In a strong illustration of how far apart Major League Baseball’s players and owners are in the early days of collective bargaining, the union on Tuesday made an amateur draft proposal that looked virtually nothing like what the league proposed a month earlier.MLB wants to greatly overhaul the draft and to let colleges take on more of the work and cost of developing professional baseball players in the U.S.. In the league’s vision, teams could no longer draft high schoolers.The union said Tuesday it had formally rejected the league’s proposal on the draft, and instead proposed something more akin to the current set-up. While MLB wanted to reduce the number of rounds in the draft to 12, the union proposed to keep the current 20 — but to move it to June from July.The union also wants revenue-sharing recipients, the smaller-market clubs, to receive an additional $1 million to spend in the draft if they make the playoffs, and to newly allow college sophomores to be selected. Presently, four-year college players can’t be drafted until they are juniors.“Rejecting MLB’s proposals that would demolish the current system by shrinking the draft, slashing benefits by hundreds of millions, and removing all players’ right to negotiate, the MLBPA offered a framework that would maintain the economic structure of the Rule 4 draft, provide lower-revenue clubs enhanced access to amateur talent, and provide millions in benefits to such clubs that achieve (success) on the field,” the union said in a news release Tuesday after the sides met in New York City.MLB declined comment Tuesday.Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the amateur draft had traditionally taken place in June. It’s now been in July since 2021, but the union wants to put it back in June “to provide a longer season for recently-drafted players.”The union also proposed increasing the number of draft picks that could be traded, which has been discussed by the sides many times in the past but never produces major change.