It's Monday, and you know what that means: Baseball's first lockout since 1990 survived the weekend with no movement whatsoever. Collective bargaining broke off Wednesday afternoon; by midday Thursday all parties had decamped for wartime entrenchments, owners had fully shut down all league business, and battle lines had been drawn. The freshest story on MLB's website today is about Hall-of-Fame inductions; no updates about the league's first work stoppage in decades have been published in four days. Notably, the headlines of the website's many sad filler blogs have converted to large-format font, no doubt to fill in the acres of space vacated by all those memory-holed indications that the sport has been played professionally in the new millennium.
Not surprisingly, the faces are still missing. MLB's website acknowledges that the sport is played by humans, but until a new CBA is reached the league is taking the extraordinary step of banishing all images and likenesses related to those humans. An anxious public cries out for faces. Grown men, big strong brutes, walk up to us with tears in their eyes, and they want to know, where are the faces? We used to have the faces, but now we can't see the faces anymore. It's unacceptable!
Here at Defector we view the showing of the faces as fundamental to the appreciation of the sport of baseball. At the top of this blog you will find another 46 baseball faces, from a randomized list of the roughly 1,500 guys who do the pitching and catching and dinger-socking for Major League Baseball. Very few stars in this group, unless you count all members of the Washington Nationals as stars, which to me seems perfectly sensible. I know just six of these men by their faces alone: two Nationals, two former Nationals, a Phillie, a Brave. Which guys do you recognize?
Also, the key to our Day 1 Lockout spread is below. Congrats to DJ Peters for having the funniest face on there! The key for today's group will be shared when we post the next of these blogs. With nothing to encourage anyone that the lockout might end anytime soon, we've certainly got plenty of time to remember many guys. Get to it.
