Thanks for joining us once again. Brandon Day and Ashley MacLennan are back to talk about the Javy Báez signing, what it means for the team on the field, and what, if anything it says about ownership and the front office’s plans for the future.
Then, we’ll have to get into less entertaining fare. After a really fun, and somewhat exhausting, week of free agent transactions, MLB did what it does best, undercutting the whole enterprise by locking out the players. Even better, despite literally everyone in the sport knowing the lockout was coming, Commissioner Rob Manfred issued a statement pretending this was some kind of last minute decision done in “self-defense” of the owners. So yeah, if you wondered how contentious this is going to become, we’re already off to a very disingenuous start from owners and their agent.
This isn’t going to be much fun.
So we’ll chat a bit about the history of labor strife between the owners and players. Then we’ll get into some of the current issues and how they’ve developed over the past two CBA’s stretching back a decade. Then a little discussion of some of Manfred’s disasters recently that have really unified the players and undercut any hope for good faith from ownership’s side. We’ll also talk about why the radically changed media landscape compared to 1994 makes it almost impossible to control the narrative, despite national baseball writers too often being little more than vessels for MLB’s owners’ message in covering the subject.
Frankly, this lockout is going to go on for a good while, and it’s hard to even get too engaged with the topic knowing that we probably won’t see any movement, even in the most optimistic scenarios, until the New Year. We’ll try and bring in a guest or two to shed further light on the subject as things start to develop.