Caught off base

This begins with God's thermostat, on another gray January morning. In these parts it's supposed to do beastly things today, like back up all afternoon and leave windchill treads on a whole lot of winter-weary souls in the process. 

Which gets me thinking about the man and the boy.

It's an odd segue, admittedly. But not all that odd, as you shall see.

I found the man and the boy standing in the sun on a crushed-shell walkway one glorious morning, and baseball was happening all around them. This was sometime in the mid-'90s in Ft. Myers, Fla., on the sort of morning you get a lot of in Florida in late March, before the humidity ramps up and chases everyone either into the air conditioning or onto some white-sand beach.

The man and the boy were from up north somewhere (Chicago? Memory fails) and they were here because every year they were here at this time. It was their annual father-son ritual, they explained, to come somewhere warm during the last lash of winter to take in spring training. And if blue skies and temps nudging 80 and the sounds of baseball were all around them, could spring up north be far behind?

We stood there awhile, the three of us, and watched baseball players stretching on impossibly green grass. It was both thoroughly mundane and thoroughly wonderful.

And leave it to baseball to screw it up.

If this is the point in winter where you start wistfully savoring memories like the aforementioned, it's also, this winter, the point where you can begin mourning spring training. It's not going to happen this year. And the reason it's not going to happen is because baseball is dumb.

The owners, see, locked out the players the first part of December, before negotiations on the new collective bargaining agreement had even begun. No one had proposed anything. No one had filed a counter-proposal. The owners just thought it would be cute to launch a pre-emptive strike.

Then they sat around for a month before offering their first lame proposal, which they knew damn good and well the players would reject.

This is not good-faith negotiating. This is next-level stupid -- and every bit of it is on the owners this time.

They had a good thing going in the 2021, a bounce-back-from-'rona summer that ended with the Atlanta Braves shocking the world by beating the Astros in five games in the World Series. If you were a baseball fan, it whetted the appetite for 2022.

And then the owners said, "No soup for you."

Now there will be no father-and-son moments in the glorious sun in spring training, barring a miracle. And you can bet the owners will let this drag on into the season, too, while commissioner Rob Manfred, the owners' pool boy, wrings his hands and lets it happen.

Meanwhile, the NBA will play on, hogging all the thunder. And the NFL -- which eats MLB for breakfast every fall -- will say "Hey, look! It's combine week! Come see guys run sprints! And don't forget the NFL Draft, the best least event-y event in sports!"

Aye-yi-yi. The stupid, it burns.