Extraordinary times call for MLB owners to try the impossible: earn players’ trust
Just when things started to moderately look up, when baseball’s 30 owners and the players exchanged starting offers to get the 2020 MLB season rolling, the negotiations were reduced to a threat.
The owners on Monday floated through the media that commissioner Rob Manfred has the ability to set the schedule, and would set one in the range of 42 to 50 games. Players would get their full pro-rated salaries, but at even less than in the owners’ initial offer of a sliding salary scale.
Apparently, the players’ first offer of a 114-game season, with full pro-rated pay and possible deferred money was just as disingenuous to the owners as the owners’ initial salvo was to the players.
According to reports, the owners aren’t planning to use the 50-game season as an official counter-offer. They are, though, willing to lower the bar for hospitable negotiations and further put a season in jeopardy.
But a deeper look at the threat shows just how preposterous it is.
Fifty games?
So few contests would fail to capture the nation’s attention at a time when the nation would willingly give baseball the attention it has lacked for years and years. There’s money to be made in future seasons by cultivating new fans amid the coronavirus pandemic.
A 50-game season would remove any chance of giving the season any legitimacy, after an offseason in which the legitimacy of the 2017 and 2018 seasons were put in doubt via sign-stealing investigations.
Forcing 50 games and a sharper pay cut upon the players would serve to galvanize them as the sides head into 2021 and hammering out a new collective bargaining agreement. The owners don’t want to see union togetherness. They want to sew disharmony among the players.
With the owners essentially saying 50 games would best to minimize their losses, how truly well off are the owners and the sport? Manfred has said owners stand to lose $4 billion this season with no fans and an abbreviated schedule. MLB, though, has also bragged about making $10.7 billion last season. MLB can’t get by on $6.7 billion this year?
Are owners losing money, or just not making as much as they have in the past?
The players aren’t innocent in all of this. Some of them really do live paycheck to paycheck, but that’s not the owners’ fault. The players unwittingly gave owners leverage over contracts in the current CBA in exchange for luxury-type items such as having two seats on the bus and earlier start times on getaway days and four more days off during the season.
While players are facing reduced salaries, they must be compassionate to the fact that so are minor-league players and fans, and clubs’ ticket-sales forces and game-operations staff and seasonal employees who help make it possible for teams to operate successfully.
However, the players have made concessions.
They already agreed to one pay cut. The thought of taking another to appease the owners, who have never shown their accounting to the union, has been a non-starter.
The owners have already wrecked the June draft for the next couple years. and are trying to contract 25% of affiliated minor-league teams. Those moves are reducing each team’s debt and payroll.
Somewhere, though, there has to be a solution.
How about a partnership of sorts? Not revenue sharing, which the players despise, but working together for the common good through trust.
The common good is playing baseball this year and also avoiding a stoppage in 2022.
If owners are as hard off as they are claiming, open the books. Let players see it for themselves. Show the players the harm that would be caused by paying full pro-rated salaries — no B.S. — and incentivize their cooperation in taking less this year by deferring payments for a year or two.
Owners could label the deferments as hazard pay. Yes, the players are taking risks in playing games and traveling to cities that might be, or become, COVID-19 hotspots. Players have families they don’t want to risk infecting or be quarantined from if suspected of having the disease.
The owners, meanwhile, won’t even have to leave their mansions to watch the players turn out the product that will trigger local and national TV contracts and potentially bring a whole new group of fans’ wallets to the sport.
And do all of this nice and quiet, without using leaks to build public discord against either side.
Owners don’t want to pay the players, but they have to pay the players if they want to stem their losses. Players don’t trust the owners, but they have to if they want to play and get paid.
The past two months have shown that billionaires and the world’s best baseball players are in this pandemic together, along with the rest of us poor saps.
As pie-in-the-sky as it might seem, especially after the owners used a 50-game threat to make a point, an owner-player partnership built on trust is what baseball needs to have a season.
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
