This is the winter ahead, when Day 6 has the general manager of the Atlanta Braves uttering a perhaps untidy, though probably not sinister, sentence and the Major League Baseball Players Association leaping to the defense of a player-acquisition system it senses has grown impure. Or, rather, impurer.
When, here we are, Alex Anthopoulos says he’d spent recent weeks discerning what other ballclubs could be up to in the coming months, actually mentioning free agency by its given name — “free agency” — and the union counters with the promise of a full investigation into just what the heck he meant by that.