With Max Scherzer As A Hardliner And Scott Boras Telling MLB Players Not To ‘Bail Out,’ Baseball Is Hurting Itself More Than COVID-19

Earth to Major League Baseball folks: With others in the sports universe closer than you to returning after their COVID-19 shutdowns, are you paying attention to those among the professional ranks?

None has players sounding like this . . .

“Y’all gotta understand, man. For me to go, for me to take a pay cut is not happening, because the risk is through the roof. It’s a shorter season, less pay. I gotta get my money. I’m not playing unless I get mine, OK?”

Yeah, OK.

That was Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Blake Snell, a former Cy Young Award winner scheduled to make $7 million this year. He would earn only a couple of million or so under the baseball owners’ proposal that would apply a sliding scale of pay cuts (with the high-salaried players sliced the most) courtesy of a drop from the normal 162 games for a season to 82 due to the coronavirus.

“I should not be getting half of what I’m getting paid because the season’s cut in half, on top of a 33% cut of the half that’s already there,” Snell added. “So I’m really getting, like, 25%.”

Earth to Snell in particular: Dude. At least you would be getting something when many folks in this country are getting nothing during a pandemic in which Forbes.com estimates the 14.7 % unemployment rate at the end of April was the highest since The Great Depression.

Major League Baseball is going, going, almost gone.

Attendance declined last season for the 12th consecutive year, and baseball’s top stars don’t shine as brightly as those named LeBron James, Tom Brady or Alexander Ovechkin.

That said, MLB has billionaire owners squabbling with millionaire players over stuff fans couldn’t care less about. It also didn’t help matters Thursday, when super agent Scott Boras was reported to have urged the 71 players he represents and others not to “bail out” during these contract negotiations.

You just know much of this rancor will bleed into 2021, when the Collective Bargaining Agreement ends after that season and both sides will flirt with turning back the clock 27 years to create The Mother of All Strikes, Part II.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll explain later, but except for 1972, which featured the first of the eight work stoppages in Major League history, I’ve always sided with the players over the owners who brought us legalized slavery through the early 1970s with the reserve clause.

The owners also have refused over the decades to open their financial books for review to the public and to the players.

What are the owners trying to hide?

Billions or just millions?

We know for sure baseball generated a record $10.7 billion last season to make the players more right than wrong in their demands.

The players reportedly will counter the owners’ proposal with a deal to have 100 games this season in exchange for the players getting a guarantee of receiving their full prorated salaries.

Sounds fair, but this is about perception.

The perception is that the players are greedy, unreasonable, stubborn, arrogant, clueless and insulting (see Snell’s comments). Worse, there was a tweet Wednesday from Washington Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer, among the leaders of the MLB Players Association executive subcommittee.

In case you’re wondering, Scherzer is among the highest paid players in baseball at nearly $30 million per year. Even with that sliding scale, he would make a nice chunk, which brings us back to perception.

Which brings us to this: With the official start of summer less than a month away, the winter games of the NHL and the NBA, combined with the autumn one of the NFL, nevertheless are opening their doors for workouts.

That’s partly because the money issues in those sports between management and labor have been minor or nonexistent.

As for the summer game of Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Sandy Koufax of the past and of Mike Trout, Clayton Kershaw and Manny Machado of the present, well. I’m glad you asked.

Let’s return to the summer game of Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan of my youth, when I was obsessed in Cincinnati with everything surrounding the Big Red Machine.

Those Reds players joined others in the Major Leagues to go on strike for the opening two weeks of the 1972 season. They wanted cost-of-living raises and more cash for their pension fund.

The owners were the most guilty since they had the money to do those things, but they also were omniscient. Even though the owners failed, they wanted to crush the rapidly growing union right there to prevent the future conflicts to come.

I was ticked . . . at the players.

They weren’t hitting, pitching or fielding, and as a teenager umpiring Little League games for significantly less than Rose’s $107,500 yearly salary back then, I thought the players’ salaries were more than enough.

Baseball fans are thinking the same now regarding Snell, Scherzer and the rest, so earth to all MLB players: You’re right, but tone it down.