Major League Baseball removed games from the schedule, but it technically has not yet cancelled games, or shortened the season otherwise.
MLB keeps setting deadlines for a 162-game schedule, but those deadlines keep proving inessential. For what it's worth, the latest one is 2 p.m. CT, and players are voting on the proposal now. For those who care about the particulars -- and I wouldn't blame you if you don't -- here's where the key elements have shifted:
The latest wrench was MLB's attempt to attach the international draft to the elimination of the qualifying offer, and after 18 hours of friction, it appears the MLBPA was able to stiff-arm the league's advances. The contract would allow the sides until July to create a working draft starting in 2024, and if talks fall through, the qualifying offer would be reinstated the following winter.
And should the union accept this proposal, free agency would start tonight.
I'm hesitant to write anything that attempts to summarize the negotiations further. While we wait, enjoy some unrelated content.
Spare Parts
Luis Mieses didn't make my top 10 White Sox prospects list (or the honorable mentions) because he struggles against left-handed pitching and doesn't have great discipline at the plate, so a couple of difficult improvements remain between him and even a more modest future as a corner platoon bat. That said, the improvements he made last year -- generating some power without losing his above-average ability to make contact -- show that he's capable of closing a gap, so he has my attention in 2022. James Fegan's profile describes a guy who wants to be as comfortable as Eloy Jiménez when cameras are on him.
Half an answer to a good White Sox trivia question -- "Who did the White Sox receive from the Marlins for Ozzie Guillen?" -- is back in the organization. Jhan Mariñez appeared in two games for the White Sox in 2012 and hasn't pitched in the majors since 2018, but he's still kicking, so the White Sox are kicking the tires.
(Ozzie Martinez was the other player sent by Florida.)
While I was irritated that the White Sox's biggest investment of the 2021-21 offseason was a closer, at least it shouldn't be affected by a shorter spring training. If he gets off to a wobbly start, nobody can say that he couldn't ramp up to his usual inning of work.
Thanks to three months of inactivity due to the lockout, FanGraphs is back to issuing a public appeal for memberships, as the lack of offseason activity has greatly diminished site traffic. It had to conduct a membership drive during the early stages of the pandemic, and now it's doing so again.
A couple days earlier, Amanda Mull, who covers consumerism for The Atlantic, wrote about how subscription services are getting tiresome, especially for things that naturally wouldn't be forced into monthly or quarterly boxes.
Both are relevant to Sox Machine's existence. Ad revenue has suffered greatly here as you'd might expect, but that's not as critical of a blow. Ads weren't an original part of the revenue model, and thanks to the aforementioned double whammy of traffic-killing developments so far this decade, I haven't felt comfortable enough in projecting revenue to spend it.
Subscriptions remain the backbone of this site, and between the subscription fatigue that Mull wrote about and MLB's piss-poor approach to keeping fans, I'd anticipated taking a hit over the course of the lockout. I wouldn't blame anybody if they looked at their budgets and decided to slash baseball-related expenses.
Instead, Sox Machine has gained supporters over the last three months, with many people upping their memberships. That I did not see coming. It's an honor, it floors me, and hopefully we'll be able to make it worth your while with actual baseball news.
