The Coldest Winter Arrives for Baseball Fans

“Now is the winter of our discontent” -Richard III

Here at All Talk, No Balk! we like to have fun watching baseball and enjoy the more amusing parts of the game. But that is all about to come to a halt, because there will be no more games to enjoy. Major League Baseball is heading towards a lockout, with the current Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire tomorrow, December 1st. There will be a complete freeze on all transactions until the league and the Players Association come to a new agreement.

As William Shakespeare’s greater anti-hero points out, the winter is the time of unrest and dissatisfaction, and that will be truer this year than at any point this century. Tensions between the league and the players are at their most frigid since the players’ strike in 1994-’95, the last time there was a work stoppage.

Fans around the world will be vocally disgruntled at a league that only cares about money and continues to make poor PR decisions. The players are not entirely guiltless, either, since they have shown almost no willingness to compromise. We are in for an endless season of long nights with little hope of a promising spring.

I could also make a very obvious Game of Thrones reference, but the unbearable winter we foresaw is already here. The owners are entrenched in their position to keep as much money as possible, and the players are holding onto their justified grudges. No one wants to have a lockout and potentially miss the start of next season, but it is better than just giving in to the other side.

As the greedy billionaires they are, the owners do not want to pay more money to their employees, and only around half of them are interested in fielding a winning team. Since they won a very lopsided victory in the 2016 CBA negotiations, teams have taken advantage of the league’s current economic system to pay the players less than they deserve. The players got personal chefs instead of fair market pricing during their prime seasons.

Some of the many issues the players want addressed involve decreasing years of roster control, increasing minimum salaries and team payroll, ending service time manipulation, and adjusting draft pick compensation. The inside-baseball terminology might seem overwhelming to casual fans, but the real headache lies with the union leaders trying to change the system. This is just a small number of items being discussed, and the players know they won’t get everything they want this time around.

There are more technical aspects I won’t get into here because the point is that we are collectively getting left out in the cold. Winter is always an awful time of year because there is no MLB action anyways, and the weather is unbearable for those of us in the North. The holiday break is a small reprieve, but we won’t be celebrating a CBA deal anytime soon.

While we won’t have a happy new year, at least we have gotten a Thanksgiving feast of baseball moves. There has been a star signing every day for the past week, and most are getting more years and money than expected. This is always a good thing, even for the players who don’t deserve it (who thought Corey Seager would get ten years?). General managers were expected to sit on their hands with an uncertain future looming, but instead they have been aggressive (well, if they run a team outside the DMV, that is). I want to believe that the increase in team spending will help negotiations, but more likely teams are confident that the overall economic structure will look the same.

As a diehard baseball fan, I dread sitting through a whole winter of talking heads praising the commercial success of the NFL and NBA while saying America’s pastime is stuck in the past. Checking baseball news every hour is only interesting when there actually is news. We will all get flashbacks to the pandemic’s first few months when the best thing we could do was watch old games. Old games! An industry based on live entertainment was reduced to YouTube videos where we already know what happens (Delmon Double, anyone?)

Like every Shakespeare tragedy, the situation will only get worse as times goes on. Buckle up for a rough few months of blaming the people who provide us with the sport we love. At least there are no labor disputes in MLB the Show.