When the lockout of the Major League Baseball players by the owners started, I had grand plans: daily podcasts to update what was happening between the two sides, articles breaking down the gaps needed to be bridged, and ideas for what could be done in order to get this work stoppage done and out of the way so that we could get back to what was important: preparing for the 2022 season.
But as the calendar turned, the podcasts stopped, the articles disappeared, and even on social media, I reduced my output to Wordle results and the odd college basketball tweet.
What happened? Did my enthusiasm wane as the sides dug in? Had even this baseball die-hard resigned to the fact that the sport had died due to greed on both sides? Hardly.
But something significant had happened.
In early January, I was offered and took a job with Major League Baseball, working in their data operations department and dealing with the electronic scoring of games at both the big league and minor league levels. And being an employee of Major League Baseball, albeit a low-level special operations one, I felt that it would be a conflict to offer up an opinion that may differ from my employer’s official line, and could cause the lockout to go on longer than it already had.
I wanted this lockout to end as soon as possible, and I wanted the players to be given as fair and equitable deal as they could get, and if my words, whether written or spoken, could be used as ammunition for either side to keep the stalemate going even one second longer than staying silent, then I would be to blame for all of us not getting the game we love in a quickly a time as we could.
So I went silent, or at least as silent as I could bear to be.
But that ends now.
With news that the two sides had come to a new deal, we get back to the great side of this business. And get back to the game on the field.
Game on, let’s play ball!
Steve Carney is the founder and publisher of St. Pete Nine. One of the people most associated with baseball coverage in Tampa Bay, he spent 13 seasons covering the Rays for flagship radio station WDAE, first as producer of Rays Radio broadcasts, then as beat reporter beginning in 2011. He likes new analytics and aged bourbon, and is the owner of one of the ugliest knuckleballs ever witnessed by baseball scouts.
