Over the weekend, Kevin Gausman tweeted this:
This wasn’t a surprise. Gausman had a breakout year in 2021, but he fell apart a little bit in September, and he’s entering his age 31 season, and Farhan Zaidi doesn’t like giving out long contracts, so the Giants were never going to come close to the 5 years, $110 million Gausman got from Toronto. Maybe they had general discussions with his agent and realized they weren’t going to be on the same page, or maybe they just didn’t see the point at all. Whatever. It’s fine. Don’t care.
But what I did realize was that the Giants can’t respond because the owners have, in their fit of petty pique, decided that no team official can publicly mention anyone in the Players Association in any way. So there won’t be an official response until the lockout is over. There can’t be. That’s the rule right now.
This is an opportunity.
Any player can say whatever he wants about any team and they can’t respond. Not allowed. Sure, they can talk around the issue, obliquely mention it without mentioning it. “We had productive conversations with a number of agents before the lockout that didn’t end with us making an offer,” Farhan Zaidi could say. “We talked with Kevin’s agent and quickly realized he was receiving offers we were not prepared to match,” Farhan Zaidi absolutely could not say.
So why not have some fun with it? I think every active major league player — every one — should make up a rumor about a team being dickish. It can be his team or some other team; it can be something that happened to him or a rumor he heard. The point is simply that the teams cannot refute it in any kind of specific terms, so their denials will sound like boilerplate non-denials.
“There is a certain member of the Braves front office who I feel has been disrespectful for a long time,” Freddie Freeman could tweet.
What could they say? What could they do? “The Atlanta Braves pride ourselves on being a welcoming organization,” they could tweet in response, as if that’s not nothing. Without a way to directly address either the complainant or the complaint, they’re toothless. Nothing they could say that would really help. And then, once the lockout is over and Atlanta has (presumably) re-signed Freeman to a big deal?
“I don’t want to talk about the past,” Freeman could say. “The Braves are a first class organization and I’m excited to be back. Let’s play ball!”
Or imagine Trey Mancini sharing an Instagram photo of himself eating ice cream with the caption “It’s not like the Orioles are gonna be good this year anyway LOL.”
Or picture Gerrit Cole, with an offseason goatee fully grown, saying, “It’s dumb that I have to shave this off when we play this year.”
Or think of Matt Chapman just tossing an aside in during a TikTok that “Yeah man, it stank so bad in my buddy’s house that I was like, shit, are we in the Coliseum clubhouse?”
Then the A’s would have ot respond with “The Oakland A’s take clubhouse hygiene very seriously.” Nobody would believe them! Why are you bringing this up? Why not just tell us why you’re bringing this up? Because you’re LIARS.
Is this a petty, stupid way to create leverage in CBA negotiations? Absolutely. Is it illegal? I don’t know and it’s not like there’s some lawyer I could just go downstairs and consult instead of writing this sentence. Would it be fun? Absolutely it would. And do the teams that would be victimized here deserve it? I cannot stress this enough: yes.
The owners’ entire PR strategy right now is to do as little as possible and force the players to meet them as close as possible to the owners’ positions. Like, if the owners were in San Diego and the players were in San Francisco, and halfway was Bakersfield, the owners would be demanding the players meet them in Temecula, and yes, this entire paragraph was just a tortured way to get a “Meet me in Temecula” reference in, thank you very much.
The players are the ones who bear the brunt of this, interestingly. It always start off with, “Look, I don’t like either side,” and then somehow immediately pivots to how the players need to “compromise” and the players need to “get a deal done” and how “they play a kids’ game” and then it seems like it might be getting better with “Like I’m supposed to pick between millionaires and billionaires” and then immediately reveals itself to not be getting better with “This generation of players is just spoiled.”
So every grievance against the teams is a good thing to air right now. Every reminder that the owners are leeches is a positive. This is my rationale for the players just going off on their (or other!) teams. It’s not just that it would be very funny.
It’s not mostly that it would be very funny.
It’s about 50/50.
Okay, maybe a bit less.
All right, you win, I just want this because it would be funny. But it would be really, really funny.