Not sure if any of you have been keeping up with this, but :
The clock is ticking on the 2022 MLB season. But that clock may as well be melting like a Dali painting.
Baseball’s owners and players are no closer to striking a new pay deal - Collective Bargaining Agreement, to be precise - than they were on December 1 when MLB locked out the players.
It didn’t help that the two sides barely met over the first two months of this work stoppage, but they remain a huge distance apart, and with Spring about to begin in the northern hemisphere, it raises the question... are we going to play games this year, or what?
At this stage, there is no doubt the season will be impacted in some form; it’s just a matter of how much.
Pitchers and catchers were supposed to report to Spring Training, the traditional month-and-a-bit-long training camp that sees teams relocate to the warmer climates of Arizona or Florida, this week. They couldn’t.
With no quick resolution to the lockout in sight, Spring Training will be partially, or more likely fully, lost. That in itself is a loss for the owners, who have turned exhibition games into another source of revenue, while most veteran players find the length of it unnecessary.
The regular season is scheduled to begin on March 31 (April 1 AEDT), but players would need at least a couple of weeks to ramp up before that - so if an agreement can’t be struck by mid-March, games will be lost and almost certainly not made up.
So what exactly is the dispute that may see MLB games lost for just the fourth time in history?
There are a few issues.
One has been solved - the designated hitter is going to be brought in for the National League, joining the American League, meaning NL pitchers will no longer need to hit.While traditionalists aren’t happy, this is a good change, because pitchers have become so utterly useless at hitting that there’s no intrigue as to whether they’ll make a difference on the scoreboard.
Tanking is a problem. Teams know they’ll make a bunch of money each year because of their TV deals, so whether you’re a Pittsburgh - who seem to accept being uncompetitive - or a Tampa Bay - who keep contending for the World Series while paying less money than almost every franchise - spending is down overall.
The success of Houston in tanking to an extraordinary degree and then finding major success (banging on a rubbish bin helped, but let’s not get into the cheating saga) has empowered other teams to give up winning for years at a time in an effort to win a World Series half-a-decade down the road. And this, unsurprisingly, has left many fans frustrated.
A draft lottery, like the NBA, may be introduced to partially limit tanking but it doesn’t quite work the same way in baseball. In basketball when you draft a top prospect, they might turn your team around straight away. In baseball, you’re looking at an impact in two or three years at the earliest.
There’s also the question of expanding the playoffs - the owners want it, to sell the extra games, and the players seem happy to go along with it as long as they’re getting something in return.
So for the most part, unsurprisingly, this lockout is about money. Growth in the amount paid by TV networks over the last two decades has seen an explosion in team profits and values - after all, baseball teams play 162 games a year plus the playoffs, so that’s a lot of games to air.
But sports leagues have disputes over how to split money all the time. Why has this lockout become so problematic, and dragged on for so long?
Well, the public comments of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred - who has quickly become widely disliked for his aggressive focus on growing the game’s short-term finances, with a perception he doesn’t even like baseball - aren’t helping.
https://www.foxsports.com.au/baseball/b ... e98777d3df
Posted: Mon Nov 01, 2021 3:05 pm