Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it’s clear that two forces are combining to steal the spotlight from the national pastime during one of its most dramatic weeks. And one of those forces is, of course, football.
Just as baseball forges through its final week before the non-waiver trade deadline on Sunday, the end of the NFL’s lengthy lockout has ushered in what will be an incredibly chaotic and attention-grabbing period of free agency just as training camps open.
On Tuesday, NFL teams can begin to talk to free agents, as well as sign rookie free agents and draft picks. Camps open Wednesday. Free agents can begin to sign with teams Friday.
The rumor mill more often reserved for baseball this time of year will be cluttered with pigskin-related news the scope of which we have never seen. Teams must first take inventory of their own free agents, with whom they have not been able to negotiate, and then decide who else to target. A multi-month exercise of building a team one hopes to be Super Bowl-worthy will be crunched into a few head-spinning days.
Baseball, meanwhile, is headed toward a deadline that seems as if it will lack major moves. There is a relative degree of expectancy that New York Mets outfielder Carlos Beltran will be traded at some point, a few starters of renown will be shipped (perhaps one to Boston) and, as always, bullpens will be restocked. But overall, there’s a chance it could be one of the quietest trade deadlines in recent memory in terms of actual activity.
The fact that the chatter surrounding the NFL’s period of drama will be so loud will only help to give baseball definitive backseat status this week.
Not that any of this is the fault of baseball, which figures to head into its next collective bargaining period with relatively little drama, but the grand old game may continue to get overshadowed even beyond its normally riveting trade deadline period.
In the interest of seeing how loosely formed teams with very little practice look in a sport defined by precision and power, and how abbreviated position battles play out, many fans will be watching preseason action with a bit more interest. That will give football its fair share of headlines through August, when baseball’s races should be drawing the majority of the attention.
And we all know how September and October work. Baseball is rife with daily drama, but it is challenged for top status each Sunday (and often Monday, Thursday and Saturday) by football.
Usually, the non-waiver trade deadline in baseball is an incredibly fascinating period of time. But because the sport’s chief rival in debates over which game rules this land has finally opened its doors, baseball’s last few days of July will play second fiddle.
