When the Clock Strikes Midnight On Dec. 1, Players Will Be Free to Move About the World

If you are wondering what the landscape of baseball will look like during the looming work stoppage that will begin in Major League Baseball at midnight on Dec. 1, look back about 20 years to the 2004-05 lockout in the National Hockey League.

When the NHL's owners locked out the players on Sept. 16, 2004 as they sought a salary cap, the NHL's teams could no longer control where their contracted players decided to ply their trade during the lockout.

That meant that 388 players - most of them European, but some of them not - crossed the Atlantic to play in Russia, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and Czechia. Others stayed in North America and played in junior leagues or the affiliated minor leagues, either in their hometowns, near their NHL clubs, or where they had friends or siblings playing.

Barring a miraculous agreement on how MLB owners and the members of the union representing the league's players, the Major League Baseball Players Association, reaching an agreement on a new collective bargaining agreement, the lockout will begin at midnight on Dec. 1, plunging baseball's top league into darkness.

Of course, there will still be baseball being played, including by MLB players, during the lockout. When Dec. 1 rolls around, the four big winter leagues, the Dominican Republic's LIDOM, Puerto Rico's LBPRC, Venezuela's Liga Venezolana de Beisbol Profesional, and Mexico's Liga Mexicana del Pacifico, which are governed by the Confederacion de Beisbol Profesional del Caribe will be just past the midway point of their respective seasons. Every winter, MLB players make cameo appearances in those leagues, and while the current CBA is in force, teams can seek to limit the participation of players on the 40-man roster.

But once the lockout begins, it's a free-for-all. Last week, MLB's Deputy Commissioner of Baseball Administration and Chief Legal Officer Dan Halem circulated a 34-page memo that leaked to The Athletic and other media outlets specifying what contacts team are and are not allowed to do with regards to their players during a lockout.

"Major League Baseball," The Athletic's Evan Drellich reported the memo as saying, "will not try to stop players from playing in other professional sports leagues during a lockout, including for winter ball."

So buckle up.

If you're a fan of winter ball, expect things to get wild once the MLB owners bolt the doors. Under normal circumstances, MLB teams can generally nix a player's participation in winter ball unless they are playing in their home country, and under the terms of the Winter League Agreement, teams can limit a player's participation. But once the lockout begins, teams won't stop players from playing in the winter leagues.

Similarly, when spring training time rolls around and there's still a lockout underway, expect players to get on planes bound for Mexico, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Each of those leagues limits the number of "import" players a team can have on the roster at a given time, with the NPB and KBO allowing four, the CPBL allowing four on the roster, three active, and two on the field at any one time. The LMB allows up to 18 foreign players on a team's roster, though most teams sign between six and 12 players who weren't born in Mexico.

Will nearly 400 MLB players go and play abroad during the lockout? Probably not - but some will.

And others will stay close to home. Expect more than a handful of MLB players to sign deals to play independent ball in the Atlantic League, American Association, Pioneer League, and National Association.

The Alaska Aces signed Anchorage's own Scott Gomez, a star forward for the NHL's New Jersey Devils, and he led the Aces all the way to the ECHL's conference finals. His linemate, Chris Minard, developed as a goal scorer from playing with Gomez, and later played 40 games in the world's top league.

Twenty-some years ago, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the NHL lockout was an independent minor league team called the Motor City Mechanics. They played out of an 8,000-seat rink in Fraser, Michigan, not far from Detroit, in a now-defunct, low-rent league best remembered for having an expansion team run by a mobster who named his 17-year-old son as general manager.

Because of the NHL lockout, the Mechanics were able to add Chris Chelios, Derian Hatcher, Bryan Smolinski, and Sean Avery - each a bona fide NHL star, and Chelios later became an honoured member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. Those four players got to keep their skates and skills sharp before returning to the NHL when the lockout ended. Of course, it didn't mean much for the Mechanics, who drew a paltry 1,775 fans per game that season and finished 37-36-7, missing the playoffs.

But if nothing else, it was entertaining. So if there's a lockout, and you're a baseball fan who enjoys baseball, tune in around the world if MLB isn't playing.

You might see someone big playing somewhere you've never been for a team you didn't know existed. And if that happens, enjoy it while it lasts, all the while hoping that we don't have to see the lockout wipe out an entire season the way the NHL's did two decades ago.