Sports Time Radio

With the Atlanta Braves wining Game 6 of the World Series last night the Major League Baseball season officially came to an end. The off season has technically started, but don’t expect much to happen. With the Collective Bargaining agreement coming to an end on December 2nd there won’t be any player movement and I doubt will even see players re-sign with their own teams. I think the best thing we can hope for is that the owners and the players association are both smart enough to realize that there can’t be a delay in the season because of this.

Now there are same decisions teams will have to make before the current agreement expires though.

November 3rd is the beginning of a five-day period where teams and players must decide whether to exercise or decline contract options and opt-out clauses for the 2022 season. Eligible free agents cannot sign with anyone but their current team for five more days.

November 7th is the deadline for teams to issue qualifying offers to eligible free agents. For a breakdown of the draft choices teams would forfeit by signing a qualified free agent. The qualifying off is $18.4 million dollars for the 2022 season.

November 8th is when free agency officially opens and from November 8th until November 11th is the general mangers meetings in Carlsbad California.

November 17th is the deadline for players tagged with a qualifying offer to accept or reject the qualifying offer.

Then November 19th is the deadline for teams to add players to the 40-man roster to keep them from selection in the Rule 5 draft.

Now there are deadlines that teams have in December, but with the collective bargaining agreement expiring it’s currently unknown if teams will have to make those decisions or if they’ll be delayed until a new deal is in place between the owners and the players.

If there isn’t a new agreement reached the owners could impose a lockout which would freeze a teams ability to make any transactions until a new agreement is reached between the two sides.

Unfortunately until there is a new agreement in place it’s probably the only baseball news we’re going to get and that’s too bad. There are quite a few interesting players headed into free agency especially at the shortstop position, but they’ll have to take a backseat as all we hear about is money and the other changes both sides what to make.

Baseball struggled to recover after the last work stoppage and they’re still recovering from the Covid-19 induced 60 game season hat they played two years ago. you have to hope that this would lead the sides to a quick solutions or possibly just continue to play under the current agreement while they tried to negotiate a new one.

Now you know money is going to come up as both sides are going to want a bigger piece of the pie. As well there are always other technical issues that will come up and I’m pretty sure that two of the changes will see will be an adjustment to the arbitration process and will have a universal designated hitter added. Other than that I’m not sure what else will come up as these negotiations move along.

What do you see happening with these labor talks? Do you think will get a quick resolution? Or are we going to see these talks drag on and impact the start of next season? I’d also be interested to know what if any changes you’d like to see made during these negotiations?

If you’d like to look me up on Twitter you can find me @Burketime.

Now due to what was an illness the Sports Time Radio podcast hasn’t been airing as scheduled, but hopefully starting today they’ll be back on their regular schedule. They air live Tuesday and Wednesday from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. and then the Friday podcast airs from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. You can listen to the podcast live on BlogTalkRadio.com, but if you can’t catch the live edition of the podcast you can still listen by heading over to TuneIn.com where the podcast is available to you anytime you want to listen to it.