As soon as the White Sox signed Yasmani Grandal, March 26, 2020 represented the start of a whole new chapter. Alas, the date we circled has arrived, and all we have is a three-week-old hellscape that shows no signs of abating.
If you're hankering for baseball, you can watch Mark Buehrle's perfect game at 3 p.m. CT on whitesox.com and Cut4 Twitter. I might poke my head in, but it's also a game I've seen a bunch of times. I'm going to watch and listen to my share of old games during the pandemic delay, but I'm reserving full, undivided real-time viewing for games with which I'm unfamiliar. I'm assuming my suspension of disbelief is finite, so I'm not wasting my supply by early April.
The one good thing that can come out of this pandemic delay is the time and bandwidth to make progress on a new labor deal. As I've said before, this stoppage is nobody's fault, and baseball could represent a normalcy Americans flock to with renewed passion, whether in attendance or TV ratings. It just needs to not piss away all that goodwill with saber-rattling or worse in 2021.
Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark wrote an overview of the situation at The Athletic, where the anonymous quotes reflect an understanding of the opportunity, but the distance between sides remain severe, especially since the pandemic poses its own economic complications that will take time to understand.
And before they can tackle a new CBA, they have to resolve some issues of compensation without games. According to Rosenthal, the league and union appear to have settled the issue of 2020 service time:
MLB has agreed to grant a full year of service to players who remain active for the entire 2020 season regardless of how many games the schedule includes, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
That seems to be the only way to handle it, because a frozen season doesn't freeze the ages of the players. It's a bad deal for teams who traded for a rental player -- imagine the Dodgers not getting a single game out of Mookie Betts before he hits free agency -- but the White Sox are remarkably well insulated from any truly adverse consequences.
James McCann and Alex Colomé are the only free agents after the season, while Kelvin Herrera, Steve Cishek, Edwin Encarnación and Leury García all have club options. With a lot of young players already locked into long-term extensions and others trying to establish themselves, Lucas Giolito is the only player whose expected contribution would have well exceeded his pre-arb salary.
Throw in the rehab situations of guys like Michael Kopech, Carlos Rodón and Dane Dunning lining up as favorably as we can guess for a season that starts in June, and as much as the absence of baseball hurts those who were looking forward to watching the White Sox, it also spares them more than other teams.
There is no such solace regarding a stoppage during or after the 2021 season. Everybody would again be feeling the pain, but this time the White Sox would hurt more than most. That's why I'm hoping the principals in negotiations are seeing the league's life flash before its own eyes right now, and will be ready to come to the table and/or Jesus in short order.
