The Phillies Will Be Playing Ball This Spring After All!
It took a long time, but Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association finally agreed on a new five year Collective Bargaining Agreement this week. It turns out this lengthy lockout only delayed the first week of the 2022 MLB regular season. And the series that were canceled are expected to be rescheduled so this will still be a 162 game season.
Not only that, but the new CBA has some changes to the game that should excite baseball fans (and piss off purists!) First off, the infield shift has been gloriously banned. The MLB has finally acknowledged that despite its strategy in helping prevent hits and runs, the shift is bad for the casual fan who is primarily attracted to offense. Now while this helps the Phillies offense, it also hurts the team’s already brutally bad infield. Though I guess it means we’ll see the infield commit less brutal errors.
Also, after over four decades, the National League will finally adopt a universal Designated Hitter. Rhys Hoskins, welcome to the DH spot! You have a chance to become the Phillies version of David Ortiz or Edgar Martinez and you’ll never have to worry about fielding again.
The 7 inning double headers and a player on 2nd base in extra innings has been eliminated which at least satisfies the purists, though they were kind of nice to be honest.
And finally, and the most beneficial to the Phillies, expanded playoffs! While it was kinda cool how hard it was to make the playoffs, the Phils badly need an easy way into the postseason to end their miserable decade-long playoff drought, along with the Seattle Mariners two-decade long drought. There will now be three division winners who will have the Top 3 seeds in each league, and then three Wild Card teams who will take the 4 through 6 seeds. Could the Phillies still find a way to blow this and continue to let our lasting playoff memory the Chris Carpenter game? Absolutely! But it’s still good to see that the team has a better chance of making the tournament and finally burying the demons of 2009-2011.
If nothing else, thanks to this get to see another full season of Bryce Harper, who has lived up to the hype of his massive contract despite the team and organization around him letting him down. We also get to see great players like Shohei Otani, Mike Trout and Mookie Betts perform in a normal 162 game season, considering that those players got hampered by a shortened 2020 season due to COVID.
And in other news, it looks like Phillie Killer Hall of Famer Freddie Freeman will NOT be returning to the defending World Series Champions Atlanta Braves. (Did they win the World Series last year? I was busy dressing up as a scarecrow last October.) Even though the Braves are probably going to win the NL East anyway, it’s great that their leader could be moving onto another team . . . and then new face of baseball Ronald Acuna Jr. uses that as an opportunity to become the new leader of the franchise since he signed his 20s away to the organization (Did you know he was injured the whole time during their World Series run?!)
The Phillies may have been extremely disappointing for ten years, but I think we can all agree its better that they’re here to disappoint us rather than not be here at all (or is it.) Either way, lets order those many tickets for games at Citizens Bank Park and pack a case of Coors Light for parking lot tailgating!