Saturday Bantering: Is There Hope?

There seem to be some hopeful signs that the owners and players are starting to gain some traction in talks. Spring games have been cancelled through to March 7, but they have stayed talking through the day yesterday. The topic has been an amateur draft lottery.

Rob Manfred has finally made an appearance at the talks. One might have figured that he would have been there from the start since he is boss and all. But I think that he didn’t want to near a failure. So I hope his appearance means things will move along.

I’d expect the talks will go past the ‘deadline’ to get the season started on time, but maybe it will come soon enough after that they will get the entire season in. Or that’s my hope at the moment.

I will be very sad if they take baseball away from us this year.

MLB Trade Rumors tells us that Freddie Freeman will be signing within hours of a labour settlement and that the Blue Jays are a possible landing spot.

The fun sentence quotes Joel Sherman : “the Blue Jays, has been given ownership approval for a “large increase in payroll” even after the additions of George Springer, Kevin Gausman and Jose Berrios over the past year-plus.” That is nice to hear. Of course, some players would have to agree to a contract with the team for that to happen.

A lot has been made of this:

I’m not too worried about it at the moment. With the lockout, they can’t offer anything. When it is over I’ll start wondering when talks will happen.

At least some are getting to catch and throw a ball: