Merrifield: CBA negotiations have been 'one-sided'

Kansas City Royals second baseman Whit Merrifield said that negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement with MLB has been challenging because the ownership group has been inflexible and reluctant to engage.

"We want to play - it's what we do, we love to play, and we're willing to work to get them to figure it out," the two-time All-Star said Thursday on "Cody and Gold."

"We haven't gotten anything in response, so we can't work one-sided. We feel like we're standing up for ourselves - we've got to at some point."

Merrifield, the Royals' union representative, said the MLBPA outlined three major points of contention in proposals it presented to the league: competitive balance, service time manipulation, and player compensation. He said the league won't budge on these items and appears to be "happy with the status quo."

"To each point, they pretty much just said, 'No, we're not going to budge on that, not going to adjust on that,'" Merrifield said. "And we've brought them countless different ways to adjust it, given them reasons why it needs to be adjusted and reasons why it not only benefits the players, but the ownership group to adjust these points, and again, they've pretty much just came out and said no."

He added: "That’s difficult to negotiate with and that's not how negotiations go. ... So, we're at the point where we're not going to keep throwing stuff out. ... We're waiting for them to come to us with something, and they just haven't done it yet."

The 32-year-old Merrifield suggested that the best way to address competitive balance is to incentivize teams to win and punish teams for losing.

"Then a lot of this stuff will take care of itself," he said.

MLB locked out players Dec. 2 following the expiration of the previous CBA.