MLB lockout over, Mets and Yankees can finally return

The hard decision I have been delaying can be delayed no more. A plane ticket must be bought, a hotel room reserved, a car rental reservation made.

I have had a while –  too long, really – to decide whether to begin this spring training in Port St. Lucie with the Mets or Tampa with the Yankees. And the fact that I ran out of time, finally, to decide is joyous. It means baseball is back.

It means the owners and the players found a way to the finish line, late, but not so late that they are still going to jam 162 games into a schedule that will now begin April 7 rather than March 31. It means free agency and the trade market have reopened and brace yourself for the most bizarre bazaar as spring training and high-stakes, rapid-fire, multiple-time-a-day transactions are going to occur simultaneously.

And it means I have to decide. And the fact that I have to decide is why those of us who still love this damn sport – even as we wonder about reciprocation – wanted it to come back. Why we wanted the owners and players to figure out acceptable minimum wages, luxury tax thresholds and amounts thrown into a new pre-arbitration bonus pool.

Because it means we get to see Juan Soto swing again and Trea Turner run. We get to see Noah Syndergaard in an Angels uniform and Corey Seager and Marcus Semien as a half-a-billion dollar middle infield with the Rangers. But here in my own little slice of baseball, I get two competitive, fascinating clubs and as the senior guy I get a choice whether to fly to the East or West Coast of Florida to begin.

And it is not easy. The Mets with their new additions – notably Max Scherzer and Buck Showalter – are glossier, more interesting today. But the Yankees never stop being the Yankees. And their lack of pre-lockout movement means that essentially they will be holding spring training and their version of the Winter Meetings simultaneously. It will be their Shohei Ohtani moment, trying to excel at two different disciplines simultaneously – both preparing a roster while finishing off major portions of it.

But don’t I want to see that first bullpen session in which Scherzer lines up next to Jacob deGrom and my imagination roams to all the possibilities that duo present?

Won’t it be good nourishment for the baseball brain to see how Showalter begins the multi-tiered process of introduction, preparation and culture building. He can’t remain silent any longer. We will see how he plans to use J.D. Davis, Jeff McNeil and Dom Smith. And on the subject of not remaining silent, Robinson Cano has lots of explaining to do about why he was suspended last year.

And, by the way, it isn’t as if the Mets’ transaction page is going to go blank with the doors re-opened. Davis, McNeil and Smith individually or in some combo could be traded. If you haven’t heard, Steve Cohen owns the team and his fellow owners are so worried about just how much more money he will invest on his roster that a fourth tier of the luxury tax was created with him specifically in mind. The Wilpons have never been more gone than when a Mets owner will have a tax named basically for him.