What if a squabble over money, and not coronavirus, is what squashes baseball in 2020?
The 30 owners of MLB teams, whether they’re sole owners or part of an ownership group, are intelligent people for the most part.
They were smart enough and innovative enough to make millions and billions of dollars in their lifetimes, and smart enough to not blow it all. They might lose chunks of their fortunes during economic downturns, but they’re still doing well enough for them to be able to use $100 bills as Kleenex.
Players don’t get the credit for how smart they are. They learn what it takes to be a major-league ballplayer and what it takes to sustain it and who to trust with the large sums of money most make each season.
Owners and players are both smart enough to see opportunity and seize it.
Instead, they have taken the first steps toward blowing it and causing damage to future seasons.
Owners and players are squabbling over money at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has thrown 33 million people out of work and is threatening to sink the country’s economy into a devastating depression.
What a terrible look from the owners and players. And guess what? People, many of them among the 33 million unemployed, are looking directly at them and won’t forget if money, not COVID-19, ultimately caused the season to get wiped out.
MLB games in 2020, no matter how long the season might be, is an opportunity.
No other team sports will be playing games until August, assuming football returns. Sports fans who’ve been adhering to stay-at-home orders for weeks will be desperate to watch.
Commissioner Rob Manfred said he wants to be part of the country’s economic recovery. The national pastime can help give people an escape from the fear of contracting COVID-19 and the uncertainty that comes with unemployment.
The opportunity for baseball to regain some its lost popularity, and the millions in dollars for owners and players that eventually could come with that spike, is there for the taking.
Yet every squabble from MLB or the MLB Players Association threatens to undermine all of that and leave a lasting black eye.
The owners are losing money, with no TV and gate revenues streaming in, and they don’t want to pay the players what the players believe they already agreed to be paid.
The players, meanwhile, say that the revenue-sharing plan that owners proposed Monday is a salary cap and they will never ever, not in a million years, agree to a salary cap.
Not even in this year of unprecedented events.
Yet, each side appears to be digging in.
Owners are trying to reduce their debt as much as possible. (Need proof? Just look at what they did to the MLB draft.) Players say safety is their biggest concern, though there are players — lots of them — who actually don’t have millions in the bank and could use some income.
In a world that often is right vs. wrong, the players seems to be on the right side.
They are the ones taking the risk. They are the vehicles the owners are using to stop their financial bleeding by taking less money for the risk of infection or infecting their loved ones.
They also have a deal in place, and have already been taking less money over the first two months of the season.
Ultimately, though, the particulars might not matter. It’ll come down to public perception.
The best thing both sides can do is to find middle ground, quietly and quickly. Limit the people doing the haggling, thus limiting the potential for leaks to the media, and don’t say squat until the deal is done.
A 2020 MLB season, even if only 82 games, is an opportunity.
Don’t blow it.
