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Lockout ends, crazy season begins

There was good news yesterday, actual real good news. The baseball lockout died. And I, for one, dance on its grave! Hooray! There will be baseball, folks, honest to goodness baseball. Spring training starts today, right now, as you read this players are reporting. Opening Day will be April 7th and the season will begin with the Red Sox in the Bronx playing the New York Yankees! I truly don’t have enough exclamation points in my keyboard to do the whole thing justice.

The new CBA isn’t perfect, but then no CBA in the history of time ever has been. This one has one thing going for it that makes me like it most of all, though, and it’s this: it gives us baseball back!

I remember saying, thinking, and probably tweeting that once the lockout breaks, there’s going to be an avalanche, an absolute frigg’n cavalcade of moves! Trades! Free agent signings! It’s all coming, folks, all at once, so strap in and get ready for SUPERCRAZYTOWN!

[long pause]

[extremely long pause]

[extremely longer pause]

[crickets]

Yup, nothing has happened. At least not as of this writing. But you know, that’s not really such a bad thing because it gives us all a moment to catch our collective breath and to look into the not too distant future as our baseball season approaches. It’s a beautiful view. Truly.

I imagine you’ll be hearing from me much more now that things have re-started. Though there haven’t been any yet, there will be Red Sox signings and trades and other Red Soxy items to report on, discuss, and analyze. And I’ll do my best to be on top of all of those things for you.

In the meantime, grab a cup of tea and let’s quickly talk about a few items of interest in the new CBA.

This isn’t intended to be a full figured picture of the new CBA by any means. I’m not a labor lawyer or a lawyer of any kind, so these are just a few items that I found interesting.

Next season (2023) will see fewer inter-divisional games and in its place, teams will get to play every team in baseball at least once. That should be interesting! The Red Sox will face, sure, the Pirates and Rockies, but they’ll also face the Nationals (Juan Soto!), the Braves (Ronald Acuna!), and the Padres (Fernando Tatis, Jr!) every year. The increased travel will suck for the players, but I do think this is a good thing for the sport. Every city should get to see those guys, and now they will. Just think, there are many cities with teams who have only seen Mike Trout once or twice. That should never be. And now it won’t. So that’s good!

And it means the Red Sox will face Mookie Betts and the Dodgers.

[pauses 10 minutes to get a hold of self]

In other news, the players have managed to get the owners to give them a larger minimum salary. A majority of players in the league play on the major league minimum salary and most don’t last in the league long enough to ever get a taste of free agent dollars, so this is big for them.

The draft will be changed as well. It will be 20 rounds (this is good, if not the 40 it was pre-Covid), and the bottom 18 teams in the standings (a.k.a. every team that didn’t make the new expanded playoffs) will be entered for a chance to win the top pick in the draft. As of now, the only pick available in the lottery will be the first, so the team with the worst record can’t move any further down the draft than the second pick, but still, this is some form of anti-tanking progress. Maybe. At least it’s interesting. [Edit: I got one of these details wrong. The lottery will feature the top six spots in the draft, not just the first pick. My apologies.]

Finally, the playoffs will now feature 12 teams. The two top teams in each league will get a bye past the first round, which will feature two best-of-three series in each league. The next round will be, presumably, seven game series between the two winners of those opening series and the waiting best teams. The winners of those series go to the Championship Series, and the winners there advance to the World Series. It’ll be a lot of playoffs. Like a lot a lot.

For my money, I’d have been fine with fewer playoffs, and in fact I’d even grown to like the Wild Card format a bit, but at least for this next CBA it is no more. So fine. We’ll just have to live with the fact that the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the final AL Wild Card game ever played. Oh drat.

So that’s about it. The moves should be flying fast and furious any minute now… any minute now… any minute now… so you should be hearing from me again soon. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe. It’s free, so really, why wouldn’t you! Free coverage of the Red Sox. Yes please!

Thanks for reading and welcome back to baseball season!