Pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training mean preseason games are only a couple of weeks away, and winter is almost over. Pitchers and catchers were scheduled to begin reporting to teams on February 15, but that hasn’t happened due to the baseball lockout. The first Spring Training games of the year are scheduled for February 25 and 26. Since tickets have already been sold for the games, the cancellation of these games will mark the start of owners losing money, which could speed up negotiations.

After very little activity, proposals have been going back and forth between the players’ union and the league in recent weeks. It is difficult to tell how close both sides are to an agreement or if the regular season is in jeopardy. We won’t know until closer to March. If no agreement is reached within a few days of March, players won’t have time to prepare for the start of the season, and the first official games of the year would need to get rescheduled or canceled.

Though nothing is finalized, the players and owners seem to be agreeing on a few changes. Adding the designated hitter to the National League, allowing more teams to be eligible for the playoffs, advertising on uniforms, a league minimum salary increase, and a competitive balance tax (CBT) increase.

A universally designated hitter will end pitchers’ batting in the national league. For such a long time, this has been a huge debate in baseball. After all these years, the reason it is happening doesn’t come down to which style is better for the game but to protect pitchers from getting injured. One year after the Angels Shohei Ohtani unanimously won the American League MVP by hitting forty-six home runs, totaling one hundred RBI’s, and pitching to a 9-2 record over one hundred thirty innings with one hundred fifty-six strikeouts, the league decides it is time for a universal designated hitter.

Expanded playoffs are also inevitable. Currently, ten teams out of thirty make the postseason in baseball. The players’ union is offering to bump that up to twelve teams, and ownership wants to make that number fourteen. It would be disappointing to see almost half of the teams in MLB make the postseason. But seeing how much money the NFL, NBA, and NHL have made by expanding playoffs, it was only a matter of time. On a positive note, the Mariners would have made it in as the seventh seed in the American League if the playoffs had expanded last year.

Hopefully, the advertisements on uniforms won’t amount to much more than a patch on the upper arm of the uniform. We’ve seen these patches in the past to promote all-star games or teams wearing armbands and having the number of a player that has recently passed away on the uniform. I’m not thrilled about ads on uniforms, but if the ad isn’t distracting or there are so many, they start to look like NASCAR jerseys, then okay.

Finally, the league minimum salary and CBT issue are really what the whole lockout is about. The owners have offered small increases to the league minimum salary and the competitive balance tax or “soft salary cap.” The players are looking for larger increases on both with all the increased television revenue. How long the two sides argue over the dollars will determine the length of this lockout. Let’s hope it is short.