PBN Around the Horn

PBN Around The Horn: Things are Starting to Get Ridiculous with this Lockout

Published

3 years ago

February 15, 2022

Welcome to the PBN Around the Horn. Here you’ll find news and notes from across Major League Baseball, your Pittsburgh Pirates, and around the Sports Now network.

UPDATE (2:53 p.m.) Henry Davis weighs in on the latest from the labor negotiations.

The people making these decisions regarding MLB and MiLB have consistently made every effort to cut costs at the expense of the game. Hard to grow baseball when the people with the power to do so treat it solely as an investment trying to maximize short term returns. https://t.co/LHAR7ZjfMA

— Henry Davis (@henrydavis32) February 15, 2022

UPDATE (11:56 a.m.) Pirate’s bench coach Don Kelly is celebrating his 42nd birthday today. The Point Park University alum has been the Pirate’s bench coach since 2019.

Happy Birthday to our Bench Coach, Don Kelly! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/yO5LMnU0SD

— Pittsburgh Pirates (@Pirates) February 15, 2022

UPDATE (9:44 a.m.) Ready to get a little sad? Well, pitchers and catchers were supposed to report today. With the lockout looking like it’s going to be a rough ride, we can all wonder when this this is going to end.

Pitchers and catchers were supposed to report today.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 15, 2022

As Around the Horn was on a break, there has been a ton of news with MLB’s lockout. From trying to bring a mediator, ridiculous offers, to press conferences that left us with more questions than answers. The one thing that stuck in the craw of a ton of folks was MLB coming out and saying, “yeah we don’t want to pay minor leaguers during spring training.”

From a minor league staffer. There are countless people who share this position and just don’t have the freedom to share publicly. pic.twitter.com/9IGQ412I8S

— Emily Waldon (@EmilyCWaldon) February 15, 2022

Remember when MLB owners cut a bunch of minor league teams to "pay more to the remainder?" Yeah, now they wanna keep cutting…Gross https://t.co/bMulqpxI4w

— Adopt A Minor Leaguer (@adoptmilbplayer) February 15, 2022

Now Jeff Passan came out with a story that is talking about MLB cutting domestic rosters from 180 to “below 150,” as Passan put it. Could we see MiLB reduced to 2-3 affiliates per team? Are we going to see MLB move to drafting college juniors on up? We don’t know right now, but some things just make no sense.

Baseball is broken, but doing things like cutting domestic rosters and not paying minor leaguers for spring training isn’t going to fix it. It’s all about the bottom dollar, right? Maybe go out and promote your star players. The fact that guys like Mike Trout, Fernando Tatis Jr., Ronald Acuna Jr. are pretty much unknown outside of the baseball world is mind-boggling.

You have a two-way star in the making in Shohei Ohtani, and from the looks of things, MLB is slipping prime time through their cash hoarding hands. Anyways, welcome back to Around the Horn, hope you missed me.