At the time of writing, there is still no agreement between the MLB owners and the MLBPA. When I gave up waiting, things were getting closer to meeting the owners' deadline to start the regular season on time. Today is est. That's a problem for another day, but not that they could enforce that without the players. The movement was the first of its kind, and things are moving in the right direction.
It seems that neither the players or owners are agreeing to anything that will fix the game and its main problems, based on what we have seen from various baseball writers.
The minimum salary is being raised. Even with the league awash in cash and the sport relying on players making that minimum far more than anyone else, MLB's minimum salary will still be miles behind the other three major sports. There is no scrapping of the luxury tax, or the penalties for going over it that teams have used as a salary cap. There is nothing to encourage teams to spend more since they don't come close to the luxury tax. You're going to get what you've seen from the Pirates.
Is that playoff expansion is coming and will contribute to the drivel that the MLB regular season will become? Bob Nightengale reported that the players might have kept the owners from getting in, so I expect to hear that the MLB playoffs will be 24 teams.
Expansion of the playoffs will only make the front office want to field a team that can run with the few that are trying to be all they can be. Who has to try all that hard outside of the AL East? You can try to chase down the Dodgers and build a consistent 105-win team. If you want to make the playoffs every year, you can aim for an 89-win one, and maybe one year everything will just bounce your way and you can call your mission accomplished. The Dodgers do everything right and everything has only bounced their way once in their decade of dominance, and that was in the season-in-a-can of 2020. Maybe it isn't worth trying that hard. Most teams will say that.
You'll get a training video for the games that count in October, but you won't get anything else. They don't really care about getting their team into them, so much as the TV money for them gets spread to all their accounts. There is an important series in August when both teams are in the playoffs. The beauty of baseball used to be that it was built to a conclusion. It will be a lot of meaningless processions that you will forget as soon as they are over.
Even if there is a chase for the top spot in each league, it is unbalanced. The White Sox will get to harvest on the decomposing organs of their division all season while the other teams have to maul each other 18 times a season. The White Sox will be better than all of them because of their geography.
The game could have been changed by the players. They had to hold on to the money. It was a huge risk. They didn't take it. They will get some changes around the edges. We will get a slightly warmed up thing. The 30 owners are the ones who always win. They will leave us to pick up the pieces when they lose. If there are any left.
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