Sorry, nothing new to report. Baseball America, which is the most reliable source of transaction information during the offseason (since MiLB has fewer interns to exploit), has only caught up to mid-December and I’m sure only one or two of you may be more excited than Boomer when he heard about the signing of 34-y.o. (35 in May) Daniel HernAAAAndez.
Yesterday, Ballpark Digest passed along news (sort of) the MLB-MiLB pissing match. It seems both sides have taken salt tablets. In the final graf, there’s a semi-confirmation that MLB’s list of 42 was negotiating tactic, if indeed one of the teams on the initial hit list (Lowell) is now “safe.”
However, as BPD’s founder/publisher Keven Reichard notes: “[W]hile there are many areas of common ground between the two sides, such as realignment to cut down on travel time, facilities upgrades on the player side[,] and a less drastic contraction, we won’t know how they could be worked out with no meetings planned.
The “sort of” is because I suspect that if/when negotiations do resume, one of the conditions will be radio silence. MLB badly miscalculated MiLB’s willingness to do its laundry in public, perhaps not realizing that penny-pinching a line item in the budget could pound-foolish.
Now, back to the watchlist and doldrums of the offseason…