"I need baseball...stop being stupid and make a deal" - When master of suspense, Stephen King shared the agony of waiting for MLB lockout to end

When the MLB was nearing a lockout at the start of 2022, author Stephen King took to Twitter (now called X) with a mini outburst. The novelist, a huge baseball fan, wanted the league to get itself in order so that a full season could be played out.

It is common knowledge that Stephen King is a baseball lover. He has a fondness for MLB in general and the Boston Red Sox in particular and is known to use elements of the sport in his writings. In King's 1999 book "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon," he told the story of a little girl who, stranded in the woods, looked up to a Red Sox closer as her hero.

The 2022 lockout was due to a tough situation between the owners and the Players Association because of a failure to draft a new collective bargaining agreement. The main reason for the lockout was due to a cap on player salaries. The owners tried to cap the luxury tax to a fixed limit for multiple years, which the players vehemently opposed.

After months of negotiation, a new CBA was agreed upon. But that was only after an agonizing moment for all baseball fans who thought they would be devoid of a full season. This prompted celebrity fans like Stephen King to take to social media.

"I need baseball. Come on you guys, stop being stupid and make a deal!" King posted on Feb. 17, 2022.

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How has the new CBA helped the MLB players?

Without negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement, plenty of free agents could not sign new contracts with MLB teams that wanted them. Furthermore, a number of salaries were backended as players missed out on off-season pay.

After the new CBA was signed, a party was reached that increased the luxury tax threshold for 2023 and 2024. Furthermore, the teams agreed upon an arbitration bonus pool as they incentivized the earnings of players who lacked service time and were ineligible for salary hikes.