Cub Tracks’ who will be the gatecrasher?

Welcome to today’s episode of Cub Tracks news and notes™. Here we have material from current beat writers, bloggers, and the occasional in-house habitué, moonlighting. These pieces center around #Cubs, #MiLB, and #MLB baseball, such as they are.

Things are looking ugly. I’ve been assuming that there would be a lockout all along... in fact I still believe that it will impact the season. I think ownership is stupid enough to do that, and try to recoup the losses in revenue by tacking on an additional layer of playoffs.

It’s pretty apparent that ownership treats anyone who is not part of their little boys’ club with contempt. Fans are necessary evils, and if they could separate people from their money without playing the games, they would cheerfully do so.

If they don’t hate baseball, they hate us. At the very least they’re indifferent to fandom/their customer base, standing there behind their anti-trust agreement.

I imagine that BCB will be focusing on the history of baseball and on minor-league ball for the foreseeable future. So will everyone else. We are collateral damage in this war of worlds. Let’s hope that there is a brighter future. #IStandWithThePlayers

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• Brett Taylor (Bleacher Nation*): Lockout, Day One: Manfred and Clark speak, the proposals MLB won’t even discuss, timelines, more. “We can totally do this for another two months, right?”
• Lamond Pope (Chicago Tribune* {$}): What’s next after MLB owners imposed a lockout of players? ‘We’re here, they’re there. We need to find a way to bridge the gap,’ Rob Manfred says. While acknowledging that a lockout is “bad for our business,” Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said owners imposed one “out of a desire to drive the process forward to an agreement now.”
• Evan Drellich (The Athletic {$}): ‘Radical’ differences in way Rob Manfred, MLBPA describe the path to a lockout. To Tony Clark, an ex-player himself, a lockout was “unnecessary to continue the dialogue.” Drellich has a LOT more to say, and I recommend a read on their site.
• Evan Altman (Cubs Insider*): Former Cub Trevor Williams ignites Player Solidarity Movement with joke. “It was just being silly,” Williams told ESPN.
• Joon Lee (ESPN*): What we do in the shadows: Locked-out players play into MLB’s scrubbed pages. “I saw it, and that’s what I did,” Trevor May said. Cub Ian Happ was one of the first.
• Dennis Young (Chicago Tribune* {$}): Max Scherzer and Scott Boras want tanking reform now: ‘A real attack on the integrity of the game’. “We have something in our rules that creates non-competitiveness.”
• Alexander Patt (Cubbies Crib*): Previewing the projected 2022 Chicago Cubs starting rotation. “There is a possibility that another arm could be added after the lockout ends with a few guys left on the board, but this is what we have right now.”
• Gordon Wittenmyer (NBC Sports Chicago*): Hoyer ‘changed strategy’ after flurry of recent signings. “You can’t just make plans and not alter them if things change,” Cubs president Jed Hoyer said Wednesday night.
• Patrick Mooney (The Athletic {$}): Maybe the Cubs will talk themselves into signing Carlos Correa after the lockout? “... sometimes the player and the deal make too much sense.”

Food for Thought:

Thanks for reading, Dana.