OK! After a solid week of negotiations between baseball owners and players, we finally have a few basic agreements between the two sides. This is very exciting:
The best season of “Justified” was Season 2.
Pepperoni is the best pizza topping.
Steph Curry is not human. He is an alien sent to teach us all.
“Coda” is a delightful movie.
Baseball is a game played with a bat, a ball and gloves between two teams of nine players each on a field with four white bases laid out in a diamond.*
*Thank you to Encyclopedia Britannica for helping the owners and players find this middle ground!
With this much settled, you have to feel very good about the owners and players coming to an agreement today to save Opening Day.
Of course, if we’re being completely honest about it, there is always the chance that because they seem to be very far apart on the luxury tax, revenue sharing, minimum salary, a pre-arbitration bonus pool, an expanded postseason and how many players should be eligible for arbitration after two years, they will not come to agreement today or, indeed, anytime in the foreseeable future.
But, even in that grim scenario, they can all watch “Coda” together.
Such a delightful movie.
Of course you are sick of all this already. Stories that should be about players in the best shape of their lives and teams believing they finally have the starting pitching to compete are instead about incremental, unconvincing changes in the competitive balance tax and how many teams should be in the amateur draft lottery. Who could blame anybody for checking out? Who could blame anybody for just cutting ties with baseball entirely?
I feel certain the owners have done the intense research to determine just how much damage a postponed Opening Day would do to baseball’s bottom line. They would be fools not to have done so. I imagine they know exactly how many games can be missed, how many fans will move on, how many fans will SAY they are moving on but will actually come back, how much ill-will they can manage before it starts to have a negative effect on the bottom line, etc.
And I feel certain, based on that information, that owners are sure they can outlast the union and baseball fans will return in full force. Every single thing they have done the last three months — from locking out the players, to then refusing to negotiate, to then threatening to cancel games, to then making a show of negotiating without meaningfully moving from their original positions — speaks to that confidence.
They are billionaires, and they get their way.
I suspect today could prove a turning point in these negotiations, one way or another. With an owner-set deadline of today as the last day to save Opening Day, there’s a chance, faint as it may seem, that they will get close enough to a breakthrough that the two sides will express some optimism and keep at it, and in such a scenario we could get a deal relatively soon.
There’s a larger chance that they will not have a breakthrough, but the two sides will keep on negotiating, even halfheartedly, because neither wants to take the larger share of the blame for a delayed season.
And there’s also a chance that the negotiations will end badly, each side questioning the other’s commitment to a deal, and the two sides will take a break from talking, at which point we will all need to settle in because this could take a long while.
All of it stinks. But as fans all we can do is complain, threaten and inevitably wait to see if there will be baseball for us to watch and enjoy this year. And watch “Coda.” It really is delightful.
Could the players go around the country playing All-Star games in different cities, or set up a mini league of pick-up games in Cowboys Stadium or something like that?
Whatever agreement is finally reached will address nothing that I actually care about. When Opening Day arrives, the games will still be 3+ hours long and filled with boring, unproductive down time.