Pitchers and catchers aren’t reporting. Baseball remains on hold. Most of the lockout involves quibbles over money, but one of the players’ planks is halfway high-minded.
Players want to make it harder to tank. As Mariners pitcher Paul Sewald told a Seattle radio station: “It’s very disappointing for fans to buy season tickets, to go to games, when you know that their owner (and) their general manager are not putting out the best product they possibly can because they want to – we’ll use the word ‘tank’ – for a couple years so they can get a top-five draft pick and they can accumulate these draft picks.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred noted last week that players and owners, who don’t agree on much, have agreed to turn the MLB draft into a lottery, same as the NBA did after the Houston Rockets snagged Ralph Sampson and Hakeem Olajuwon No. 1 overall in consecutive drafts. (Conspiracy theorists insist the first lottery was rigged to put Patrick Ewing in Madison Square Garden.)
