MLB Fans Should Be Prepared For No 2020 Season

My six-year-old brain just couldn’t comprehend it.

I was in a summer day camp on Long Island when the 1994 Major League Baseball strike halted play for the rest of the season

“What do you mean there’s no baseball,” I thought, crestfallen that I could no longer see my heroes compete for the World Series.

Welp, there’s a chance that history could repeat itself and we may not have a 2020 baseball season at all.

A disagreement between the owners and players over— you guessed it— money, has the potential to completely derail a season already heavily delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and already in a tenuous position because of the seemingly countless ways things could go fatally awry.

Back in late March right after what would have been opening day, a couple of weeks after sports leagues around the world shut down because of COVID-19, baseball’s owners and players came to a wide-ranging agreement where players would be paid a prorated amount of their salaries based on games played. But now that MLB is taking tiny cautious steps in planning an 82-game summer season that would begin around July 4, it’s come out that owners actually think players making half their annual salaries for half of a season is a little too rich for their tastes.

So owners, who say they’ll lose a collective $4 billion without games in 2020, came back with a proposal to split baseball revenues 50-50, even though the prorated salaries agreement was collectively bargained as part of a large package of pandemic contingencies and players may view that split as a salary cap of sorts. The agreement even stipulates, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, that players can’t sue to receive their salaries.

But a New York Post report on Tuesday cited an MLBPA email from March suggesting that the prorated salary agreement may eventually have to be re-negotiated, while MLB is arguing that the prorated salary agreement would only be binding if games were played in front of fans. Since we won’t be having fans in seats for months, and likely not until at least 2021, owners believe the prorated agreement isn’t binding anyway.

So right now we have ourselves an old fashioned impasse, where MLB and its owners want a 50-50 revenue split while the players’ union and powerful agents like Scott Boras contend that prorated salaries have already been agreed on and further concessions serves as a nonstarter.

And once we get past the money, there are still myriad health, safety and logistical issues to address and hurdles to leap before players even take the field in 2020. Every ballpark in every city needs to be safe enough to play, with enough tests to go around for every player and essential staff member and then some and the closed border between the U.S. and Canada and Canada’s quarantine rules greatly impact the Toronto Blue Jays.

ESPN addressed the “narrow way” to returning to play in 2020. The owners and players still have to agree on how often there’s testing, MLB competing for essential resources in some areas and smaller logistical issues like using showers and hot tubs in ballparks, spitting, high fives and team buffets laid out in a 67-page health and safety protocol laid out by MLB. That stuff also has to be ironed out before anyone can think about returning to play.

And then there’s the issue of whether it’s safe to play baseball even with all these safety precautions.

“Let’s face it: Infections are going to happen,” a professor of epidemiology and infectious disease at Emory University told The Athletic. Would players go to bars and restaurants in cities where that’s allowed and then travel to cities that still have stay-at-home orders? The travel and inevitable hotel stays heightens players’ risks regardless of where they go and how much testing there is.

Patrick Rishe of Washington University in St. Louis estimates that MLB is losing $75 million every day that games aren’t being played. Owners of teams are already enacting pay cuts and furloughs to staffers even though they’re all worth billions.

Yet MLB owners seem willing not to play out the season until further concessions are wrung out of its players, and fans always seem to blame greedy players who get paid to play a child’s game instead of the owners. Though the players excel on the field, they always seem to lose in the court of public opinion.

In a follow-up piece on Wednesday, Joel Sherman of the Post explains both sides succinctly:

“MLB’s view is it never would have given out the current player contracts if owners knew this was their revenue and, thus, players should accept less. Players argue that when owner revenue goes up in a particular season, players don’t suddenly receive larger checks, so why should they share the burden when the revenue goes down? Both claim the March 26 agreement validates their position.”

Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine has been through all this before. The Braves legend went through the players’ strike in 1994 and 1995 and told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that players would ultimately get blamed and that he doesn’t want to see the game wane in popularity like it did 26 years ago.

Every year on MLB opening day, I go back to my six-year-old self, so excited to watch the best players in the world play America’s Pastime. But my 32-year-old self today knows that there’s a definite possibility that we aren’t going to get baseball in 2020. And if I’ve learned anything during this pandemic, it’s that while we can all hope and pray for the best, we also have to prepare for the worst.