No Thankyou

MLB owners and players are doing what they do best, which is fighting. Right now, the two sides are arguing over how the new season should progress. As ever, the owners want to own. The league sent a proposal outlining a plan that would make Commissioner Rob Manfred a super-Pope, with the power to start and stop the season pretty much as he sees fit. The proposal also called for delaying the season to late April;, reducing the number of games to 156; keeping seven-inning doubleheaders and the tie-breaker format, along with the dh in the NL; and having fourteen teams qualify for the postseason. I guess you could say the players got all Martin Luther and rejected the plan. (Yes, I like my metaphors.) So, everything goes to default mode, with a 162-game season and spring training starting in two weeks. Personally, I can live with that. But Paul Sullivan in today’s Tribune apparently can’t. He calls for delaying the season’s start to a week before Memorial Day and starting the postseason November 1 (All Saints Day, per the metaphor); the playoffs would have warm-weather sites, and the World Series might even go all the way to Thanksgiving. Heaven help us. So, the elephants are at it again, and only the grass, aka fans, will suffer. This is all about money. No doubt, the owners have projections showing them the best date to start the season, with fans allowed into stadiums ASAP. In addition, owners must be feeling heat from communities in Arizona and Florida that built all those fancy spring-training facilities for teams. If no one goes to spring training, that means hotels and restaurants stay empty. That means no tax revenue, and no tax revenue means those stadiums have to be paid for somehow. On the other side, players want to be paid for 162 games, period; fans in the stands is not their problem. But Thanksgiving baseball in the Sunbelt isn’t much of a solution. I can live with the seven-inning doubleheaders for another year (but not the tiebreaker, sorry), as well as a delayed start to the season, provided a sincere effort is made to play all 162 games. At some point, ever-expanding playoffs will turn the postseason into one big participation trophy. Then again, what do I know? I’m just a fan, or what elephants call grass.