Apparently the Players Association and Major League Baseball have a tentative agreement:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32882139/mlb-lockout-mlb-mlbpa-agree-new-cba
https://www.mlb.com/
The regular season is to begin on April 7th.
--M.C.
Apparently the Players Association and Major League Baseball have a tentative agreement:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/32882139/mlb-lockout-mlb-mlbpa-agree-new-cba
https://www.mlb.com/
The regular season is to begin on April 7th.
--M.C.
3 comments:
Here's an analysis of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement from Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs.
I haven't read it (yet) and I'll do a post when I have a better sense of what went down. I admit to not following the whole debacle very closely. I can only assume the players signed a cosmetically better deal but that baseball's core economics stay the same.
But it appears we will have real baseball for 2022!
A couple of things:
Unversal DH - Boo, Boo and Boo! I don't like it.
12 team playoffs - Boo! Obviously, more money for MLB due to TV revenues, but it eliminates the quirky wild card format which I found charming. Watching other divisions to see who can finish with a better record, regardless of place in the divisional standings, was great. I suppose that's gone and that the top two finishers in each division will be in the playoffs. The top two teams by record, will get byes. Does that mean that the 2021 Giants and 2021 Dodgers would have both gotten byes? I don't know. MLB wants 14 or 16 teams in the playoffs, so we will pay less attention to the season, like basketball, but that will be in the future.
Advertising. Boo, but, whatever. Manfred is determined to make this a clown show anyway, so they can require tattoos with sponsors for all I care.
Apparently they are going to continue negotiating on an international draft.
I like more teams in the playoffs but I agree that the previous format and Wild Card games created great drama at season's end. I think they could get creative (like a round-robin CWS-style elimination weekend) and come up with something less generic. It's like MLB wants to be more like the NFL. I don't like tie-breaking formulas, even though they might be more fair. I like sudden-death games.
I'm actually happy to see the DH. Pitchers haven't hit for years and besides that pitchers' PAs have been in precipitous decline. What with relief pitching and pinch-hitting we saw fewer and fewer chances in a game for a pitcher to hit anyway. I like the lineup flexibility it gives you and the chance to see a guy hit who would normally have to sit that day. Logan Webb is the only Giants pitcher I can stomach at the plate. The rest are just "gimmes" and I hate that. I want competitive at-bats at every spot. (Webb's HR in Game 162 is likely the last we'll ever see by a pitcher!)
I thought the ads would've come a long time ago. I'm amazed the owners didn't push for it sooner. Of course they've been decking out caps and jerseys with all sorts of patches over the years so I'm less annoyed than I ought to be. They do ads all over the world on soccer jerseys and you can't watch much else without Nike swooshes on everyone. More money in the game ought to mean more money "trickling down" but it doesn't. The owners just get richer and meaner.
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