Weiner expects contract talks next year
March 21, 2010
TAMPA, Florida (AP)—New baseball players’ union head Michael Weineranticipates talks with Major League Baseball on a new collective bargainingagreement will begin by spring training or perhaps a bit earlier next year.
“Our goal will try to be, in one sense, you always want to have anagreement without a threat of a stoppage,” Weiner said on Sunday. “But youalso have to have an agreement that works for both sides. I’m sure thateverybody will try our best to get a deal done on a kind of timeframe that wedid last time. So we’ll just have to see how it plays out.”
The current agreement expires in December 2011. The deal was announcedduring the 2006 World Series, about two months before the previous agreementexpired.
Weiner and other union officials met with New York Yankees players as partof a tour of spring training camps. The issue of blood testing for HGH was alsodiscussed.
“Our attitude toward any kind of testing, blood or urine, is really thesame, that we have to make sure the science is down and with the commissioner’soffice we will continue to investigate whether the science behind the blood testfor HGH is 100 percent sound,” Weiner said.
“The test has to be administered in a way that’s safe for the players, andobviously drawing blood has complications that don’t exist with respect tocollecting urine. And the test has to be administered in a way where the playerscan actually go to work. Drawing blood is harder to do.”
Yankees outfielder Curtis Granderson(notes), a former union representative withDetroit, agrees.
“We want to make sure it’s accurate,” Granderson said. “We definitely arenot subjecting the players to something that could be inaccurate, plain andsimple.”
Expansion of the draft to include international players and the forthcomingrecommendations from commissioner Bud Selig’s on-field review committee willlikely be part of next year’s labor talks. Proposals about realignment may alsocome up.
“We’d be happy to talk about those (ideas) in bargaining,” Weiner said
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