Latest On MLB Plans For Team Employees

We’ve been learning quite a bit about Major League Baseball’s coronavirus plans involving players, whose relationships with the league are conditioned upon a collective bargaining agreement. But teams also employ quite a few other personnel under rather different terms.

It has not been clear to this point just how the league would handle non-uniformed employees. But the MLB commissioner’s office has acted to secure coordinated action on this front, per Jeff Passan of ESPN.com and Evan Drellich of The Athletic (Twitter link).

Every team has agreed to continue employing all non-player personnel in the regular fashion through the end of April. That will ensure steady paychecks for a large number of employees, though it’s worth remembering that not all workers associated with a ballclub and ballpark — say, vendors — are necessarily employed by the team. (The league has previously promised at least $30MM to ballpark workers — $1MM per team.. The Red Sox have boosted that amount, as Jason Mastrodonato of the Boston Herald tweets.)

The question remains: what’ll happen when the calendar flips to May? That isn’t known at present and will surely depend upon how the global coronavirus pandemic plays out. If baseball is ramping back up for play come that time, perhaps a broad loss of jobs can be forestalled altogether. Further coordination could take place at the league level, but it’s also possible teams will at some point be left to set their own courses.