On Monday, Major League Baseball offered its latest proposal for a shortened 2020 season to its players. The details of this plan—the second official proposal MLB has put forth since the season’s postponement in March—include 76 regular-season games per team, plus a playoff featuring up to 16 teams. Players would receive 50 percent of their per-game salary during the season, with all players due an additional 25 percent after the completion of the World Series.
The MLBPA, according to Joel Sherman of the New York Post, declined the presentation that customarily goes with a written proposal of this nature. It’s an unusual action, but understandable—the MLBPA has seen this offer before.
In March, the league and union agreed to a contract that would allow MLB to determine the 2020 schedule while guaranteeing players service-time accumulation and a pro-rated salary based on the number of games played. In subsequent negotiations, the union has held to the line that teams must honor players’ contracts on a per-game basis and has called for as many as 114 games this season. The more regular-season games, the more money the players would make.
The league, meanwhile, has claimed that it would lose money by playing games without fans. According to a presentation by commissioner Rob Manfred’s office that was obtained by the Associated Press, MLB told the players it would lose an average of $640,000 per game over an 82-game season. (A closer examination of those numbers by Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus reveals the $640,000-a-game number is based on accounting that “portray(s) MLB as sloppy, ignorant, and/or deceptive,” and contradicts other public reporting on the league’s revenue and expenses.) MLB has therefore sought to shorten the regular season as much as possible while still putting on a credible postseason, for which players receive only cash bonuses, rather than additional per-game salary.
ESPN’s Karl Ravech, who was the first to report the details of Monday’s proposal, called it a “significant move towards players demands.” It does look that way at first glance: The 76-game schedule is longer than MLB’s season of last resort, which would run somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 games. But the length of the season matters primarily as a proxy for money, and on that issue MLB hasn’t budged. Cardinals ace Jack Flaherty tweeted that this proposal is “the same deal worded differently.”
In May, the league proposed an 82-game schedule that would require players to take a graduated pay cut, with higher-paid players earning as little as 20 percent of their contractual per-game rate, and players on the league minimum making 72.5 percent. All told, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, that comes out to roughly $1.23 billion in leaguewide salary, or about 30 percent of the $4.1 billion that MLB players would have made over a full 162-game season.
If MLB puts on a 48-game season under the March agreement, it would pay big league players 48/162nds of their contracts, which comes out to 29.6 percent. And while Monday’s proposal of 75 percent pay over 76 games is about 35 percent of a full season’s pay, only two-thirds of that is guaranteed. The rest wouldn’t be paid until after the World Series. While ordinarily it wouldn’t require a big leap of faith to assume that there will be a World Series, MLB is eager to wrap up the regular season by September 27 in large part because of the possibility that a second wave of COVID-19 could spread across the United States this fall and winter. That could force the American public into a lockdown similar to what it experienced in March and April, and would effectively end the baseball season.
Monday’s proposal, therefore, is not a significant move toward compromise. Compared to the 48-game schedule, this option would force players to do more work—and put them and their family members at greater risk of contracting COVID-19—for less guaranteed money.
MLB’s hardline stance has only hardened the players’ resolve. On May 26, Cardinals relief pitcher Andrew Miller, a member of the eight-man MLBPA executive subcommittee, told The Athletic, “Players are willing to make sacrifices and surely willing to get back on the field. However, we will not sacrifice our principles or the future generations of players to do so.” A day later, Nationals ace Max Scherzer, another member of the subcommittee, tweeted out a statement that read, in part: “[T]here’s no reason to engage with MLB in any further compensation reductions. We have previously negotiated a pay cut in the version of prorated salaries, and there’s no justification to accept a 2nd pay cut based upon the current information the union has received.”
Outspoken players such as Trevor Bauer and Marcus Stroman have publicly bristled at MLB’s offers. Things have gotten to the point where even Buster Posey—who’s so milquetoast he makes Mike Trout look like Dennis Rodman—has called MLB’s motives and accounting into question.
Monday’s 76-game MLB proposal would seem to constitute precisely the kind of salary reduction that Scherzer decried two weeks ago. Nationals reliever Sean Doolittle responded to it with a tweet echoing the message Miller delivered in May. “We want to play. We also have to make sure that future players won’t be paying for any concessions we make.”
The return of baseball this summer was supposed to herald a triumph of American resilience, ideally surrounded by the fanfare and pageantry of Independence Day. That isn’t going to happen now; the players need about three weeks of spring training to ramp back up to playing fitness, and the 1,000-plus MLB players are currently scattered across the country and the globe. Even if an agreement were reached today, it would take more than a month for the season to start back up. And MLB has seemingly delayed the process of returning at every turn, taking weeks at a time to roll out plans through the media before presenting them to the players.
That approach could result in MLB forcing the MLBPA to accept a 48-game regular season under the terms of the March agreement. Or, in an unlikely worst-case scenario for all parties involved, the league could stick to its specious claim that regular-season games without fans would lose money and choose not to hold a season at all. The long-term impact such a development could have on the players, fans, and sport at large doesn’t appear to be much of a consideration.
It’s hard not to contrast what’s happening in baseball with the relatively streamlined processes that have the NHL and NBA within weeks of a return to play. Certainly those leagues have it easier: Both regular seasons were nearly over when they suspended play, and the economic concerns of restarting for the playoffs were more straightforward. But MLB and the MLBPA haven’t even been able to hammer out a safety protocol, which speaks to the chilly relationship between the sides.
On that front, MLB and the MLBPA at least share substantial common ground in their desire to conduct the 2020 season in as safe a manner as is practicable. But as Bradford William Davis reported in the New York Daily News this weekend, most local health authorities in MLB markets have not been informed or consulted on the league’s proposal. And while Monday’s plan would allow immunocompromised players to opt out of the season while receiving pay and service time, the same protection would not apply to players who have immediate family members with underlying medical conditions that put them at risk. Rays pitcher Blake Snell was derided for saying, “I’m risking my life. … If I’m going to play, I should be getting the money I signed to be getting paid.” Given the danger players would take on by playing during the pandemic, Snell is right to be cautious.
Back in March, Manfred expressed the hope that baseball would play a role in boosting morale as the nation recovers from COVID-19. Three months and several proposals later, he’s running out of time to make that happen.