Big questions facing MLB in 2022
The 2021 Major League Baseball season represented something like a return to normalcy after the coronavirus-shortened 2020 campaign. But even as baseball resumed in familiar forms on the field, MLB found itself bouncing from one off-field issue to the other, as pandemic-related challenges, a handful of allegations against players and a high-profile social justice stand forced what felt like near-monthly reckonings with things other than what happened between the foul lines.
As 2022 begins, the gravity of off-field concerns threatens the potential for on-field frivolity yet again, in part because those offfield concerns may prevent anyone from getting on the field at all.
Will the MLB lockout delay Opening Day? Major League Baseball and the players’ union could not come to an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement before the last one expired in December, but the two sides will need to do so before official activities - like, say, a baseball season - begin again. With no agreement in place, all offseason transactions have been frozen and all team contact with players severed. The MLB world is stuck in place, with many high-profile free agents yet to sign and uncertainty reigning about when they will get the chance to do so.
The gaps between the sides, particularly when it comes to the rules governing the economics of how teams are constructed and players are paid, remain vast, according to people familiar with what have so far been limited negotiations — negotiations both sides seem to be approaching with about as much urgency as that with which Pedro Baez approaches his next pitch, which is to say not much.
Negotiators from the league and the players’ union have met just once since the owners locked out the players Dec. 2, a meeting about issues so inconsequential that many of the heaviest-hitting negotiators were not even at the table.
After what amounted to a lost season in 2020, some industry insiders believed neither the players nor the team owners would be willing to risk losing another season’s worth of goodwill and revenue to a labor dispute. But until a deal is reached, free agents cannot sign, spring training cannot begin and the regular season will hover in peril, on the precipice of what would almost certainly be a catastrophic loss of games for a sport that has spent years trying to expand its appeal, only to swing through fastballs down the middle time and time again.
Will Trevor Bauer pitch in the big leagues?
This time last year, Trevor Bauer was one of the more coveted starting pitchers on the free agent market, about a month away from signing a massive deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now, he is in limbo after he was accused of sexual assault and became the subject of police and MLB investigations that have yet to yield any public conclusion.
MLB placed Bauer on administrative leave in the middle of the 2021 season, which kept him out of action from early July through the end of the Dodgers’ postseason run. But whether the league will reinstate him - and what the Dodgers will do if it does - remains unclear.
Will there be a universal designated hitter?
For the last few years, everyone from executives to agents, managers to players, has spoken about the universal designated hitter with a sense of inevitability. Any new CBA would almost certainly include implementation of the designated hitter into the National League, or so the thinking went, in part because both team owners and players could find benefits in it.
The owners benefit when the game is more actionpacked, and games are more action-packed when they include more offense. A designated hitter would provide more offense while protecting the health of the biggest on-field investments those owners make: elite starting pitching. Players, meanwhile, would suddenly have 15 more jobs available to hitters who might be squeezed out of lineups elsewhere. The whole thing seemed like a win-win, as long as everyone could stomach a departure from tradition.
But in December, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred made a somewhat stunning admission: The league and the union had taken on-field changes off the negotiating table to focus solely on economics.
Rule changes, like implementation of a designated hitter or a pitch clock to speed up games, can be negotiated outside the CBA at any time. But if the sides cannot agree to a new CBA until shortly before the season, they will need to give teams time to adjust their rosters to any new rules in place on Opening Day. Time, of course, is something those involved in the negotiations have not yet used efficiently.
Will MLB standardize the baseball?
Recent reporting from Insider, based on the work of physicist Meredith Wills, found that MLB used two different baseballs during the 2021 season — and that players, executives and coaches didn’t know about it. The league, which owns ball manufacturer Rawlings, had announced before the season that it would be changing the ball to shorten its flight somewhat and increase the number of balls put in play.
Besides the potentially massive impacts of those inconsistencies on competitive integrity and the relative statistics of one player or team to another, the idea that the league has been altering the ball without being completely transparent further undermined player trust in management: In June, at least one player went so far as to publicly float a conspiracy theory about the league’s motives for altering the ball.
But even beyond changes that could affect the ball’s flight, players are clamoring for changes to the outside of the baseball, too. When MLB announced its muchdiscussed crackdown on the use of sticky, grip-enhancing substances, players complained that they used those substances because the balls are too slippery to control safely, and wondered aloud what MLB would rather see — a reduction in sticky stuff usage or more players taking fastballs to the head.
As it happened, the league’s crackdown provided the first change without resulting in the second. But the idea of switching to a ball with a tackier surface, like those used in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball, seemed to take hold as a potential, easy-to-implement solution.