St. Louis Cardinals President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak met with the media via Zoom Thursday night after the news of MLB owners and players coming to terms on the collective bargaining agreement.
"The best news is it's over. Hopefully, everybody can move forward, and as far as the term 'labor,' we're not talking about it as much anymore. We're talking about how our club looks, how the season is going, and who's performing well," Mozeliak said. You can hear Mozeliak's full conversation with the press in the audio at the top of the page.
The MLB Players Association voted 26-12 in favor of the owners' offer. Players may begin reporting to spring training as soon as Friday. Mozeliak says he expects to see Cardinal players at the Jupiter facilities by then.
One of the President's top priorities is "reassessing how you think about a shortened spring training schedule, and how you think about pitching," Mozeliak told Katie Woo of the Athletic. "We're gonna have to reverse engineer what that looks like, and determine how we can get our pitchers their innings in an appropriate manner."
The players' acceptance of the owners' offer on Thursday put an end to the 99 day lockout. A full, 162 game season will be played with 9-inning double headers to make up for the postponed Opening Day. The 2022 season will also feature pitch clocks, a universal designated hitter, and an expanded 12 team playoff format amongst other rule changes.
"We can look back and say 'What do we wish would've happened? Why didn't we start this earlier?' I'm sure those are details that some of us may never know the answers to, but what we do know is that we're back," Mozeliak emphasizes.
Related
The Cardinals will open the season at home on April 7th with a four-game series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. First pitch is at 3:15pm CT. As always, you can hear the game on KMOX 1120AM and 98.7FM.