you take me back, we taken a time with a thazoo

there's no ticket of clock anywhere, you have to go

Yeah music never starts home, we'll fill on the platform

we won't tych but i got you take me back to my mountain tire

be aware of the figures where i got you take me back to my mountain tip

Hello and welcome to episode 1780 of Effectively Wildly Baseball Podcasts from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I am Henry Verga, the Wringer, joined by a MacGrowley of FanGraphs. Hello, Nick.

Hello.

I was thinking about what various baseball personnel will be doing during the lockout.

We will be making podcasts, of course, and you will still be publishing posts about what I don't know.

I'm sure you're trying to figure that out. You have plenty of experience of trying to figure out what to publish on a baseball website when there's no baseball going on from last year.

In a way, that suspended portion of the season when things stopped after spring training and before the season started last year was kind of a dry run for this.

I mean, hopefully it'll be under somewhat better circumstances, depending on how various variants proceed. But that seemed like kind of a trial for this, like a lot of players who now are not able to rehab or train with their teams, not that all of them would be over the offseason anyway.

But those who were training remotely last year and maybe developed some sort of home gym or some personal fitness plan that they could do on their own, maybe they are better prepared for this now.

And probably baseball media members are better prepared for this. They have their evergreen feature ideas, scrolled away, hopefully to publish now.

But players will be wondering where they're going to play. Of course, if they are not signed somewhere. And front office people who fortunately from the sound of it are not being furloughed or anything for now, I wonder what they will do and how that will differ from their normal offseason workload.

When Jeff Sullivan has been on the podcast talking about what he did last year when there was a pandemic and no baseball, it sounds like not a whole heck of a lot. Like he was taking a lot of long walks around Portland from the sound of it. And there's probably going to be some of that going on now. But you have to lay the groundwork you have to prepare for the presumed sprint to spring training and opening day.

I mean, if the lockout is resolved in February, let's say, and pictures and catchers are reporting right away, then there's not going to be a whole lot of time to figure out what you want to do. So you have to have your plans in place. And so I wonder if we will still get rumor reporting and leaks about potential transactions, even though there's a transaction freeze and teams are not allowed to talk to players.

And as I understand it or not, even allowed to talk to agents and maybe some teams and agents will figure out a way to circumvent that it wouldn't shock me.

Baseball teams don't always play by the rules when it comes to acquiring players for their teams.

But I'm sure that teams can talk to each other, right? So trades could perhaps be worked out and agreed to provisionally and not officially.

So I wonder if there will be a big backlog of deals that are done in principle. And then all of a sudden will be announced in the days after the transaction freeze unfreezes or thoughts.

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