Jeff Passan’s cryptic tweet has fans freaking after MLB Lockout bummer

It’s a bleak world out here for baseball fans right now, grasping onto takes from a month ago to justify their vision that the MLB lockout will be ending swiftly.

Once upon a time, everyone treated the owners locking the players out like a formality. It’ll be two months of grumbling and then a resolution, they said. We won’t miss any games or even Spring Training scrimmages, they said. Trust us, these two sides are just posturing and they know what they’re doing, they said.

Well, smash cut to a month later, and the MLBPA and ownership camps haven’t even talked. They won’t be talking for several more weeks, at which point they’ll have about three weeks to reach an agreement before Spring Training is delayed. There’s no end in sight that doesn’t significantly impact the season.

Or, as Jeff Passan so eloquently quoted a baseball person as saying in Wednesday’s piece, “What the f*** are we doing?”

Wish we knew, Jeff! Wish we knew.

Since the two sides botched the COVID season so spectacularly, resolving none of their issues before striking a bare-bones deal to give us the smallest amount of baseball possible, we could feel this coming. Yankees fans stand to lose as much as anyone; you sign Gerrit Cole, you get your ace, and then boom: a 60-game season no one likes, a season that begins without fans in April and May, and likely another shortened campaign.

And that MLB lockout aggravation is exactly why Passan’s next tweet set us, and the rest of the baseball universe, off so much. A GIF of a fighter jet about a half hour later? Does this mean action? Does this mean anger? Does this mean … something?!

What is Jeff Passan saying with his cryptic MLB Lockout tweet?

What is it, Jeff? Sudden progress in the wake of your depressing first message? Are both sides ready for war? At least war would be something. Something we could look at.

Are we landing the plane, or crashing the plane here? That feels important.

Needless to say, this simple GIF might as well have been a new 900-word Harry Potter book for baseball fans who are desperate to slurp up anything. They had plenty of interpretations of Passan’s wordless message, which of course followed many, many depressing MLB lockout words from earlier in the morning.

Yes, Jeff, is it Carlos Correa signing with the Yankees? Is he flying his own plane? Or is that landing at JFK to go visit Steve Cohen?

Makes sense that Correa would have a fighter jet in his possession, to be perfectly honest. Pretty argumentative guy.

Or was the fighter jet a live look at one Yankees star’s struggles?

Oh, great, a reminder of that. Because the one thing we needed in a time of unprecedented labor unrest was a reminder of one of our biggest stars’ insane regressions.

Hall of Fame czar Ryan Thibodaux took a break from counting ballots just to join Passan in getting excited about “Top Gun 2”.

Yeah, maybe it is that simple.

While no conclusions were drawn, the replies were very educational, at least. For example, some fans learned about time zones!

Those tricky little buggers…

So, when will Passan drop the bomb on us that the season’s either resuming or outright destroyed by greed?

Check back in a few weeks. For now, we’ll just keep riding the highway into the danger zone.

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