Given that I would've wagered a very small amount on the season maintaining its original Opening Day, I don't trust my sense of how long the lockout will last.
That said, if I had to make a very small bet on what might happen next, my thought is that any cancelled games signified a crossing of the Rubicon. Major League Baseball reset the job site disaster board to "0 DAYS" and invited all the potential disaster to the sport a work stoppage courts, so I'd guess that both sides feel like they've already risked losing the most they might. Why not dig in?
Ken Rosenthal laid some track for the same lines. In his evisceration of Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball's ownership class, he gave a couple of initial timestamps to keep in mind:
April is typically a month of low attendance and revenue for many clubs, particularly those in colder climates. Local television contracts generally do not require clubs to issue rebates to their networks until about 25 games are missed, according to a source with knowledge of such deals. And the big money in the league’s national-television contracts comes from the postseason.
Players, on the other hand, are still recovering from the shortened 2020 season when they received only 37 percent of their pay. The union, drawing on its reserves, has authorized a monthly stipend of $15,000 for April, and its executive board will determine the next steps for future months if necessary. But if Meyer fails to restore the players’ full pay and service time, they will collectively lose $20.5 million for each day removed from the 186-day regular-season schedule. Once 15 days are missed, the free-agent eligibility of star players such as Shohei Ohtani and Pete Alonso could be delayed by one year, and the service time of hundreds of others will be affected as well.
Basically, it seems like the union has some incentive to strike a quick deal, but that motivation disappears if more than an additional week is needed. After that, mutually assured destruction starts to resemble a no-brainer, especially if Jason Heyward is correct and the league is fine with getting rid of April baseball altogether.
As spectacularly stupid as it seems for a league with a diminishing mindshare to voluntarily disappear itself, the dumbest bells have been lifted, so all options look like they're on the table.
That includes the status quo, in which the White Sox miss three games over four days at home against Minnesota, and three games over four days in Kansas City. There are two ways to look at it:
Divisionally: These missing series theoretically benefit the White Sox more than other teams, because if the Twins and/or Royals were to upset the Sox's projected cakewalk in the AL Central, making the most of head-to-head matchups is the shortest distance between two points.
Leaguewide: Considering that both teams are projected to finish below .500, last year's records suggest that the Sox don't want to miss out on any series against the AL's second division.
A pair of three-game series probably isn't enough to force a rearrangement of the whole schedule. Given that MLB opted for overdramatic from the get-go by scrubbing players' likenesses off all team and league websites, I'd guess they'd erase the whole schedule if it were necessary. Instead, they've just sliced off the first week because it'd be near impossible for teams playing the odd interleague series to make up those games later in the year.
But let's say the league indeed sees the first month of the season as expendable, and the players need to hold off until May to cut muscle or bone. What does that look like then?
15 days
- 3 vs. Twins
- 3 at Royals
- 3 at Tigers
- 3 vs. Mariners
25 games
- 6 vs. Royals (3 home)
- 6 vs. Twins (3 home)
- 4 at Guardians
- 3 at Tigers
- 3 vs. Mariners
- 3 vs. Rays
A quarter of the season
- 7 vs. Guardians (3 home)
- 6 vs. Twins (3)
- 6 vs. Royals (3)
- 4 vs. Angels
- 4 vs. Yankees
- 3 at Tigers
- 3 vs. Rays
- 3 at Red Sox
- 3 vs. Mariners
- 2 at Cubs
That's the schedule through Mother's Day, and it features a pretty favorable cross-section of teams to miss, as the Cubs are the only team with no strong designs on 2022. However, if the stoppage lasts deep enough into the season where a team is missing half of its games against a division rival -- and the Sox and Royals would get there it with a four-game series starting on May 16 -- then I imagine the schedule would be crumpled up and revised.
Or maybe the league would preserve the schedule as is until somebody draws attention to an exploitable imbalance that requires Rob Manfred's intervention. Hey, Tony La Russa was that guy in 1981, so it makes some sense that another twisted moment would find him once again.
