To get mad at baseball is to be Charlie Brown endeavoring to kick a football, still believing Lucy won’t pull the ball away at the last second – even though she has every time before. Baseball is the silliest of sports. Owners and players claim a deep love of the game while hating one another with a passion. The shock isn’t when baseball gets something wrong. The shock is that it ever gets anything right.
That the 2022 MLB season wouldn’t start on time was written on the wind. The league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players was set to lapse Dec. 1, 2021. That would prompt the owners to lock out their players, which would induce the players to throw a fit, which would mean that each side spent two months mostly ignoring one another. When they finally got around to talking, they decided they’d rather stop talking than let the other side win.
Not that everything in life can be explained by “The Godfather,” but I’m reminded of the scene where Clemenza gives Michael the gun that will be used to clip Sollozzo and Capt. McCluskey. How bad, Michael asks, will the ensuing strife get? “Pretty bad,” Clemenza says. “But that’s all right. These things got to happen every so often. Helps to get rid of the bad blood.”
