ST. LOUIS — While we wait to see how Major League Baseball players field this 82-game proposal from their bosses, here’s a proposal for both parties.
Read the room.
Better yet, read the news.
The COVID-19 pandemic had claimed nearly 83,000 U.S. lives as of Tuesday afternoon. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the U.S. economy lost 20.5 million jobs last month. The unemployment rate, 14.7%, is the worst since the Great Depression.
That puts the common man’s tolerance level for bickering between billionaire owners and millionaire players at — let me check the latest poll — somewhere around zero%. Average Joe would love to watch a baseball game to keep from worrying about his bank account. Please don’t ask him to worry about baseball’s.
“It is time again for baseball to serve,” super agent Scott Boras wrote in a New York Times editorial last week.
Let’s hope Boras is sticking to that logic in conversations with his clients and the owners who employ them as both sides discuss plans for a shortened 2020 season that is being promoted as a way to help a reeling nation heal.
Baseball isn’t back. Not yet. And it takes loads of optimism to envision a scenario in which the proposal owners agreed to Monday is not derailed by a virus that is uniquely problematic for team sports.
But if something has to stop baseball’s return, let it be the virus and not the vitriol between players and owners. Let it be health. Not wealth.
A quick and relatively painless agreement owners and players struck on March 26, after the pandemic canceled spring training and postponed the start of the regular season, seemed like a good omen.
The fear before had been that the bad blood boiling between owners and players as the next negotiation of the collective bargaining agreement neared might cause both sides to lose sight of the bigger picture.
The worry now is that the cooperation displayed back then might have been a false positive.
One of the biggest problems players are expected to have with Monday’s proposal stems from a disagreement about the wording of that March 26 deal. Players seem to think the discussion about salary was settled, pointing to their agreement to accept a year’s worth of service time and a prorated portion of their contracts for however many games could be played in 2020. The owners, pointing to another clause in that same March 26 agreement, believe the language of the agreement can and should be revisited due to the fact the 2020 season will at least start without fans in the stands, meaning the loss of revenue from tickets, concessions, parking and more. Owners, claiming no fans in seats could mean a revenue decline of roughly 40%, want players to help sustain the hit, so they want to swap the idea of paying 82 games worth of player salary with a 50-50 revenue split between players and owners. Players had previously suggested this would be a non-starter.
“Our position is that with respect to player salaries, we’ve had that discussion already,” Tony Clark, the head of the players’ association, told ESPN last week. “Our focus now is on health and safety moving forward.”
There are lots of unanswered questions about health and safety, by the way. This discussion matters more than the money. Washington Nationals reliever Sean Doolittle raised some obvious issues in a series of tweets posted Monday, wondering about the amount and frequency of testing that can ethically take place in a league that plays in a country that does not yet seem to have enough tests, the risk to players who have preexisting conditions that might make them more vulnerable to serious health problems if exposed to coronavirus, and the big one that cannot be repeated enough — what’s the plan if, and it’s more like when, a player tests positive for the virus after baseball gets back to work?
These answers are either not in the proposal, or not in the part that was leaked to national baseball writers faster than a Jordan Hicks pitch reaches Yadier Molina. If you don’t know why the topic of the money was the first to surface, you’re not thinking critically. The owners are ready to play ball on their terms, which means they are ready to make the players the bad guys if they protest.
But owners are being shortsighted if they think they are safe from public backlash. Average Joe is on to them. Owners will and should be called out for crying poor while never opening up their books to prove it. They did not rush to cut players in on revenue spikes, such as massive TV contracts and MLB Advanced Media, but now they want players to help pick them up from a decline. Owners’ chances to recoup losses are much greater than the comparatively short career lifespan of players, who are going to be the ones putting their health on the line to play.
And the players? They will be vilified if they are viewed as attempting to bite the hand that feeds them. Greedy. Entitled. You know the drill.
Both sides lose if this gets ugly. Save the big fight for the CBA negotiations that will come after the 2021 season. Now is not the time.
Forgive me for playing Pollyanna during a pandemic, but wouldn’t it be nice if players and owners could give our nation’s lost politicians an example of meeting in the middle?
Players should agree to switch from 82 games worth of salary to a 50-50 revenue split only if owners agree to make up the difference in deferred payments down the line, after the business of baseball is booming again. If owners don’t like the sound of that, they should honor the March 26 agreement. Settling this fast would allow the conversation to move on to more important topics, like what the heck happens when a starting infield comes down with coronavirus.
It’s smart to have serious doubts about this 82-game season working out.
It would be a shame if infighting stopped it before it starts.