Atlanta Braves podcast: a blueprint for the MLB off-season

What can we expect the Atlanta Braves and MLB teams to do this Winter?  We think we already know.

The TomahawkTake / Atlanta Braves podcast this week focuses primarily on how we believe teams are going to navigate this era of uncertainty during this Winter.

In short, it’s like this:  if you can’t see the depth of the water, you’d better not dive in.

This wretched virus simply isn’t going away.  Across the United States — and particularly in the big cities where professional sports teams are located — cases are continuing to crop up in the thousands on a daily basis.

As a result, there’s really no expectation that clubs can count on fans in the stands to any degree in 2021 (even at limited capacity) or even what kind of season length might be in play.

Heck, here we are now at the end of October and there hasn’t been a sniff of a rumor about bringing back the Designated Hitter rule for the NL next year.

This represents a real problem for teams in terms of planning.  There is no assurance of revenue.  There has been no communication about how they can use certain players — at least in the National League.

While there is a published schedule (the season supposedly starts on April 1), there’s no certainly of how travel will be handled or if teams will have the budget to do anything on a “more normal” basis.

All of that is the underlying tone on this week’s podcast, where Fred, Jake, and Alan shake off our last thoughts about 2020 and start looking forward to 2021.

We hinted strongly at some of these themes in a preview of this podcast, but we really believe that it is going to be a very rough Winter for teams and players.

Heck, if you liked the arguing going on between team owners and the players union back in June and July, then I’ll bet you can’t wait for the inevitable shouting matches that will happen by January.

But that’s the backdrop — and we spent some time detailing our ideas for what might happen here in the podcast.  Here’s the direct link for that, along with the inline player below:

As always, you can subscribe to the TomahawkTake podcast at most of your favorite distribution outlets, and we want make a point to thank you for listening.  It’s a labor of love on our part, but also fun to put together.