With the new collective bargaining agreement in place, Opening Day will be set for April 7, as first reported by Bob Nightengale of USA Today (Twitter links). It’ll be a 162-game season with full player pay, with the end of the season pushed back three days and doubleheaders in place to compensate for the one-week delayed start. Spring Training games will begin around March 18.
Players will be able to report to Spring Training tomorrow, tweets Jeff Passan of ESPN. The mandatory spring report date is Sunday, March 13, according to Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post.
MLB had announced yesterday it was canceling games through April 13. However, today’s progress in negotiations led the league to backtrack on that stance. Nothing has been made official on the league’s end — presumably, that’s pending this evening’s ownership ratification, which is expected to be a formality. At that point, the league figures to make a formal announcement on the schedule. Presumably, it’d reinstate the originally scheduled games it nominally wiped out yesterday, but there’s been no word on that yet.
In another notable development, Jesse Rogers of ESPN reports (on Twitter) that the on-field rules changes put into effect as pandemic protocols have been lifted. The nine-inning doubleheader returns, as do standard rules for extra innings. The “ghost runner” provision has been scrapped.
The seven-inning doubleheaders and the extra-innings runner proved divisive provisions among baseball fans in their two years in place. They’d been implemented as part of the COVID-19 protocols, with both provisions designed to lessen player workloads during seasons that could be massively impacted by virus-related postponements. Those concerns aren’t expected to be as prominent in 2022, and it seems neither party was motivated enough to agree to implement them permanently. The league may look to reinstitute those rules at some point down the line, but they won’t be in effect for the upcoming season at the very least.
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