It seemed for a brief moment this week that Major League Baseball Commissioner Paul Manfred was offering an olive branch to players by agreeing to postpone the controversial introduction of a pitch clock until at least 2019.
But players aren't in the mood for conciliatory gestures. In the midst of the perhaps the coldest free-agent market in modern baseball history, the fight over the pitch clock could become a proxy for the players' many other grievances.
Few Detroit Tigers pitchers were enthusiastic about the idea of a pitch clock to speed up the game when the issue was raised last week at TigerFest.