We may be about to see some March Madness in baseball now, a March Madness the likes of which the game has never really seen. In college basketball, the excitement starts up with Selection Sunday on March 13. Now that there is a new collective bargaining agreement in place, this year's baseball season will start the same weekend, when the players who currently have jobs report to their teams and MLB is officially open for business again.

This year won’t have a traditional Spring Training. It will have a frenzied free agency, with trades and Black Friday-like shopping from Florida to Arizona in all the new and old capitals of the spring.

• Everything you need to know about '22 season

Usually the foundations for most teams have been set by now. Not in the spring of 2022, as we wait to find out what’s going to happen with Freddie Freeman, Carlos Correa, Trevor Story, Kris Bryant and … well, you know, the list is much longer than that.

Nobody really expects Clayton Kershaw to leave the Dodgers. But Kershaw is a free agent, too. There is always the chance that he leaves Los Angeles, goes home to Texas and starts a second career there at age 34 (his birthday is March 19).

We all know what things are like in all professional sports when free agency begins. We saw some of that last fall with contracts like the ones Max Scherzer signed with the Mets and Corey Seager with the Rangers. It always goes like that once the season ends. This time around it, many signings are going to happen as a new season is about to begin. Spring Training will be a chance for March Madness without brackets.

Usually at this time of year, it is March Madness in college basketball that seems to dominate the sports conversation. But maybe not now. What was a hard February for baseball fans while they waited for a new CBA to be hammered out, a hard February that spilled into March, might turn out to be a March filled with big, crazy fun.

Is Mets owner Steve Cohen about to make another set of aggressive moves so his team can go after the Braves in the National League East? Cohen, more active on Twitter than any other owner in the sport, was back the other night with a new tweet, saying, “Anybody know how to use Twitter? I forgot how.”

It is unlikely that he has forgotten how to make bold moves, and we’ll see what he and general manager Billy Eppler have up their sleeves this spring.

The Yankees, who didn’t make a major signing pre-lockout, are going to be in play for big free agents. We keep hearing that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman is about to make a push for Freeman, who is coming off a dream October in which he finally won it all with the Braves. His career was beginning in Atlanta as Chipper Jones’ was winding down. Then Freeman became the face of the franchise.

Would Freeman leave the Braves now for his own second act, in New York or maybe even in L.A. with the Dodgers? We are about to find that out, too.

By the way? The Yankees don’t just need help at first base. This might be the first Yankees team ever with question marks in March at catcher, first base, shortstop, center field and left-handed power. Freeman obviously would check a couple of big boxes for them. Stay tuned.

“Being in this organization means everything to me,” Freeman said not long after the Braves won it all.

That was November. This is now.

Freeman was a postseason star in October 2021. Correa has been a postseason star more than once with the Astros, and his Houston team won it all in 2017. Correa is still just 27 years old, and even though there have been lingering concerns about back issues, he is going to get paid somewhere, maybe even in Houston. His old manager, A.J. Hinch, is now with the Tigers, who seem poised to make a big move in the American League Central. Detroit already signed shortstop Javier Báez prior to the work stoppage. Báez moved to second base with the Mets because they had Francisco Lindor. He could do the same for Correa.

These are just some of the bigger names available out of a list of Major League and Minor League free agents, who will start signing as a giant wheel begins to turn this weekend when players report.

There are also going to be trades. We keep hearing that the A’s might be open for business, because some of their star players now stand to make more money in arbitration. Another name linked to the Yankees is first baseman Matt Olson, who hit 39 homers for Oakland last year and is four and a half years younger than Freeman.

We’ve gone from no action in baseball to the potential for all kinds of action, on and off the field, starting now. The CBA negotiation that just ended took 14 weeks. Look out for the next three.