The owners first imposed the lockout that has shut down baseball in early December, and MLB has indeed been shut down since then. The league waited six weeks to make an opening offer after imposing a lockout which they said was to jumpstart negotiations, and the two sides have been miles apart for this entire process. The talks finally, at the very least, started to speed up this past week with MLB setting a deadline unilaterally that a new CBA must be in place on Monday in order to start the season on time.
Well, that deadline has been pushed to Tuesday at 5:00 PM ET, as Monday featured the first signs of hope between these two sides, honestly in years.