As Major League Baseball and their players’ union diddled around, passing MLB’s February 28 artificial deadline for keeping their whole season, the idea came to me. Oddly, a tweet by somebody worried about insults to the New England Patriots’ quarterback had turned on a lightbulb about the MLB lockout.
That tweet read, “Mac Jones is a dink and dunk QB.” This was sarcastic, as it turned out, since the attached video clip showed Jones throwing (yawn) long, effective passes. Twitter points scored.
NFL fans, however, did not exactly yawn at the 45-second video because the tweet accumulated nearly 1,250 “likes” within 48 hours. As everyone knows, American pro football has replaced MLB as the national religion among males and far more than a few females.
Could the MLB lockout engender a very dangerous idea involving the NFL?
Anyway, MLB and the MLBPA also missed their extended negotiating deadline the next day, and the 2022 MLB season was postponed by at least two series shortly after 5 p.m. on March 1. The MLB lockout endured.
So, the idea, right? If MLB doesn’t want to entertain sports fans until who knows when, why shouldn’t the National Football League fill the vacuum, and move five or six of their games into the spring? People have become concerned about the danger to the players of the new, 17-game NFL season, and who wouldn’t prefer a football game on a beautiful May afternoon instead of a frigid day – or night – in December?
Imagine it: Five games in the spring, time for teams that start 1-4 or 2-3 to reset, and all the rest of the regular season in reasonably good fall weather.
How many teams still share stadiums with MLB baseball teams?
Unless I’m mistaken, all that ended when the Raiders moved out of the Athletics’ stadium. Are there any teams that share environs with NFL teams? Thinking about game days here…
Yes. Philadelphia is a good example, but so what? People should expect a tragedy in MLB and NFL parking lots. And this assumes that the MLB lockout actually ends before the NFL spring does. Does that seem reasonable, considering what has occurred over the winter?
Maybe there are contractual agreements in place having to do with same day games for those teams that share “areas.” So what? Contracts can be rewritten. If MLB won’t play in Philly, why wouldn’t the Phillies owners sell seats cheap in their venue to see the Eagles game across the street on the big screen?
This is not to favor the MLB owners at all, but really, regular people are very tired of this work stoppage. Do the owners or players ever look at social media?
We’ve lost only a few games now to the MLB lockout, but if MLB baseball is determined to collapse, why shouldn’t the NFL move into the beautiful spring weather, and work their way towards a 20-game split season?
NFL owners could become even more obscenely rich, and maybe their players would reach the heights of MLB player salaries before the MLB lockout killed baseball.