baseball operations A.J. Preller said. “The possibility of having a different economic system, you take that into consideration, but it’s really hard to predict what’s going to happen, what the exact system is going to be, so I think ultimately if we see something that we think makes sense for us both in the short and long term, then I think we’re going to be prepared to act on it.”
Skubal was 12-7 with a 2.72 ERA in 26 starts this year for Detroit and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who acquired him on Aug. 2 for three prospects to join a rotation that included Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Skubal could top the largest contract for a pitcher, Yamamoto’s $325 million, 12-year deal with the Dodgers that started in 2024.
“As you look at the construction of your roster,” Dodgers GM Brandon Gomes said, the front office is “making sure you’re balancing and not setting yourself up to potentially hit a slow point or making sure you’re not doing things that disrupt what could potentially be — what we want is a very long window and making sure that stays open.”
Skubal heads a relatively weak free-agent class that also includes Freddy Peralta, Michael King, Seiya Suzuki and Randy Arozarena.
“I’m approaching business as usual here until told otherwise,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said. “I’ve been given a budget by Hal (Steinbrenner) and we’re trying to now connect with teams and agents as the winter has just started to see what is feasible and what isn’t feasible and try to game plan off of that information that we’re gathering now.”
The Los Angeles Angels might be more reticent than most teams to make major moves. The Angels announced on Sept. 1 an agreement for Arte Moreno to sell the franchise to Kroenke Sports and Entertainment, which controls the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams, Premier League champion Arsenal, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and Major League Soccer’s Colorado Rapids. The sale is subject to MLB approval, and a closing has not been scheduled.
“We’re positioning new leadership (so) that they can be nimble for whatever direction they want to go,” interim GM John Mozeliak said. “And so over the next few days really it’s my responsibility just to get an understanding of what teams have, who they have interest in and maybe what they’re willing to do in a trade type of discussion. In terms of free agency, still just trying to understand what that looks like in terms of who we think we might target and when new leadership gets in place.”
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