The World Series is over. There will be no baseball played today. There will be no baseball played tomorrow. And sadly, we have no idea when Major League Baseball will be restart again, if at all, in 2027.
Usually, this is where we turn to the famous Rogers Hornsby quote:
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
But that depressing reality doesn’t quite capture the mood this year. There’s no guarantee spring will bring us relief from the hellscape the owners are about to unleash. So instead, I’m just angry. Angry at the owners, angry that the sport I love is about to do unspeakable levels of damage to itself, and angry that we have no idea what things are going to look like on the backside of this completely unnecessary carnage.
Back in 1994, baseball lost eight months of action from the time the strike ensued in August all the way through Opening Day in 1995, which was delayed until late April. With Covid, we technically went nine months without baseball as the season didn’t start until July, but the offseason leading up to it was relatively normal, and we even had spring training games start on time.
Over the last 150 years, nothing has disrupted an MLB season like this looming lockout could. Not World Wars, not the Great Depression, and not even the infancy of the sport back in the late 1800s. Since the Western Frontier closed, we’ve never gone more than nine months without a professional baseball game. Today marks the beginning of a stretch that could end that fact. We’re sailing straight into a sea of uncertainty.
What we do know is that the Milwaukee Brewers — The smallest market in the sport — just won the World Series over the Tampa Bay Rays, who ooze overachievement an on annual basis. And yet, the owners are preparing to shut down everything down over the guise of competitive balance. They could not be more full of shit!
At least now, after the way this October unfolded, we can get a little bit more serious: The real reason the owners want a cap is because they need a line on a graph to go up. Nothing more, nothing less. Valuations of franchises tend to be much higher when you get to put a limit on how much you pay the guys who make your product magical, and since baseball has and always will reflect the American reality, we now get to sit back and watch as a small group of billionaires prepare to make life worse for everybody else.
And along those lines, there’s something else that has me very concerned. We as a society don’t compromise on much of anything anymore. Two sides dig in, never abandon hardline positions, and nothing gets done while everything crumbles around us. Is there any reason to believe this impending lockout will be any different? The owners have made it pretty clear they’re not going to budge unless they get a cap. The players meanwhile have always seen a cap as a nonstarter. Even if we didn’t live in the most unproductive debate environment in American history, it’s hard to see how this ends without one side emerging completely victorious.
There’s either going to be a cap, or there’s not. Baseball will either be changed forever when we resume, or we’ll be rebuilding the current structure and way of things when it’s time to pick up the pieces. I don’t see much of an in-between, but then again I don’t see much of anything right now as we stare into an apocopic abyss.
All I know for sure is that I’m angry right now, and it’s hard for me to direct that anger at any place other than the owners. The wonderful story of what the Milwaukee Brewers just did juxtaposed with what these jackals are about to do is deeply poignant at this hour, and with no more baseball games to distract us from the impending tsunami, I’m dreading just how ugly this is about to get.
