Athletics Eckersley Growing Impatient With Owners & Players Not Getting Deal Done
Dennis Eckersley is just like any other baseball fan.
Well, except for the MVP win, the Cy Young Award, the World Series ring and the Hall of Fame plaque. Admittedly most baseball fans don’t have any of those.
Like many of his brethren in fandom, longtime Oakland A’s reliever Eckersley is spending some time grinding his teeth while Major League Baseball’s owners and players dance around the subject of getting baseball up and running again, three months into a pandemic-induced shutdown.
Eckersley woke up Tuesday morning feeling good about baseball’s future, which was a nice change.
“As far as this baseball thing, I see something happening right now,” Eckersley said from Pleasanton, where he’s been staying for the last month or so as he visits his daughter and her family. “The next day. I think it’s nut-cutting time right now, I really do.
“The embarrassment is there already that they are having a draft tomorrow and there’s no baseball. They are going to play. I believe that. But they’ve already done damage.”
Eckersley said that he’s coming at the subject from “an angle of `Let’s make sense.’”
“And that’s not always the way it works in baseball,” he said, “not when you’re passionately involved like they (the owners and players) are. We can be over here thinking about it all we want, but were not in it. They’ve done damage, but they could clean this up really quick.”
He said he doesn’t know what it feels like to be a player in this generation, but you know how it is, that (in negotiations) they get their chests all puffed out in solidarity. There’s a time for that, but not in a pandemic.”
Not that he has any love lost for the position the owners take.
“You would think they would see that the value of their clubs is in jeopardy with what’s to come, if this continues,” he said. “With the virus around, the owners are going to be up against it.”
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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