The Giants spent a franchise-record 125 days with the best record in Major League Baseball last year. That's an impressive amount of time, but on Tuesday the league stayed committed to a lockout that's threatening to shoot right past that number.
As the lockout reached a fourth month, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred stood behind a microphone in Jupiter, Florida and announced that the league is canceling the first two series of the 2022 season. After more than a week of daily negotiations between the two sides, no deal was reached before MLB's self-imposed deadline of 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
For the Giants, this means the elimination of the first road trip of the season, which also happened to be one of the tougher but more interesting ones. They were supposed to open the NL West title defense on March 31 at Petco Park and play four games against the San Diego Padres before heading to Milwaukee for three against the reigning NL Central champs.
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SIGN UP HERE After Manfred's announcement, players across the league took to social media to express displeasure at how the league has operated during negotiations. MLB waited 43 days after the lockout started before making an offer, and even this week's frenzied pace seemed orchestrated to make it look like the Players Association was holding up a deal. In a text message, Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford said it was obvious to players "how calculated everything has been from (MLB's) side since the start of the lockout."
"It's the last thing we want to happen," he said of the canceled games. "It's not fair to the players who want to get back out on the field, and even more unfair to stadium employees and the fans who have no say in the whole thing. We hate to see that. But we're also not going to be pressured and bullied into taking an unfair deal just because we were given a 'deadline.' That wouldn't be fair to the future generations of players, which is mostly what these negotiations are about.
"Keep in mind that MLB didn't negotiate with us for almost two months after locking us out. Then they give us a "deadline," like the union is the one holding everything up. It's been their agenda for the past year to try to put as much pressure as possible and threaten us (and the fans) of missing games, and then turn around and put the blame on us."
The first round of cancellations means the Giants are ironically now in line for a rare opening day at Oracle Park, but it's unclear if the two sides will gain enough traction to even guarantee the Giants can play April 8 against the Miami Marlins.
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Manfred said the league determined that the earliest that spring training could start at this point would be March 8, which led to the cancellation of games. Any further delays would just keep chipping away at the schedule, which MLB says is inflexible because of all the interleague games involved.
The Giants host the Marlins and Padres before heading back out for a long road trip to Cleveland, New York and Washington D.C., but there was not much optimism Tuesday that any of those games would take place. The sides are far apart on the key financial issues -- the CBT threshold, a pool of money for pre-arbitration players, and the minimum salary -- and some people within the Giants organization were preparing to miss at least half of April.
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For players and staffers, it's now a waiting game. The MLBPA has set up a training site for players in Arizona, and that could be appealing to the Giants who live in the Phoenix area. Most of the players on the roster remain at their offseason homes, training at facilities that are taking the place of what should have been the first week of Cactus League games. The only members of the organization currently allowed to take the field under the supervision of team employees are the minor leaguers who are not on the 40-man roster, and they started a minicamp in Scottsdale late last month.
For the time being, those minor league practices are the closest thing fans have to Giants baseball. It's a situation perhaps best summed up by the player who was supposed to start March 31 at Petco Park: