For the second consecutive day, the White Sox issued a media release pertaining to the 2022 season.
Unlike the roster of the player development staff, it's harder to know when the dates and photos of selected giveaways will actually come into play.
Here are the dates and items the White Sox are proposing in a world where the season starts on time.
- March 31: 2021 AL Central championship pennant
- April 2: White Sox crewneck sweatshirt
- April 30: White Sox hockey jersey
- June 11: White Sox Hawaiian shirt
- Sept. 4: Los White Sox soccer jersey
And you can see the photos of the items below.
There are also four scheduled bobblehead days -- April 16, May 14, July 4 and July 23 -- but because MLB teams are pretending current members of the MLBPA don't exist, the White Sox merely said they'd involve "current and former White Sox players." Credit them for delivering the redacted news more gracefully than the Brewers, I suppose.
As for the lockout, the news isn't getting any better, even by the bad-news-is-probably-no-news standards that usually apply to unpopular public negotiations. The Athletic's Evan Drellich says that Major League Baseball is already proposing for federal mediators to assist in collective bargaining talks, rather than responding to the MLBPA's last proposal.
Drellich says the union isn't likely to sign up for it because it didn't do anything for them during the 1994. Labor laywer and Sox Machine Podcast guest Eugene Freedman said in a Twitter thread that under earnest circumstances, a mediator can have third-party input that can help rein in more extreme factions in the individual camps. In this case, if some owners are playing extreme hardball, or if some players are demanding the impossible, an informed and impartial mediator might be able to reinforce the median notions and get a side to focus up.
Under more cynical circumstances, it's a way for management to say that the union isn't coming to the table, knowing they're probably not likely to take the risk of meeting with a mediator who deals them a bad hand. If Alex Wood's reaction is any indication, the players would rather point out that, between the six-week inactivity before the new year and limited exchanges since, the league hasn't had much of an interest in coming to the table in the first place.
