Commentary: Seattle ready to spring forward as lengthy MLB lockout comes to a close

SEATTLE – Before we were so rudely interrupted, the Mariners needed a bat – probably two – for their offense and really had use for one more veteran arm for their pitching rotation.

You remember the Mariners, don’t you? Team from Seattle that plays in Major League Baseball, which until Thursday was paralyzed by an owner-imposed lockout, losing esteem and fans by the day.

Three-and-a-half months and a bitter labor impasse later, the M’s still have the same needs. And so, with the ink on Thursday’s agreement that lifted the 99-day lockout still fresh and the vitriol not yet dissipated, the fun part of the baseball season is starting. Finally.

Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto, start your cellphone.

This impending feeding frenzy of free-agent signings over the next 48 hours or so will be unlike anything the sport has seen before – approximately 300 players still in need of jobs and 30 teams still in need of players. Pronto.

Gratefully, there will be no more deep dives – for now – into the efficacy of the Competitive Balance Tax, or the pros and cons of the international draft. The nuances of the minimum salary and pre-arbitration bonus pool will be tabled for another day.

This is a day for anticipating what’s to come, not agonizing over the unpleasantness that just happened.

Suffice it to say that an agreement was reached, not at the 11th hour but more like the 23rd hour, to save baseball from itself just when self-destruction seemed imminent. It came after commissioner Rob Manfred ostensibly had canceled the first two weeks of the regular season once deadlines were passed, only to create new deadlines and find ways to magically restore the lost games to the schedule.

Thus, the 162-game season was preserved at a point when the impasse between the sides seemed so entrenched that it was easy to envision this dispute dragging well into the season.

But finally, after a 10-day stretch in which hopes for a settlement kept being lifted and dashed – all played out in real time on Twitter, a diabolical new twist from labor disputes of the past – a compromise was reached Thursday. It happened mere hours after Manfred announced that two more series had been removed from the schedule, and after the union issued a terse news release calling such a move “completely unnecessary.”

Spring training will be lopped by nearly three weeks. The regular season will start for the Mariners on April 7 in Minneapolis instead of March 31 in Seattle, as originally scheduled. The missed games from the early portion of the season will be made up by adding three days to the end of the season and sprinkling in doubleheaders – both games lasting nine innings, unlike the seven-inning doubleheaders of the past two years. Also gone is the ghost runner on second base in extra innings.

How much damage was done to the sport by exposing its dark underbelly at a time when fans should be luxuriating in the pleasures of spring training? Substantial. Instead of being a welcome respite from the stresses of real life – and those have never been more extreme – MLB has just been another irritant all winter. And even worse, at a time when interest in the sport was already on the decline, its place in the sporting hierarchy in jeopardy, and discontent with the product on the field rampant.

But now baseball will respond to its woes in the best way it has always done so: By presenting itself on the verdant fields of Arizona and Florida: by showcasing its great players instead of its savvy negotiators; and by changing the focus from grouchy men in suits to the poetry of ball meeting bat, the symphony of pitch hitting glove, the ballet of the crisply turned double play, the majestic gusto of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.”

Yeah, that’s a bit cheesy and overwrought. Guilty as charged. But the romance of baseball has always been high on its list of appeals, and that’s what the people in charge were destroying with every indignant rebuke of the other’s negotiating stance. Some would say the romance disappeared long ago, and that those who cling to it are living in a fantasy world. But it’s a fantasy that somehow has endured from the 1800s into the 2000s.

Speaking of fantasies: This is a year in which the Mariners have a realistic chance to break their 20-year playoff drought, longest in major professional men’s sports. Coming off a 90-win season that left them two games shy of a postseason berth, they boast the No. 1 farm system in the sport. In late November, Seattle signed reigning American League Cy Young Award winner Robbie Ray to a five-year, $115-million contract.

Dipoto promised at Ray’s introductory news conference that the Mariners weren’t done. But 24 hours later, their team-building process screeched to a halt when Manfred imposed the lockout and slapped a moratorium on any transactions. The hopes and dreams of Mariners fans were likewise put on long-term hold.

Baseball has lived in that uncomfortable darkness since. The offseason is supposed to be a time for fanciful daydreams that this, finally, will be the year. But it’s hard to put much of your heart’s yearning into that notion when you don’t even know who’s going to be on the team. Or, more to the point, when it will play.

Now, finally, we know the last part of that. Players will be flooding to spring-training sites in the upcoming days and are set to play games Friday – only about three weeks late. And soon we’ll know the first part, too, as GMs burn the phone lines to fill out their rosters.

Maybe the Mariners will land Kris Bryant, or Trevor Story, or Seiya Suzuki – three prominent hitters on the free-agent market who were linked to Seattle before the shutdown. Maybe they’ll trade for Sonny Gray or Chris Bassitt, two pitchers said to be on the trading block. There are many others, and knowing Dipoto and his penchant for wheeling and dealing, the Mariners will be in the middle of the fray.

The best news is that the union and owners representatives have left the negotiating room, and taken the soul-draining spectacle of labor minutiae with them.

I don’t care if they ever come back.