It doesn’t matter that the Major League clubs keep their spring training complexes closed as part of the “lockout” or lockout that they decreed 96 days ago.
The players work daily, fine-tuning their tools to be ready when the new collective contract (2022-26) is signed. For now they are doing it in a complex located in the town of Mesa, Arizona, in which the union provides support with specialized personnel.
For example, Venezuelan reliever Brusdar Graterol, who is about to complete his third season with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was seen performing pitching routines, with fast fast pitches that easily exceed one hundred miles per hour.
Graterol is just one of dozens of players from various clubs training in Arizona.
Many of them have said that the owners’ decision to cancel the first two series of the regular season was disappointing.
One of them, Austin Slater, an outfielder for the San Francisco Giants and a union delegate on his team, confessed that the players, as a union, are more united than ever.
“I think this is the strongest and most unified we’ve been in the last 30 years,” Slater told the newspaper.
San Francisco Chronicle “And I think the owners and the commissioner’s office appreciated that and maybe saw it as an opportunity to see if that was really true or not. And I think they will soon find out that it is: we are strong, we are united, everyone is informed and on the same page, and that we are just fighting for a fair deal here.”
Graterol came to the Dodgers in a three-way trade before the 2020 season began, after making his debut with the Minnesota Twins in 2019.
The 23-year-old right-hander from Guariqueño, born in Calabozo on August 26, 1998, has seen action in 67 games in three seasons (three as a starter) and is 5-3 with a 4.07 ERA, 18 walks and 50 strikeouts.
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