Do you ever have a topic that takes you a while to figure out? It could be anything. Solving for something at work. Figuring out why your significant other is mad at you. Or something in sports. That last one is maybe more a ‘me’ thing as a blogger and podcaster. Yesterday, I tried to figure out why the players came out so feverishly (No pun intended) about the missteps in testing at different places. Then it finally clicked that there is a new distrust between the players and MLB. While the players are likely overreacting, the MLB didn’t do enough to alleviate those concerns.

The reactions of Kris Bryant, Brett Anderson, Sean Doolittle are a bit over the top. They expected something brand new with a lot of nuances to be perfect immediately. That is foolish to expect everything will run smoothly. Some teams did not have problems with testing. From all accounts, the Milwaukee Brewers did a great job with their testing. While the media is trying to make this seem like a league-wide issue, it is only a few teams that had issues with their testing. Anderson’s overreaction tweet felt not needed seeing as Brewers are doing a good job with their testing. MLB learned from their mistakes over the weekend, and things will get better this week.

As for the MLB, they’re not escaping criticism here. How the fuck do you start this thing over a holiday weekend? Of course, there would be delays. How did MLB not check in with each place doing testing? If there was going to be a delay, they should have worked with those teams directly and figured out how to schedule their practices. MLB did not write out a statement or apologize. They went through the media versus owning their shit. This is a consistent problem throughout this era of distrust.

Where do we land now? No one trusts anyone. That’s a major issue. MLB needs to do more to appease their players even if they’re upset at how everything went down. And if they give a little bit, maybe just maybe, you will not have players speaking out at every turn.

Charlie.