BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. -- As he will in Arizona early next week, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred met Friday with reporters who cover teams who hold spring training in Florida. Among the highlights of the session:



* With the season about six weeks away, Manfred has yet to issue a ruling on the three domestic-violence cases that represent the first test of the league’s new domestic-violence policy -- Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel [...]

BONITA SPRINGS, Fla. -- As he will in Arizona early next week, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred met Friday with reporters who cover teams who hold spring training in Florida. Among the highlights of the session:

* With the season about six weeks away, Manfred has yet to issue a ruling on the three domestic-violence cases that represent the first test of the league’s new domestic-violence policy -- Aroldis Chapman, Yasiel Puig and Jose Reyes. Manfred said he expects to rule on “at least two out of the three” within “the next few days.” He declined to specify which two. �

“My strong preference would have been to have them decided by this point in the calendar,” he said. “More important than the calendar, however, is making sure that we know all the facts before I make a decision. The worst thing that can happen from our perspective is to make a decision and then find out that we decided without knowing everything that happened. The timing of gathering those facts is not completely within our control.”

Law enforcement deciding not to proceed with prosecution does not mean Major League Baseball cannot discipline involved players under the policy, Manfred said.

* Manfred met face-to-face with Major League Baseball Players’ Association executive director Tony Clark on Friday to start to hammer out a timetable for collective-bargaining agreement negotiations. The Basic Agreement in place now expires Dec. 1. Manfred and Clark both have been involved heavily in negotiations in the past, but this will be the first time both will be at the head of their respective sides.

“I have every expectation that we’re going to find a way to make an agreement, as we have the last three times around,” the commissioner said.

* According to reports, Dexter Fowler and Yovani Gallardo are on the verge of signing with the Baltimore Orioles. There appears to be movement on the Ian Desmond front as well. Those three are the last of the 16 free agents who declined qualifying offers left on the open market -- and all appear to have had their markets depressed by the draft-pick penalties tied to them. Any team that signs one of those players would forfeit its highest draft pick outside the top 15 overall selections.

In light of the slow movement of the market for those free agents -- especially coming two years after Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales sat out until the middle of the season -- it stands to reason the MLBPA might push for separation of draft picks from free agency, at least in terms of signing teams being required to forfeit picks.

Asked his thoughts about the influence of such penalties on free agency, Manfred pushed back hard -- and did so with a bit of an edge to his tone.

“Well, they’re not penalties, they’re compensation, first of all,” he said. “Look, it was a big free-agent class this year. One of the thing that MLBPA has always wanted is a market-based system. It’s been a long time since I took Economics 101, but my recollection is that when you have a lot of supply in relation to relatively fixed demand, the market is going to operate differently than one might expect. It’s not a surprise to me, given the size of the class.

“I do expect that during the next round (of CBA negotiations) there will be conversations about the topic of draft-choice compensation. I’m not going to get into speculation about that except to note that draft-choice compensation has been an aspect of the Basic Agreement that is generally pro-management, and it’s been in there a very, very long time.”

* Manfred defended the changes to the amateur draft that debuted with the latest collective-bargaining agreement, starting in 2012. He credited those changes with enhancing the competitive balance in the game.

�“A lot of the competitive balance that we have today in the game is due to the fact that young players are dominant in the game,” he said, “and we made a set of changes in the draft that allowed clubs who had had bad years access to talent at a reasonably certain price. If you think about the economics of sports, every sport needs competitive balance. That’s what you sell. That’s competition. It seems to me that regulation of entry-level talent, as we did through the amateur draft, is a relatively unobtrusive way to get a very good result on competitive balance.”

That entry-level talent, of course, is an entity that has no seat at the bargaining table -- which is why the players’ union is not likely to object to the installation of an international draft during this round of negotiations. The more money teams spend on youngsters, the thinking appears to be, the less they spend on veterans.

For the sake of context, the largest signing bonus in the history of the draft is -- and will remain, at least for a long time, thanks to the new rules -- is the $7.5 million the Washington Nationals gave Stephen Strasburg in 2009. Asdrubal Cabrera, Omar Infante, Adam Lind and Michael Morse all earned $7.5 million last season. All but eight teams had an Opening Day payroll of more than $100 million last season.

One concern about the draft system raised at the time was that two-sport athletes -- who once had been bought out of college commitments with exorbitant signing bonuses -- might choose other sports. Manfred said that he hadn’t seen such a trend take hold. At a time when football players like New England’s Jerod Mayo are retiring at the age of 29, the longevity baseball offers can be a determining factor.

“It’s hard to look at the young players in the game today and think that baseball is somehow missing the boat on its share of good young athletes,” the commissioner said. “The economics of being a professional baseball player are really compelling in comparison to other sports.”

* Manfred was not asked about the lawsuit being brought against Major League Baseball by minor-league players, past and present, and it’s likely he’d have declined comment if he was. But a remark he made while he was asked about teams tanking for draft picks appears to contradict one of the pillars of defense -- that minor-league baseball should be considered an apprenticeship, not a profession of its own.

“I think 12 percent of the players that we sign eventually play one day in the major leagues,” he said.

If 12 percent of players eventually play one day in the major leagues, it stands to reason that a significantly lower percentage hit the jackpot the way stars like David Price have.

* Asked if he wanted the National League to adopt the designated hitter, Manfred said he liked the status quo -- in large part because it meant that people would keep debating whether the National League should adopt the designated hitter.

“The DH debate makes people talk about the game,” he said. “Me, personally, I like when people talk about the game. I’m perfectly happy the way it is. Neither form of baseball offends me in any way.”

* Manfred will continue to make pace of play a priority. The allotted time between innings will be shortened by the start of the season, he said, and there will be “a focus on the number and length of visits to the mound,” including visits by catchers.

* Manfred said he believed there would be “huge advantages” -- scheduling chief among them -- to expanding to 32 teams. Major League Baseball has not expanded for 18 years, its longest static span since the expansion era began in 1961. But the commissioner also said that he wants to deal with uncertain stadium situations in Oakland and Tampa Bay before he pushes for expansion.

“I can’t see baseball expanding until those situations are resolved,” he said.

The subtext there is that any cities that would be candidates for expansion teams also are cities that the Athletics and Rays can use as leverage against Oakland and the Tampa-St. Petersburg area in much the same way NFL teams repeatedly used Los Angeles as leverage in their own negotiations for stadiums. Expanding into two new markets before the Athletics and Rays have resolved their stadium situations would not be an effective negotiating strategy for Major League Baseball.

When Arizona and Tampa Bay became baseball’s 29th and 30th franchises in 1998, both ownership groups paid a fee of a reported $130 million. But the way Manfred talked Friday, as Bud Selig had talked before him, those ownership groups paid that steep fee merely for the privilege of losing money.

“The economics of being an owner in this sport are not all that appealing, in some respects,” he said.

To choose one recent example -- and an example not as extreme as the Los Angeles Dodgers -- John Moores purchased the San Diego Padres for a reported $85 million in 1994, and he sold the team in 2012 for a reported $800 million.