The 2022 baseball season is being delayed. The MLB owners and the Player’s Union were not successful in agreeing on a new contract by the self-imposed deadline of the end of February. 

The commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, has canceled the first two series of the regular season. The players will not be paid for these missed games and there is going to be no effort to make them up. The MLB owners are trying to blame this on the players to make them look bad. 

As I mentioned in my last article, this is all a game of chicken to see who will budge first. Which side will give up more of their demands for the sake of playing baseball? There’s a world in which we only miss the first two series of baseball and there’s a world where we miss an entire month of baseball. Either way, this is bad for the game of baseball. 

The way that the MLB canceled games is especially problematic, considering they didn’t cancel a specific number of games for all the teams, they canceled two series. There can be a different number of games in a series spanning from 2 games to 4 games. This means that, under the current schedule, each baseball team is not guaranteed to play the same number of games. 

For example, let’s compare the schedules of the New York Mets and the Miami Marlins. The Mets were going to play 3 games against the Washington Nationals to start the season followed by 2 games against the Atlanta Braves. This obviously adds up to a total of 5 games that the Mets will miss. The Marlins were going to play 3 games against the Atlanta Braves to start the season and then 3 games against the Texas Rangers for a total of 6. 

In a normal season, every team plays a total of 162 games. If the Mets miss 5 games and the Marlins miss 6 then the Mets will play a total of 157 games, while the Marlins will play a total of 156. That is a problem because it makes the game less even. 

Another argument can be made that this is even less fair because of home-field advantage. All the games that the Mets are missing would have been played in New York, while none of the Braves games were played in Atlanta. That means that the Braves will have more home games than the Mets this year, which is unfair. 

The easiest way to remedy this is to make up the games. MLB could either make them up with double-headers throughout the year or they could tack two series on at the end of the year. MLB currently will not do this because it sees missing these games as a statement and a threat to the players. 

The fact that the players won’t ever be paid for those missed games is a tactic that the owners are using to get their way. The owners are showing that they are willing to miss games to get their way. Will we have baseball in April? No one can be sure about that. Discussions are still happening about a new contract, and we’ll just have to wait and see when baseball will start.