Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1817: Opening Delay

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

In the hours immediately following MLB’s decision to cancel the first two series of the regular season, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley are joined by Ben’s colleagues from The Ringer and The Ringer MLB Show, Michael Baumann and Zach Kram, to recap the negotiations leading up to this week’s MLB-imposed deadlines, lament and lambast the […]

Now the time has come to make amends to everyone To pay the price for all that we could have done But we wasted everything now Now we're done Now we're done Hello and welcome to episode 1817 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrafts presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Dunlinburg of The Ringer, joined as always by Meg Rowley of Fangrafts. Hello, Meg. Hello.

The good news, the only good news, is that that guy who's been posting a new drawing of Mike Trout each day of the MLB lockout can keep doing that. Or maybe he's sick of that by now. So I don't know if that's good news for him or not. It's good news for us. The bad news is that we won't be seeing the real Mike Trout anytime soon because the lockout continues. No deal was reached by the MLB-imposed Monday deadline. No deal was reached by the MLB-imposed Tuesday deadline. Deadlines can move. And now MLB has officially canceled the first two series of the regular season and decreed that those games won't be made up,

though that may be subject to bargaining. As we record on Tuesday evening, the next talks have yet to be scheduled. And so to lament and lambast and bemoan these developments or non-developments, we are joined by our friends and my colleagues from The Ringer MLB Show and The Ringer at Large, Michael Bauman and Zach Kram. Guys, we needed to do a crossover episode because otherwise, the way things are going,

I'm not sure when or if we would ever get to talk again. Well, not only that, you would have found yourself in the awkward position of having only management people on this podcast. And so you needed Zach and me to speak for the people. And in that capacity, I'm happy to oblige. Yeah, we've got equal representation here. Yeah, when you started by saying there's one good thing about this podcast episode,

I thought you were going to introduce us then, but I guess not. So you're two good things about the podcast episode. I thought you were going to introduce us then, but I guess not. So you're two good things about the podcast episode. So he had to get the low-hanging fruit out of the way, and then you could be the main event. But we do have two

genuine members of the Ringer Union bargaining committee with us today to represent the Players Association standpoint. Of course, Meg and I are just mouthpieces of the owners and Rob Manfred, as usual. Anyone who's been listening to the show for long enough knows that. But we have just listened to Manfred's press conference. We've listened to Tony Clark's press conference,

at least until ESPN decided to cut it off after about one question, because I guess the Players Association is not an ESPN broadcast partner. I don't know. Anyway, how are you all feeling about the fact that games are officially postponed and or canceled? I feel a sense of like giddy numbness. This has been in the works for so long. I've been anticipating this for years and years and years. And now that it's here, I'm actually a little relieved that things seem to be in less dire straits in terms of getting the season started than I feared they could have been, which might be just a result of me being a miserable old were talking pre-2020 we were already making references to the lockout or strike to come in 2022 and then the 2020 season happened and the owners probably lost some money and the players lost some money and after the 2020 season i thought okay now

having that experience delay to the season or a cancellation of the season is less likely just because of what happened and maybe i should have stuck with my initial impulse, because if I had, then this wouldn't necessarily be as unexpected as it now appears to be given. I'm sure we'll talk about the stalled momentum of yesterday, which maybe wasn't actually momentum, but given the long arc of this negotiation dating back half a decade, it isn't a huge surprise. resembled a win expectancy chart. It's just been up and down as talks have either progressed or stopped. And as the rhetoric has changed from angry to more conciliatory, I was actually sort of surprised that Tony Clark was maybe not quite as fire and brimstone as I expected that he might be given the Players Association statement that it tweeted out. He was maybe a little less that way than I expected

him to be. I don't know if that's what you meant, Michael, by the fact that it seems like we might not be as far away from productive talks as might have been imagined. But maybe it was just me kind of buying into the idea that, oh, they'll all just kind of realize that this has to be averted no matter what at the last second. But it was starting to seem maybe like something could have come together before one of these deadlines. And the fact that there was one deadline and then another deadline kind of tells you how arbitrary the deadlines were to begin with. But it seemed like and, you know, we're parsing tweets from people who are getting leaked to from one side or the other and the tone didn't always match him doing so. And what was it, 13 rounds of bargaining on Monday and people making jokes about sending in a zombie runner to cut things off. But they were up late and then they were up early again. And it seemed like at

least some sources would have to believe that things changed, that the tenor of the conversation changed from Monday to Tuesday. But it may very well be, that the tenor of the conversation change from Monday to Tuesday, but it may very well be just that the people who were leaking things on Monday were leaking things differently than the people who were leaking things on Tuesday, or at least the people who were allowing themselves to be leaked to, by which I mean Bob Nightingale. Well, before we talk about Bob, because gosh, shouldn't we do that? I think that thinking that there was some momentum was prior to yesterday, not completely unreasonable, if only because the players aren't actually asking for all that much. I mean, you know, we went into these negotiations, I think,

with an understanding of just how monumental a task clawing back all of the losses that the players have suffered over the course of the last CBA would be. And while they went in and did ask for, you know, some big stuff, they've been pretty conciliatory on those issues as the negotiations have gone on. There's nothing in this that fundamentally alters the landscape all that much. If anything, it is letting them barely keep up with the pace of revenues. So if only because it seems silly to risk damage to the sport and loss of revenue over such a small amount of money, it struck me that, yeah, maybe we would get a deal because the owners could go in, see what was being proposed and think, we've won. We've won this negotiation.

We haven't conceded anything we were unwilling to concede. We got expanded playoffs. We got an international draft. We got all of this stuff. And their unwillingness to see it that way, I think we were starting to get that telegraphed over the last couple of weeks. But I don't think it was unreasonable to think that this could have worked out because the earth didn't shake all that much, right? There's no radical change in the players' proposals here. But I guess there's a reason why none of the four of us is an owner, because we all see it that way, but we're not on that side. That's the only reason, though, because otherwise, you know. Yeah, like what I keep coming back to, and this has been repeated over and over in many different places, but you look at the asks and this is why, you know, the momentum from last night is what it is.

It may or may not have been real, but the numbers just aren't that far apart anymore in the grand scheme of things. or two proposals and the the owners came off of the 50 flat cbt penalty like there are numbers and compromises that can can be moved here so i just don't know what there is to cancel a season over at this point which is not where i was you know based on what was publicly available a week ago i think that there's still a lot of the bad feeling is still there from the player side. And a lot of the problems they set out to solve wouldn't be solved by these proposals. But in terms of just getting baseball started again, I'm feeling more optimistic than I have in a while. There's been a lot of talk about the pace of the talks and the lack of progress or the lack of engagement and MLB going

43 days after imposing the lockout before actually opening up the talks again. And then, you know, what was it? Nine, 10 days in a row of bargaining right before the deadline. There were a lot of comps to like, you know, the student trying to turn in the term paper the night before it's due, that kind of thing. We've all been in that scenario, but this seems less like procrastination than a tactic, right? I mean, this is what they wanted. I got the sense that they wanted to wait until the last moment, until this deadline that they made up, basically, and then to have it come down to that last second and hope that the players would break. I mean, that's my sense of what they wanted to happen here. This wasn't just like an accident. This was the design as far as I can

tell, right? Just to add that time pressure and have it be right up against the last date where you could possibly have an agreement in order to start the season on time, hoping that the players would say, okay, fine, we roll over and accept whatever you want. And that didn't happen. And I don't think there was any reason to expect that to happen, given how unified the players seem. But that seems to me like that was in the cards all along. I don't think it's a tactic. I think that's just how the negotiation is going to work. If you've got nothing, and I said this last time I was on here in the fall, There's no pressure to make a deal, particularly a deal that you're not thrilled with, if there's not a deadline coming up. And a lot of people are going after, well, Rob Manfred said his non-answer to the why did it take 43 days for a proposal from the owners.

And I think that's a valid, it's still a valid question. But he said, you know, we've done a lot of work over the last nine days. These nine days were really the only time that anybody was ever going to get serious because that's what the deadline was. That's when if we don't get a deal, then something bad happens. And up until that point, if you've got months or weeks of lead time, you can say, well, we're going to be patient. We're going to wait a little longer for the other side to blink. And now there are consequences for not blinking. And instead of just, we don't like this deal, so we're not going to accept it. There's a penalty for both sides for not coming to an agreement.

And both of them, you know, and I think the players rightly have said that we're willing to accept this penalty in exchange for, you know, instead of taking a deal that doesn't work for us. But the time pressure and the procrastination, like elements of this timing, I think are a deliberate tactic. But the fact that stuff only picked up in the past couple days, it's just how negotiations work. I agree with what you said, Mike, but I want to point to something Ben said, which is that the owners seem to hope that the players would break. And I would go further than that without delving too far into owner psychology,

although I have been thinking a lot about it. The owners didn't just hope that the players would break. They seemed to expect the players to break. And that was probably based on winning the last few CBA negotiations, right? If you get through 2016 and the one before that and the one before that and very much win by getting the financial incentives you want while giving up a third seat on a spring training bus, then you probably think it's going to happen again at the next negotiation. And I think they were taken aback by the unified front. Even if we could see it coming, the owners had prior experience where it just didn't manifest in the same way. And the analogy that... I'm sorry you didn't use, Mike, is it kind of reminds me of the

1980 Miracle on Ice, where the Soviet Union had won the four previous gold medals. They beat the US badly in a tune-up exhibition. And then they get into the all-important Miracle on Ice game. And all of a sudden, the US scores two goals in the first period, and the Soviet coach, who had expected the Americans to roll over, panics and pulls his goalie, who's the best goalie in the world,

and all of a sudden ruins everything. And maybe Rob Manfred is Tikhanov here, and I don't know who Trediak is in this analogy, and we can go back to baseball in a second. But it's just an example of... Can we? Will we ever be able to? Well, we're not going to because I'm going to take Zach's absolutely bizarre historical

analogy in which the owners are the communists, first of all. That is a fair critique, but the owners had won the last several negotiations and fully expected the opposition to roll over. And when the opposition didn't roll over, they didn't know what to do with their pre-planned strategy. Wouldn't a more apt analogy be that the union is the crew of the Red October? Bowman, go. So I was actually going to pull a different Olympic ice hockey analogy. That in terms of expecting the union to break,

I think that the union has taken that specific lesson to heart from the previous couple of CBAs. And one thing that like everything is over and over and over, the players are unified, everybody's communicating, everybody's motivated, everybody's mobilized. And that's something that if you want to look at the most successful collective player action in North American sports over the last 10 years, it's the U.S. Women's Olympic hockey team who went on strike in advance of the world championships a few years ago. And that only succeeded because they got the entire player pool in line and had them unified and completely on board. And I think I've told this story on this pod before, so I won't repeat it, or won't repeat

any more of it than I have already. But the only weapon that that the players have is withholding their labor and their their solidarity. And they seem to have that covered. So it's no, you know, it shouldn't be a surprise to to anybody, most of all the owners that they're meeting stiffer resistance this time around. Well, and I think that it's also useful that they had the galvanizing event that was 2020 we've talked about this i can't remember who amongst you i have talked about this with so probably all of you but i think that that year and the way that the league and the owners conducted themselves as the union and the league were negotiating the return to play was really illuminating for a lot of these guys especially the ones who had not been particularly active in the union previously and maybe didn't have a very strong sense of solidarity, that there was very little care being directed their way on the part of ownership and a real willingness to sacrifice as sort of as many games as they needed to in order to get what they wanted from a concession perspective. So I think that Manfred kind of underestimated the degree of solidarity and

particularly that event in clarifying for a lot of these players, the priorities of the league, which are not about their wellbeing or compensation or the health or safety. So I think that there has been a lot of really good recent work on the part of the union to foster that, but there's nothing like an event like 2020 to really sort of throw into specific relief where the fault lines are between these two parties. And in that respect, how big a strategic blunder does that look like the way the league handled those negotiations two years ago? Because I absolutely think that was a radicalizing

factor for a lot of players. And it's worth noting, I think, how we talk about the two sides, right? Like we talk about the players and how there are veterans and youngsters, and they're asking for buckets of money for different groups of players. But they, as we say, seem more unified than they have in some time. Whereas with the owners, we, even on this pod now, are grouping them all in one group and assuming that they all have the same interests. But that isn't true, right? Steve Cohen is probably not happy with the CBT thresholds, given that the Mets' 2022 payroll is already pushing over $250 million. the access into the owner's room to know which owners are pushing which proposals. But I imagine that some of the intransigence and some of the delay here has to do with disagreements on the owner side with different parties wanting different things. Something that Jonathan Judge, who's been on this pod before, pointed out today is that

baseball's smallest markets don't seem to want to spend any more money themselves, but they also don't want to be outspent by the bigger markets. And that just seems to be an intractable problem when some of the owners might be okay with some of the players' proposals, but when you need 23 to sign off on everything, that isn't going to work out if Pittsburgh and some of the other markets like that aren't going to sign off. I mean, that was a big problem in 1994 too. But to that point, I think that might be one of the reasons that Steve Cohen is not one of the more popular owners. He's not one of the people who's going out there and representing the owners in their negotiations, because for all his

other faults, and as much as he should be in jail, he actually wants to win, which makes him probably a minority among owners. So if that's his view and he wants to get the – he wants a higher CBT cap, he doesn't have the votes to push back against that because at least two-thirds or three-quarters of the owners will probably be like, okay, we can just all spend less money now. Yeah, and you all know me. I'm not the most emotional man. Yeah. And you all know me. I'm not the most emotional man. I'm not prone to fiery fits of rage. But this is really pretty infuriating that this is happening because it's a small group of people who are denying all of the rest of us baseball. And everyone wants to watch baseball and the players want to play baseball. And a lot of people, to some extent us, but even more others, livelihoods depend on baseball. And baseball is not going to be played, Major League Baseball is not going to be played at that time, just because this small group of people who have been doing extraordinarily well and would continue to do extraordinarily well under the terms of even the players' proposal are digging in their heels and saying, no, we won't cede any ground and are blowing it up for everyone.

And we all want to watch Shohei Otani. That is a subject that I am emotional about. Some of us more than others. And whether it's Soto or Acuna or on and on or all of the exciting teams that are out there, all the players that are just sort of in limbo out on the market, not knowing where they'll play. It's so frustrating because even if a deal were done quickly and there's no real indication that that will definitely be the case, the season is already marred by this because it's going to start late under the best of circumstances. And you're going to have probably some kind of compressed spring training. And then who knows how quickly all of the free agents out there will still be able to sign and what shape they'll be able to be in. Of course, the Players Association is going to be operating its own camps as it did a few years ago when there were so many unsigned free agents left at this stage. But who knows how that affects people's health and people's preparation for

the season. And we're probably going to be deprived of some games in any scenario and for no good reason, really. I mean, just a few immensely wealthy people who are going to continue to be immensely wealthy and are just holding the entire sport hostage. And this occupation, this entertainment that we all love, that we're all looking forward to, we can't have it just because they won't give any ground. And they gave a little bit of ground. There was some movement toward the middle, which was really a first as opposed to before when it was just we won't budge on anything of importance except in some small cosmetic way so that we can give the appearance of being bargaining in good faith here. There has been more significant movement in the

recent days, which is kind of encouraging, but there's just no real reason for this to happen. And you can't even call it a cell phone. Maybe it is a cell phone, but it's a cell phone that affects all of us. It has consequences for the sport, possibly long term, but certainly short term. And I don't know whether this will be disastrous or not. We did an episode and an interview about that recently. People are making the point that, well, this is different from 94 and baseball isn't as popular and there's all kinds of competing entertainment products out there and people are already sick of things because of the shortened 2020 season and all of the war of words that went

on at that time. But even if you think that fans would eventually come back and that revenues would bounce back, which of course is the owner's primary concern here, it's going to do damage to the sport, at least in the short term. And it's just not benefiting anyone really, except this small, small group that hopes that eventually they will be able to buy another yacht more easily or whatever it is, whatever real difference you could even measure in their net worth as a result of holding the line here. Also worth noting that the last time we actually lost games because of a labor battle, it wasn't agreement between the players and owners that ended it. It was a federal judge who is now a Supreme Court justice who ended it, and they had to play another couple years without a CBA in place. So that does not seem like an optimal endgame here. That would take a long time,

and it would lead to a lot more mess. It would lead all of us to not only have to learn about business, but also the law, which is not where I refuse to know anything about business or the law. That's why you're friends with me. Yeah, you don't have to know about business. You can just be like, oh, Meg. So I want to go back to the point that Ben was making only because it's specifically the topic and main thrust of the column that was just published on TheRinger.com, which is a good website. But we think about this as dividing pieces of the pie.

This is not an issue of there are 10 pieces and owners want seven and the players want six and they can't agree on a number. But the owners are costing themselves money by doing this, by fighting the players over tens of millions of dollars. Not even that in a lot of cases. Sometimes it's just millions of dollars for some of these proposals when by canceling games by like, there's something they could get to buy a 14 team playoff from the union. And that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They're willing to take less just to put a finger in the eye of the union. And so when you look at this, look at their behavior from any kind of like, you know, rational or game theory perspective.

They're not behaving in a way to maximize their own financial interests. This is there's no other way to read this apart from this is emotional for a lot of these owners. And it's about putting the union in their place. And it's about, you know, it's the juxtaposition of these very grandiose ideas, these huge amounts of money and very small, very petty grievances in some of these cases. And that's why we're losing the season. And the frustrating thing to the point Ben was making is there's nothing you or I or,

you know, there's nothing we can do about it. Even the nominal higher power and regulatory interests, like, they can't save the season. Governmental processes would take months. We'd get a deal before that. And so it's just frustrating to live under, and I'll put a dollar in the swear jar, under late capitalism, where this is, you know where this is just how the way things work. And everything's going to get more expensive and slightly worse over time. And there's not a whole lot that we, the consumers, the observers, the people who are invested in this emotionally can do about it, let alone the workers who actually give this industry any value. Yeah.

workers who actually give this industry any value. Yeah. Well, and I think the frustrating part is that we've had this idea maybe amongst ourselves that all it takes is an honest accounting of how little difference there really is and how little per team it costs, right? If we can put it in terms of how many flyer contracts on a reliever this is per team, cost, right? If we can put it in terms of how many, you know, flyer contracts on a reliever this is per team, then the sort of stakes of this, at least from a dollar's perspective, will be made stark and something will make the owners go, aha. But they're so far removed from either the impact of that feedback directly in terms of it making them like feel something in their tender human hearts or the impact that a mass exodus of fans from gate revenues could actually cause because of how many other ancillary revenue streams are that you really end up feeling kind of stymied. Like I've had a lot of people ask me, well, what can I do? And it's like,

I don't know how much they really care about you canceling your mlb tv like they care but do they care that much i don't know man like probably not they're making that money up up in you know prop bets as soon as we have a season again so it can make you feel to michael's point very helpless even in positions like ours where we have some impact on what the public narrative is around this stuff it's like once they get in the room none of that matters saying that they're going to make up that money and prop bets as soon as the season starts is the most depressing thing said on this podcast super super cursed sentence to be clear but it will take 20 minutes for that money to just flow back into the coffers of the league because there are so many ways that they can make money.

And, you know, I think you're right, Ben, that there will be people who say, I'm taking a break or I'm not going to go to the ballpark this year or whatever. But I don't think that the exodus will be sufficiently large for it to feel like pressure. And even if it does, the next time we do one of these, they're not going to remember any of that crap. It's going to be five years from now. We're all going to be living under domes and terrified that dinosaurs are back. We're going to have other problems. And it's not expressing the amount of money in terms of reliever contracts. It's not showing how much the owners are squeezing players. It's not like that's not an argument worth making or

work worth showing. But let's play this out to the very end. It's not like that's not an argument worth making or work worth showing. But let's say, let's play this out to the very end. Let's say that public opinion swings behind the players militantly and we've got people boycotting and we've got people burning effigies outside of Tom Ricketts' house. Like Meg said, they can't be threatened by that. There's nothing that we, the public,

their consumers, or they the mobpa have to threaten the owners with that can really put a scare in them and you know that's sort of a personally i find that as like a societal issue to be more concerning than having to hear about prop bets is as distasteful as i find some of that. But that's the really bummer part of this for me. If they come to a deal by the end and start the season by May 1st, I think everybody's going to forget about it by the World Series. But this is just another reminder of the forces that govern the society we live in. And it just sucks to have that thrown in your face all the time. Yep. The 2011-12 NBA season was a bit shorter than usual, but not terribly so.

They had a normal finals and everything. And really, the only reason that season matters— The Sixers were good that year. That's the only reason I remember that season. The 8-1 upset. But that season is basically only important historically now because it messes up my data whenever I'm writing some sort of historical basketball piece. And we all are familiar with that in baseball, of course,

because of 2020 and 1994 and 1995. But I think if, like Mike says, this is solved by May 1st, May 15th, then it won't have as deleterious a long-term impact. I just wonder what the path toward that agreement looks like at this point, because there isn't really a precedent for this specific scenario at this point. Yeah, I don't know how many studies I've done in the past where I have either excluded certain seasons or noted in the text, excluding 94, 95, and 81, the shortened seasons. Well, now we can add 2022 to the list, presumably. That just hit me.

Since the strike was such a good historical moment. Oh, no. For like the start of normal baseball. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my. That sucks. Yeah.

I can still enjoy watching baseball and even covering baseball and bringing attention to it, enjoy watching baseball and even covering baseball and bringing attention to it, knowing that that attention is enriching the owners who are basically doing their best to run the sport into the ground. As long as I'm getting something out of it, I can live with that because almost any entertainment option we choose these days, we're aware that it is enriching someone who is probably terrible in some way. That much I can live with. But I think what is extra frustrating about this is that the owners have put people like us even, people who most want baseball to come back and have things at stake, even personally and professionally, in its coming back. They've put us in the position at times of rooting for it not to come back because of the

circumstances that it would have to come back under. I mean, there have been times when MLB's last deal was dangling out there and they barely budged on anything and it would have made everything worse, where I'm just thinking, well, they shouldn't take that deal, right? don't even want them to take that deal, not only because it would be unfair in some way, but because it would make the sport worse in some way that would affect my enjoyment of it. And so here we are, and we're getting emails from listeners too. And we have very devoted listeners who love baseball a lot. And they are saying things like, I don't want the Players Association to accept these offers. I don't want baseball to come back because of what would happen to happen for it to come back while the owners are being so intractable. And I think that's the worst part of

it is that at times I've been sitting there thinking, well, of course I want there to be baseball, but I want there to be baseball in such a way that I can feel good about it and still enjoy it. And it's been hard to know whether both of those things can happen or whether they're mutually exclusive. And also like rooting against baseball coming back. I don't know if that even is productive in any way. For one thing, it's like spiteful almost. It's like, this is what I have now is like hoping the owners don't get their way instead of getting to enjoy actual great baseball players playing baseball. it's like a fan of a team that is eliminated from the playoffs and is now enjoying just being a spoiler and beating other teams like that's not as fun as actually getting the thing yourself disagree i have two comments spoken as a true foley fan i guess but yeah i was gonna say like

one of you guys on the pod last year asked me if I was okay with booing my own players. So first of all, I would encourage you to embrace spite as just a general principle. But I'm not upset by the fact that we're rooting under these very limited circumstances, rooting against baseball. As you put it, I think it's just a realization that even if you love a thing, how the thing is made is important. And sometimes it's okay to have less of a thing if it means that the thing is done in a more ethical, equitable manner. I thought about this a lot when we were talking about restarting society, as it was during the pandemic. I'm okay going without the stuff I love temporarily, if it means that we can make the world a better place. I think this is a very small,

low stakes example of that. But, you know, I'm okay missing a few games, if it means that the game is going to be more competitive. And, you know, whether the current proposals on the table can achieve that is a different question. But I think it's okay to have momentary disruptions in pursuit of loftier societal or even just petty industry-based goals. Yeah, I see what you're saying. On the other hand, it's also extra galling that I don't think the owners really want baseball to be played right now either. And so if I root against baseball being played in these circumstances, I'm almost playing into the owner's hands as well, because really want baseball to be played right now either. And so if I root against baseball being played in these circumstances, I'm almost playing into the owner's hands as well, because they don't

seem to care if the season starts now. They seem to be fine with waiting a month or two months or whatever, the coldest, lowest attendance months when kids are in school and their profit margins are not quite as wide as they will be later in the year, the players are probably the ones who would be paying the stiffer penalty, at least for a while, right? Because as long as the owners get the playoffs and the revenue that comes with that, and who knows whether expanded playoffs will still be on the table or not after all of this. I assume that they still will be in some form, but we could talk about that. But if we miss a month or two of the season and then we come back and have expanded playoffs, I think the owners would probably be

just fine with that, right? I mean, they may even prefer that. And you said you weren't spiteful. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. It's not even spiteful to hope that baseball doesn't come back right away because that might be just what the owners want. And there's a question that I mean, you could lose an entire season and then end up back where you were before. games that are off the calendar now. He said they've been canceled and the league doesn't have the intent of rescheduling them. And in the press conference that the Players Association held, which was, again, carried only ever so briefly on the networks that you might expect, their expectation is that they will ask for compensation and have those canceled games rescheduled. The longer this goes, the harder the restart becomes in some ways because a bigger chunk of the revenue pie

that cancellation constitutes. And you imagine that they're not going to say, we'll walk away from that demand, right? They get to collectively bargain the length of the season. So how much do you think the union's insistence on being made whole for those games, whether in the form of playing them or just having compensation for them them is going to impact the speed with which the owners are sort of interested in coming back to the table. Because this was a huge sticking point in 2020. And we had a pandemic to blame for it, right? It was like, this wasn't necessarily the owners being, you know, spiteful entirely, right? We were trying to keep people from getting COVID in that year. At the very least, it certainly adds just another item to the bargaining table like this isn't like apples to apples but

we saw in the last 48 hours all of a sudden the shift was under discussion again and pitch clocks were under discussion again and i was like i thought we were focused on money at this point so i think it's a useful reminder of how many items still remain open in bargaining, and especially when they're all being packaged together. Like if ultimately there comes to be some sort of deal where the union and the owners agree on CBT thresholds, but then that is tied to the revenue from these lost games, then that's not really an agreement on CBT thresholds because you need the whole package to work. So I think it adds a complication that didn't exist when they were at the table last night and earlier this morning. So it sounds like, based on some comments that came out after ESPN stopped carrying the press conference, Tony Clark said the game has suffered damage for a while now. The game had changed. The game has been manipulated. Players have been commoditized in a way that's really hard to explain in the grand scheme. And Bruce Meyer, the negotiator for the PA, said, We've also been clear and consistent that there are major issues on which we're very far apart.

That hasn't changed. There have been and still are major issues. And so I guess the question is now that even this kind of fictional deadline is behind us, there just is no deadline now. And every day and every week that's missed just eats into the season, but there isn't really a hard date that you can point to and say it has to be done by then. So I guess the question is what forces them, well, let's hope they come back to the table sometime soon. In a few days, they regroup. But after that, I guess, is the urgency that was clearly there over the last couple of days still going to be there? Can you keep that level of

intensity up knowing that you're losing games every day that this goes by? Or after a certain amount of time, does it just kind of blend together? And it's like, well, we're already pot committed to this thing, so we might as well keep going. Yeah, I don't think you can keep that intensity up, which is why I think it's a good thing that they're retreating to their separate corners and both owners and the PA are going to regroup and come back at this with sort of fresh eyes, hopefully soon. I mean, it seems

like neither side is really itching to delay the season any longer than necessary. So I hope they'll come back to bargaining soon. But eventually, the lockout will generate a momentum of its own, and you're going to feel like you've lost. This is the big motivating factor, is that every day this goes on now, both sides are going to lose gobs of money. And so they're going to start putting that into their mental calculus, whether they put it into a balance sheet or not, it's going to weigh on them emotionally. And they're going to feel like, okay, well, are the gains I'm getting back in the CBA going to be enough for missing 30 days worth of ticket sales or 30 days worth of paychecks? And that's when things could,

I think, start to get contentious and really ugly. So, you know, I think there's been more progress in the last 72 hours than I really expected there to be at this point. But if there's going to be a point where there's going to be an inflection point, I don't know where it is. It could be two weeks from now. It could be three months from now where just the path dependence of this is going to weigh on the situation so heavy and it's going to make it harder for a deal to come together. I think you're right, but I'm just the part that concerns me is aren't we there now? Like the difference in any given year over the course of this cpa is like 200 million bucks no i don't think we're there now i i don't think we're close to there now i think that like there's been so how many games did they lose in 2020 and over like over a whole lot less money than is at stake right now i think that like there's a commitment for for both owners and the pa to show that they mean business and that means

like you know we mean this so much, you know, we were so committed, we're willing to lose games. How many games that is, probably different for each side and under what circumstances, but I don't think that the fear of that right now, I think the, the amount of money lost matters less than the principle of the thing for everybody involved. And I don't think that's necessarily unhealthy. the thing for everybody involved. And I don't think that's necessarily unhealthy. So it seemed like there was movement on some important issues and there are still large gaps when it comes to the bonus pool for players early in their careers. And there's still a pretty large gap when it comes to the CBT, although MLB did finally back off its demand

to make the penalties for going over the payroll tax threshold steeper. So that was a positive development. Yeah. But in their latest proposal, the first three years all have the same threshold. They think nobody realizes inflation exists on the union side. Right. Yeah. And the salary minimum, I guess, is somewhere in the middle-ish between the two. What was it? MLB's latest proposal is $700,000. The EPA is at $775,000, something like that. I don't think it's that far away.

I think it was $700,000 versus $725,000 unless I read something wrong. But there's a difference in how much it goes up every year. That's the difference too is that these things don't seem to escalate and keep pace with inflation, let alone revenue. And what else? I mean, the PA earlier backed off its attempt, very brief attempt to try to extend free agency to more players and then has also backed off its attempts to increase the Super 2 pool and get players to arbitration sooner. Although that backing off seemed, at least in the way that it was initially reported by Evandrelic, as if it were contingent on them getting the concessions they want around CBT thresholds. So that's an important thing to note. Right. So none of this stuff is settled. And then there were other things that, as Zach said, just came into play

in the last minute here, just about Manfred wanting to be able to impose some of these changes to the game on the field without waiting a year to do so. And generally, I'm with him on a pitch clock, and I'm kind of with the league when it comes to changing some things that the players have not been in favor of changing. But even so, I would not want them to be able to do that by fiat in 45 days, if that's what they were asking, because that's just not enough notice. So I don't think that would be great. And of course, the Players Association didn't respond well to that either. And then the shift suddenly entered the chat and banning the shift at the last second there and we were so close the funny the funniest one was alongside the shift and pitch counts was

bigger bases yes and like i think bigger basis is a fun idea if it increases stolen bases sure but it is funny to imagine like negotiating over tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in gap over five years and then all of a sudden you're like hey want to make the bases two inches bigger like that's gonna strike a deal right yeah but this this stuff's in every cba yeah like how much like you know we negotiated over like signage, you know, bathroom signage and stuff. And I agree. It's just like the fact that that's being thrown in at the end as like alongside all of these other items. I guess when we did it, we kind of squared away everything else first. So it just left money for the end, which it seemed like MLB was doing.

And we were just going to ignore the on field matters this time around. But Manfred had other plans. was doing and we were just going to ignore the on-field matters this time around but manford had other plans right i mean working conditions covers a wide variety of topics if you know that wasn't clear before yeah and then of course there's the playoff expansion and either way we lose i think at least as people who are generally anti-playoff expansion. It's going to be expanded. It's just a question of how much. And the Players Association is sticking to 12 teams. The league is pushing for 14. It seemed that they had agreed for now on 12, although again, nothing is signed yet. And that was when Bob Nightingale briefly came to the fore because, well, he reported that there seemed to be a compromise on the 12-team matter, which was not wrong necessarily.

But he also made it seem as if the sides were pretty close on other issues and that a deal was getting closer. And that obviously didn't happen. And maybe that tells you something about his sources. But he became the main character of baseball Twitter there even more than he usually is for a few hours. And people were saying, oh, this is the redemption of Bob Nightingale. He is out there. He's going to break the news of the lockout ending while all the other reporters were sitting there silently not tweeting except for pictures of the sides walking back and forth. And as it turns out, maybe he got a little bit ahead of himself there.

And as it turns out, maybe he got a little bit ahead of himself there. It was almost literary. Like it was so perfectly like the perfect payoff to years of buildup. Just absolutely incredible. You know, one man holding the torch out in midnight as the two sides are going together and also becoming farther apart. I'm sitting in my living room yelling, kiss. Game of Thrones wishes it was that well plotted out. I'm just in awe.

This is a bit navel-gazy, but I think Nightingale aside, I have been struck by the tone of some of the national reporters. Obviously, Mike and I are going to think that the owners are in the wrong here, but to see the columns from folks like Jeff Passan, and they radicalized Ken Rosenthal. To see his column and the kind of uniformity among national media types to blame Manfred and the owners, again, as we've been talking about,

I don't know if any of that really matters to the owners i suspect it doesn't but it is a shift in how matters of labor have been talked about this particularly in baseball i wasn't around to follow the 1994 strike coverage but we get it you're young but i i know that wasn't the case back then. So I get like a very, very thin silver lining, but it's been nice to see from that perspective. Yeah. I think that's a real silver lining. I mean, this is going to make me sound like the reformed, you know, former poli-sci PhD that I was,

but like, I think that the import for this stuff is helping people understand the value of organized labor writ large and one of the big challenges that that folks have is they're trying to build and foster solidarity with people who make a lot less money than major league baseball players do at least the ones who are up in and stick in the majors for a while is helping them understand that the the sort of cause and thrust is common and i think that even if it doesn't end up changing things in the room at the table, having the national media be able to say, no, the fault here lies very obviously with the commissioner and with ownership,

has value societally beyond just whatever ends up happening with this particular CBA. And having it expressed in those terms around a thing that people like, I think has real value. I know that we live in a little echo chamber and that every average fan is not sitting there saying, the owner is down with capital. But a lot more of them, I think, are reckoning with the reality of this labor force being underappreciated and undercompensated relative to the revenue that they bring in. And that has value. And this is something that I think, I don't know how insulated the players are from this,

but people, not Zach, who came out of the birthing chamber 30 minutes ago, but the other three of us, we all graduated from college in the middle of the the great recession which is part of the reason that at least i went to grad school which was a huge mistake but like the but people our age who have that experience who didn't come up through like the keep your real world stuff out of my my sports like 800 word gamer newspaper type of thing which you know i think describes us but also you know maybe somebody like hannah kaiser who's been on the ground covering this stuff the whole way like getting those outside perspectives as opposed to just

people who just generate scoops and and regurgitate rhetoric and and have been trained to think about the game in the world a certain way. Everybody's calling this the way that their view of the world has trained them to see it. And I think having a better-rounded, more holistic view of the world is a good thing. And I think, for the most part, our readers and listeners are smart enough to pick up on that and pick up on a lot more nuance than maybe they would have been given credit for 25 years ago. Can't write gamers without any games. That's right. Desperate times.

That's why you're a full-time basketball writer now. Anyone want to read about the Celtics' unique coverage of pick and roll defense? I got you. I do not want to read about the Celtics. Will you just write about Ja? Because I've decided I'm a Grizzlies fan. And while everyone else was watching the Twitter to see what was going on last night,

I was just watching Ja Morant be the coolest human being alive for a couple minutes. Do you think it would help the players' effort if Ja Morant dunked over Rob Manfred? I think I have an inappropriate answer to that question. No, I mean, I think that it would be humbling in a way that might actually make him more intransigent. So since we're talking about basketball,

we can talk about James Harden. And since we're talking about James Harden, we're talking about beards. And can we talk about Tony Clark's lockout beard? He looks great. It's incredible. Whatever else the lockout brings, I'm so grateful we got to see that. It's immaculate. He looks like if God looks like that, I'm going to be really happy when I die. Yeah. He looked like he should be doing some smiting with that beard.

Yeah. He wasn't. He was fairly soft-spoken, but it is really immaculately groomed. It's got like a really sharp line and separation. And the color also, it's like the snow white beard. Stark white. Oh, obviously. So you have a ton of hair on the bottom of his head and none on the top. And it's just really a great look, especially with the spectacles that go with it. So yeah, I'm in favor of more screen time for Tony Clark, just hopefully not for these circumstances. But let's pick a different sport again, hockey. Do you think that Tony Clark will continue to grow that beard out as a lockout beard, like a playoff beard in the NHL? to grow that beard out as a lockout beard,

like a playoff beard in the NHL. It'll just get bushier and bushier. He's got plenty of contacts within the PA. I remember years ago having a very long conversation with Archie Bradley about beard maintenance. Tony Clark has plenty of people to go to for advice. Not that it seems like he needs it. It's just, it's exquisite. It's the only thing in baseball in months that has made me happy. Speaking of hockey, by the way, I was going to ask this because we saw Bryce Harper Instagram message the Yomiuri Giants on Monday.

And technically, players are allowed to go play wherever they want, right, in international leagues. That's something that happened during the NHL's work stoppage in 2004-2005 when there was no season. Players went and played internationally. It happened in 1314 too. Right. Okay. So there's no way that happens here, is there? Would you have any interest in doing that? Because I feel like I obviously would want to play. Players like playing baseball, and it's a pretty good way to stay in shape and also make some money potentially for some of them. Doesn't necessarily make a huge difference for Bryce Harper, but it would for others. But

I mean, there's the problem of, you know, limits on international players in those international leagues, which would prevent most of them from doing that. And there are there almost aren't any leagues to go to, which is a big issue. Like, where are you going to find what you like? You would find something that we would recognize as like major league hockey in basically every country in Europe. And there just isn't that equivalent of jobs out there. If we're going to talk about an alternative form of, of lockout hockey, what I would like to see is the equivalent of the Wayne Gretzky's 99 all-stars from the 94

lockout, uh, where he just got a bunch of superstars together and they barnstormed around Europe playing local all-star teams. Like I would love to see Mike Trout's 27 all-stars going on tour. I said this on Twitter yesterday, like, hey, there are 40 vacant minor league stadiums now. I have no idea what happened to the teams that they used to play there, but it's not like there's any shortage of professional quality baseball stadium where they could go play games or do a home run derby for charity. I think if this lockout goes on, yeah, that'll be something fun to do to kill the time and keep the players in the public eye. It'd be like that pickup game during 2020, right, when the season hadn't started yet. And I guess at the time they were probably breaking pandemic

protocols and social distancing and such. It was Arizona. I guarantee you they were not. Yeah. So that maybe wasn't the best. But otherwise, it was kind of cool to see them play a sandlot pickup style game. And yeah, like if you went to NPB, I mean, there's an injury risk, I guess, whatever you do. But also like you'd be displacing some NPB player in theory, and you'd obviously be a mercenary who was only there until the lockout ended. And so that wouldn't be the best maybe, but if you just barnstormed and entertained people and also remind them what they're missing and build some goodwill probably for the player side, that'd be fun. I also say like international travel,

like even now that we've pretended the pandemic is over, it's way more complicated now than it was the last time the NHL locked out its players. So, you know, as fun as it would be to see Bryce Harper, who's a big Vegas Golden Knights fan, keeping the hockey theme going, seeing him play for the Yomiuri Giants, I'm not going to hold my breath on any name players going to Asia. You say that, but Darren Williams in the NBA lockout a decade ago, he was an active all-star in the prime of his career, making eight figures. And he went and signed with a Turkish club with a clause in his contract that if the NBA lockout ended, that he would be able to leave and come back to the NBA. He ended up playing like a dozen games in Turkey and was so good and famous that they retired his number after just a dozen games. So maybe Bryce could. Darren Williams was an all-star. I think it was briefly at least a fun night on baseball Twitter in a gallows humor kind of way on Monday because, A, there seemed to be some momentum and everyone was watching this at the same time. And it was sort of absurd because you had Walk Watch being the new hug watch that you get at the trade deadline. And it's like Dan Halem and Rob Manford and whoever Dick Monfort walking from this place to that place.

Right, yes. But the fact that we were all actually engaged in something at the same time, that kind of reminded me, hey, sports can be fun when they are being played and it's a good collective activity. And it's a whole lot more fun to watch games than to watch Rob Manfred walk across a parking lot, ultimately to no end. But when we were all watching that and just the inherent silliness of it really against the backdrop of what Rob Manfred would describe as the disastrous loss of games, even though he didn't go to great lengths to prevent it seemingly, that was a weird mood and atmosphere. And then, of course, you had Nightingale just bringing the whole thing to a head, as you already talked about. But that made me wish for actual baseball that is more fun than just watching people walk across parking lots. And other than that, and I guess this is a boom time for the photographers who've taken pictures of baseballs with locks and chains around

them. So great that those continue to get a ton of use. But other than that, not a ton of upside here. There was a bit of other news on Monday that I don't know whether you all think is related in any way or was just odd timing. But Derek Jeter stepping down as CEO of the Miami Marlins. Did you make anything of that? I mean, there was one line in his statement, right, where he said kind of cryptically, the vision for the future of the franchise is different than the one that I signed up to lead, which suggests that maybe he thought he was going to be given more rope and more payroll. And there was some reporting about that, again, like half the baseball media was in that parking lot in Florida. So they didn't have a ton of time to chase down why Derek Jeter resigned, I guess. But that was the basic idea. And I don't know, there's been some reporting in the past, I think, about how Jeter's bonuses were tied to the Marlins payroll. And so maybe he

didn't have that much incentive for them to spend at the time either. You would think that someone who like took winning for granted during his career and professed to care all the time about winning would maybe have been frustrated by the lack of investment in that roster. But who really knows? We don't know what went on behind the scenes there. I did think that there was a tweet from Miguel Rojas of the Marlins who basically like tweeted an image of Jeter's resignation statement and said, this is what leaders do. Which I thought what leaders do is reside, I guess, like famously captains abandon the ship. Hey, maybe if Miguel Rojas, the de facto captain of the Marlins, had quit in the first weekend of the 2020 season, maybe his entire team in the Phillies wouldn't have all gotten COVID. I was going to make that same reference. At least they made the playoffs that year. But

yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess there's a scenario where Jeter took a principled stand and said, I cannot abide this low payroll and I'm walking. But if you're like the CEO, I mean, he wasn't the GM. Like if you're the CEO, it's kind of like your job to get him to send more. He's not the CEO. He was always a puppet. Yeah, I guess he was a figurehead with a small investment. Derek Jeter's job with the Marlins was – and I apologize for getting emotional on your very non-emotional podcast.

Oh, I get emotional all the time. It's Ben who's focused and stayed. The comm center over here. getting emotional on your very non-emotional podcast oh i get emotional all the time it's ben who's who's you know focused and the comm center over here yeah the mr intj over here but his job is to keep bruce sherman's name out of the papers when the marlins take in tons of tax rebates and don't spend any money and lose 95 games that was his whole thing was to give off the impression that he was running the show and so like if it was what was reported and what Justin Turner seems to be operating under the assumption he was doing, then yeah, it's related because like the problem is not necessarily the minimum salary or or super two or or the competitive balance tax threshold it's that there's a financial financial incentive for most of the league not to feel the competitive team and so if that's what the issue was that the marlins have by hooker by crook built a very exciting young pitching staff they've got jazz chisholm they've

got like there's reason to be optimistic about a team that's getting outspent by their division rivals two three or five to one, and Jeter's like, hey, give me $15 million so I can get a decent center fielder or re-sign somebody to replace Starling Marte, and he's not getting it, then yeah, that is the problem. That's the same issue. Right. And hopefully his departure doesn't affect Kim Eng's standing there in any way, because obviously they had a pre-existing relationship.

Beyond that, though, you just hope that she isn't going to be saddled with perpetually perennially low payrolls as well because if so, she's going to have to get creative and maybe that's okay because they have two starting rotations worth of viable starters. So maybe she can make it work, but it'd be a lot easier to make it work if she could go spend some money. Of course, that's all contingent on the lockout ending. Well, she might have to interview for a different job. Yeah, well, the lockout would have to end for her to be able to spend some money or for the Marlins to win some games. Well, and the other thing that we don't know yet, and I imagine given the current state of the industry that we're not going to see anything happen too quickly,

but a big part of what Jeter had to do was build up the infrastructure for that team to be remotely good and some of that meant bringing a bunch of guys who he had connections to through the yankees like half of that player dev and r&d staff is just a transplant from the bronx so are those people gonna stick around when jeter is gone i don't know the answer to that so it's not just the you know it's not just him leaving that has an impact like a lot of there's a lot of oh i'm gonna say it i'm gonna say this sentence and i want you to know that i know it sounds bad there's a lot of jeter dna in that office i have regrets i have immediate regrets but you leave a gift basket when he left as well?

I did appreciate that everyone was just like, screw it, we're doing these jokes again. They're still funny, because guess what? They are. Yeah. So I can't believe that I'm asking this, but it's a sign of the times that I've been pushed to the brink here. Mike, is there any college baseball we should be watching

while we wait for the lockout to end? I mean, as we record, South Carolina's losing to App State, so I'm not too happy about college baseball either. Well, speaking of players who are not paid what they're worth, maybe. That's true. Does name and likeness stuff, does that affect college baseball in any way? I mean, obviously, like athletes in other college sports are bigger celebrities whose names and likenesses are maybe worth more in most ways. But have there been college baseball players, to your knowledge, who have benefited from that? There have been a couple, like I cringe to say this, I think Barstool sponsoring a couple of college baseball players.

But I mean, that's definitely like a viable thing. And certainly in the SEC, like schools like South Carolina, Mississippi State, like LSU, that would be huge, but not like huge, like a football player huge, but you can probably make a decent amount of money. It's like everything with college baseball. In some places, it could be a big deal, but in most places, it's probably not going to be on the radar. Hey, Ben, if we're spitballing here, I have an IndyBall question for the expert. Gut instinct, because our conversation about IndyBall inspired this question. Just off the top of your head, no thought, what would Bryce Harper slash in Sonoma?

Boy, I mean, the Pacific Association doesn't even exist in the form that it used to now. So it's an entirely different league and level at this point. But back then, he'd still make outs at times just because of the- Are you sure? I think so. Just the nature of baseball. Like inevitably, he would hit a line drive right at someone. Although at that level, not everyone catches every line drive hit right at them, especially if it's 120 miles per hour, as it probably would be if Bryce Harper were hitting at that level.

But, yeah, he might hit like – he'd probably hit like 600, 700 maybe I would say. How much would he get walked? Well, yeah, that's the issue is he'd probably – he probably should just be walked in every plate appearance. Like the peak bonds treatment would actually make sense statistically for Bryce Harper at that level, I would think. But yeah, he would be scary. Effectively Wild can still have random hypothetical questions that fit the podcast that are actually relevant to the lockout. Oh, yeah. We can keep going here and we will somehow. But all right.

Well, this was not a full college baseball preview episode, but I gave you a chance there. If you want to shout out a couple storylines that this is a sincere offer because people will be desperate for baseball in the United States and there won't be a whole lot of it, at least until the minor league start and Indy ball. Yeah. the thing is, a lot of the big programs, I don't have a schedule in front of me, so I can't point out what games to watch this weekend. But a lot of the, they're still a non-conference, so you're not getting the big, juicy matchups.

And a lot of teams like Indiana went down, absolutely got their clock cleaned. Although Penn took a series from Texas A&M at Texas A&M this weekend. They sure did. Rallied in one of those games, too. It was fun. Yeah.

So we're not getting the Phillies at the Astros to start the big league season, but we got the college baseball equivalent. And that turned out pretty good for the home team, or for, I guess, my home team. Well, if we get to the point where you're preparing quizzes for me about college baseball player names and I actually know the answers, that would be a bad sign for MLB because it would mean. This is the thing, Ben. The names alone. Oh, the names are great.

Just the names, Ben, are, you know, I sound like it's like a total stoner Meg talk, but it's like, have you heard about these human names, man? Like, have you heard about what humans call their kids? Some of these names are great. Yeah. All right. We forgot to mention, by the way, that the international draft also snuck into the last day or two of negotiations. It's been there the whole time. I don't understand.

It's been around. Yeah. People are acting like this is new. They've been wanting an international draft since the beginning of the negotiations we just assumed that like the domestic amateur draft the parameters of it would get punted until the cba is actually agreed to because that's exactly how much they care about either draft yeah i'd love to know just how important like the draft lottery is to the players actually because they do seem to be pushing for it and they tentatively it seemed had agreed on the first five picks being lottery picks but it just

seems almost beside the point at least if this is an anti-tanking measure like teams in baseball are not tanking for draft picks at least not anymore so if the players association is spending any of its leverage on that i just I don't get it really. It doesn't deter tanking in basketball where it actually works. Like it's beyond eyewash. I find that just so frustrating that we're going to have it and we're going to have like if you make me do math to figure out who's going to have the number one pick next year. That's just so impolite. I'm not not happy about it.

Michael against math math against business against law yeah that's gonna be my the slogan for my u.s senate campaign oh no you're gonna win yeah i'm gonna kick cory booker's ass all right well it sounds like what is the consensus if we were all forced to predict and of course course, I famously hate predicting. But when I have been asked to predict and Meg, you made me predict fairly recently, I think. And what did I say? You like making other people predict. So it felt like the turntable should be turned.

I feel hypocritical when I do that and I should stop doing that. But when you made me pick, I said maybe we miss April, right? Yeah, I think that's right. I guess that's still what I'm sticking to like i i really wish we had i was telling zach and bobby this the other day that like i wish we had done a day by day like bayesian uh i thought you hated math don't trot out the word bayesian here i know things that i hate zach but like it would have been really fun to go back and look at the way our perception of this has changed throughout the winter. Yes.

Yeah, because I definitely hoped that we could avoid where we are now. So this is sad. But I told you yesterday, Mike, I sent you a picture of my daughter wearing the onesie that you gifted her with Lance Lynn on it. And that's the only time I'm going to be seeing Lance Lynn as well, unfortunately. But sadly and symbolically, that onesie was pooped on today. And so it is temporarily out of the rotation. But that feels appropriate because that is basically what the owners did. Well, I'm glad she felt comfortable in the Lance Lynn onesie. Yeah. No, it's for six months and she is not quite six months.

And it's pretty voluminous, as you would expect for an article of clothing that bears the body of Lance Lynn. They only make Lance Lynn stuff so small. It's good. She can grow into it eventually. But nice to at least see Lance.

That's how starved I am for MLP these days is that your crush, Lance Lynn, I'm happy to see him. I'm happy to talk about college baseball. We'll do whatever it takes. But it's been good to talk to you guys again. It's been quite a while, and I'm sorry that we couldn't be joined by our Ringer MLP show producer, Bobby Wagner, who was moving today. And he could have brought in another podcast crossover to Tipping Pitches, his show here.

And he could have brought in another podcast crossover to Tipping Pitches, his show here. He was unavailable, but he would have supplied probably even more anti-owner invective than we mustered today. But we did okay. I'm so proud of Bobby. I taught him everything he knows. All right. Well, thank you guys. And I hope that I get to talk to you on a podcast again sometime soon. Yeah.

I hope that I get to talk to you on a podcast again sometime soon. Yeah, if we could see if the Ringer F1 show with me and Meg Schuster ever gets off the ground. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. And thanks to Zach and Michael for joining us. Always fun to talk to those guys, even if the circumstances aren't the best. You can find Michael on Twitter at Michael Bauman and Zach on Twitter at Zach Cram. Isn't that easy? And you can find their and my writing, mostly not about baseball these on Twitter at Zach Cram. Isn't that easy? And you can

find their and my writing, mostly not about baseball these days, at TheRinger.com. One thing I meant to mention, I don't know whether you picked up on this too, but there seemed to be some difference in mood when comparing Clark and Manfred in their respective press conferences. Clark seemed somber. He said it was a sad day for baseball. Manfred seemed almost jocular, at least by his standards, which doesn't matter that much, really. Actions speak louder than words or expression, so he could have been sobbing for all the difference it made. As long as he was up there canceling games, he didn't have to cancel. The way he did it wouldn't have mattered all that much, but it still seemed somewhat discordant. If you're a commissioner, canceling games should be one of

the worst things you have to do, and he was sort of smiling and joking. Maybe it's insignificant, but it didn't quite capture the severity of the situation. It also occurred to me as I was watching the State of the Union address timely after we recorded, wonder how it's decided that the commissioner gets to go first and then the Players Association gets to go second. With the State of the Union, it makes sense that the president delivers the speech and then the opposing party delivers the rebuttal. With a labor situation, it could go either way. I suppose if you are the side that is canceling games and you are the side that imposed the lockout, it would also make sense for you to speak first. But in theory, that shouldn't always be the case. It's just a function of the fact that the commissioner

is kind of a celebrity, is seen as a spokesperson for the game, even though it's a very partisan position. Now I'll leave you with this quote from former Effectively Wild guest Ross Stripling, who is the Blue Jays player rep. Now the union statement that was published on Twitter said that the lockout is the culmination of a decades-long attempt by owners to break our player fraternity. Stripling, speaking about the negotiations Monday night and Tuesday morning, said, It got to be like 12.30 and the fine print of their CBT proposal was stuff we had never seen before. They were trying to sneak things through us.

It was like they think we're dumb baseball players and we get sleepy after midnight or something. It's like that stupid football quote, they are who we thought they were. They did exactly what we thought they would do. They pushed us to a deadline that they imposed and then they tried to sneak some shit past us at that deadline, and we were ready for it. We've been ready for five years, and then they tried to flip it on us today in PR, saying that we've changed our tone and tried to make it look like it was our fault.

That never happened. That quote was reported by Shai Davidi at Sportsnet. So that's one side of the story, but given what we've seen, doesn't sound especially implausible. We'll probably have a bit more lockout and bargaining-related coverage on the podcast later this week. Maybe we will try to talk to someone who was actually on the scene for those scintillating sights of executives striding back and forth to exchange proposals. Maybe we can hear a bit more about how it all went down or didn't. In the meantime, you can support us on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. We really do appreciate that so many of you have

stuck with us throughout the lockout. We can get through this thing together eventually. And the following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad-free while getting themselves access to some perks. Logan Carlson, John Cho, Jemish Mehta, Daniel Keegan, and Justin Kusan. Thanks to all of you. If you're looking for something non-lockout related, you can catch me and Meg on the February Patreon bonus pod that we recorded and published earlier this week. We drafted technologies that we take for granted in our daily lives that would have blown our minds when we were kids or would not have been available at all. So that was fun.

A non-baseball related draft for you. You can get access to all of the monthly bonus pods that we have recorded, as well as other perks like the Effectively Wild patron-only Discord group. Again, by signing up at patreon.com slash effectively wild. You can also all join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash effectively wild you can also all join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and meg coming via email at podcast at fancrafts.com or via the patreon

messaging system if you are a supporter you can can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at BWPod. You can also browse the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. Check the show page, as always, for links to a lot of the stories we discussed, including Michael's columns and statements by the Players Association and the League. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Couldn't stand another broken love affair. My heart is closed for you. Baby, it's closed for you.

And the 1997 Pontiac Astrowagon goes to the fan sitting in seat number 0001C Montgomery Bay. Yeah! Yeah! And the fans do not like this one bit. And here come the pretzels. Oh, no. Don't do that. You're supposed to be tasting them.

Hall of Famer Whitey Ford now on the field, pleading with the crowd for some kind of sanity. Uh-oh, and a barrage of pretzels now knocking Whitey unconscious. Wow, this is a black day for baseball.