Braves fans, many of them still giddy about last year’s World Series championship, received sobering news Tuesday: the cancellation of at least the first week of the 2022 regular season because of baseball’s labor dispute.
Fans who shared their reaction with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by phone or email expressed concern about how much more of the season might be lost to the lockout.
“In the meantime, at least we’ve got last season’s amazing run to hold on to,” said Megan Jones, a “really big” Braves fan since the mid-1990s.
Another Braves fan, Jared Sellers, said the dispute between MLB’s owners and players makes him “feel like a child in a messy divorce – both parents wanting the kid to side with them.”
He added: “Fans ultimately don’t care who’s at fault. They’ll just find something else to do with their time.”
The owners imposed the lockout Dec. 2, two minutes after the previous collective bargaining agreement expired. Even before MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s announcement Tuesday that each team’s first two series are “officially canceled,” the trade and free-agent markets had been shut down for three months, and major-league players had been kept out of spring training. But the lockout takes on new weight with the loss of regular-season games.
“My first reaction was, just very disappointed that the two sides cannot come together and hammer out a collective bargaining agreement,” said John Shafer, a Braves season ticket holder for 32 years. “There’s too much at stake for everybody.”
“The way I look at it, it is all so unnecessary. There's a lot more serious stuff going on in the world."
Six Braves games, all on the road, were canceled: the March 31 season opener against the Marlins in Miami, three more games in Miami through April 3 and two games against the Mets in New York on April 4-5. Still on the calendar for now – but endangered unless a deal is done within a week or so – is the Braves’ home opener April 7, when fans would welcome back the World Series champs to a sold-out Truist Park.
“It almost sounds selfish, but as it stands now, with Manfred canceling the first two series, that then places a greater emphasis and creates more excitement for our home opener,” Shafer said. “If that truly becomes the opening of the season. Who knows if that will come to pass?”
Further cancellations would be “very damaging and catastrophic from a fan’s perspective,” Shafer said, “especially for the people who went through it the last time.” He was referring to the 1994-95 players’ strike that wiped out about 70 regular-season games per team and the 1994 postseason, including the World Series.
“The way I look at it, it is all so unnecessary,” he said of this dispute. “There’s a lot more serious stuff going on in the world.”
Jones, who attended Game 5 of last year’s World Series at Truist Park, has been “pretty closely” following the lockout, “and I stand with the players – even though it has now cost us games and may likely cost many more.”
“Ultimately, the balance of power has swung too far to the owners,” she said, “and it has been adversely affecting the game for far too long already. … It (would) break my heart to lose the season, but if that’s what it takes to repair what has been so broken, so be it.”
Michael Italia, who became a Braves fan at age 9 by watching the team’s nationally televised games on TBS in the worst-to-first season of 1991, suggested fans are “becoming numb” to labor battles in baseball and other sports.
He believes the MLB owners “only care about one thing: increasing revenues while decreasing expenses.” He believes the players “have moved way more toward the owners than the owners have moved to them” in the negotiations. He opposes the owners’ proposal to expand the postseason from 10 teams to 14, seven in each league.
“As a fan of the Braves, I don’t want a 14-team playoff,” Italia said. “Even 12 (which the Players Association has reluctantly accepted) is too many. … Making it so the team I follow through 162 (games) has less shot at winning it all in a crapshoot October tournament is just wrong.”
