Coronavirus

The MLB Players Association has responded to the league’s proposed health and safety guidelines, Evan Drellich of The Athletic was among those to report on Twitter. Last week, MLB sent the union a 67-page document outlining suggested protocols for safely starting the 2020 regular season and minimizing the spread of COVID-19 once play is underway.

There’s no indication at present that there are any particular areas of tension, let alone intractable disagreements, in this arena. Matters of compensation remain to be discussed and carry much greater potential for serious clashes. (Indeed, the battle is already well underway.)

It seems the players are looking for a few changes after close review of the proposal. The players would prefer to have greater access to on-premises facilities (showers, etc.) as well as more frequent coronavirus testing, per Joel Sherman of the New York Post (Twitter links).

A spokesperson told ESPN’s Jeff Passan (Twitter thread) that the MLBPA has been conferring with health experts and, on Monday this week, held a 3.5-hour video conference with more than 100 players to discuss the league’s suggested guidelines. Some players had already pushed back against some of the suggested restrictions, both in on-record statements and anonymously.

Odds are the league will be amenable to discussing changes of this kind. Team executives told Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic that the 67-page, league-issued guidelines are viewed as a “first draft” — one that will need some workshopping as the two sides seek an amenable compromise that works for all parties involved.

 

Finding agreement on health and safety is obviously necessary if there’s to be a return to play in 2020. There’s plenty of optimism on that score.

Perhaps there’s even some hope that cooperation on this front will pave the way for better relations on the financial side. But we’ve yet to see evidence of that. As Jon Heyman of MLB Network reports today (Twitter links), an internal union memo derides “misinformation” from the league and says the MLBPA still hasn’t received information it requested in mid-March regarding the economic feasibility of playing without fans.

As states throughout the nation begin to lift or ease their stay-at-home ordinances, several teams have begun to open their facilities to 40-man players. The Yankees, Phillies and Blue Jays have been allowing limited workouts at their spring facilities in Florida, and the Rays this week are opening Tropicana Field to players on their 40-man roster, per Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times. Rays players will be limited to small-group or individual workouts for the time being and won’t be in the weight room or clubhouse just yet. The Marlins this week also opened their spring facility in Jupiter, Fla., to players on the 40-man roster, as first reported by Andy Slater of Fox Sports 640 AM (Twitter link). As with the Rays, the Marlins are allowing a limited scope in terms of workouts. Miami players can use the facility’s batting cages and mounds but won’t be in the clubhouse, weight room or other areas. Teams throughout MLB seem likely to follow suit, as they continue to hope that the league and the Players Association can reach critical agreements on health protocol and salary structure in a shortened season.

On that note, a few more items pertaining to the potential restart of the season…

• Marc Carig and Andy McCullough of The Athletic spoke with six epidemiology experts about the league’s first draft of its health and safety protocols that were sent to teams (subscription required). All who reviewed the 67-page document praised its comprehensiveness, but questions arose about the lack of specifics surrounding positive tests among players and personnel — particularly when those positive tests occur on the road. The plan calls for saliva-based testing rather than nasal exams, which Dr. Michael Saag of the University of Alabama Birmingham explained is “in its infancy with this disorder” and not yet as accurate as the more intrusive nasal testing. He and several other interviewees acknowledged reservations regarding the plan could be lessened by June or July, but it’s impossible to know exactly where testing capabilities will lie at that point. Questions were also raised about the increased risk of clubhouse outbreaks several weeks into a rebooted season if and when players begin to let their guard down and lessen their adherence to the league’s guidelines.
• Tackling the plan from another angle, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic spoke to five anonymous baseball operations leaders about the proposal (subscription also required). Most emphasized that the current plan is only a “first draft,” with one exec cautioning that the final protocols “will look way different” after feedback from teams and the MLBPA is incorporated. Teams are set to provide feedback on the document by week’s end, per Rosenthal, who adds that MLB also sent the guidelines to governors in every state where teams play. Multiple executives called for increased testing and pointed to that as a more critical area of need than the currently rigid guidelines players would be asked to follow at the field. Others have pushed back on restrictions of hydrotherapy pools, indoor batting cages and even showers at the park, suggesting players should be permitted to use them in shifts. Multiple players, including Cardinals shortstop Paul DeJong and Marlins reliever Brandon Kintzler, raised similar issues this week when speaking with Jesse Rogers of ESPN.com.
• Both Joel Sherman of the New York Post and Buster Olney of ESPN suggest that the MLBPA is in what has become a rare position in recent years — one in which it has leverage over the league and its owners. While the players needn’t simply accept the league’s 50-50 revenue split, both Sherman and Olney highlight the manners in which they could use the current stalemate as a means of negotiating longer-term wins (e.g. service time manipulation, anti-tanking measures) in exchange for a 2020 arrangement the owners deem more favorable.

May 20: The league is aiming to formally present the union with an economic plan by this Friday, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports.

May 19: As Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association continue their standoff over player compensation in a shortened 2020 season without fans in attendance, it seems neither side is prepared to budge. MLB Network’s Jon Heyman tweets that some with the league believe they “have it cold in emails” from late March that the previously agreed-upon prorated salary arrangement was contingent on fans being in attendance. The MLBPA, of course, has contested that the standing agreement sufficiently addresses that scenario (i.e. that the players are entitled to prorated salaries even in a spectator-free setting).

Joel Sherman of the New York Post has obtained the email in question, which was sent from MLB senior vice president of labor relations/deputy general counsel Patrick Houlihan to deputy commissioner Dan Halem. Within the email, Houlihan details a conversation he had with MLBPA deputy general counsel Matt Nussbaum on the morning of March 26:

Matt asked what ‘economic feasibility’ meant in Section I. I told him it meant that we would only consider playing in neutral sites or without fans if it worked for us economically. I reminded him of [commissioner Rob Manfred]’s comments at the outset that playing in empty stadiums did not work for us economically. But I said, for example, that we might be willing to have a conversation about playing some limited number of games in empty stadiums if players agreed to reduce their daily salaries for those games, and if it was part of a larger plan that made economic sense. Matt confirmed that that is what he thought we meant, but appreciated the confirmation.

Of course, it can’t be gleaned from that email just how clearly and accurately the league’s stance was laid out by Houlihan, nor is there any direct quote or confirmation of that understanding from an MLBPA official. We also don’t know whether any additional discussions or negotiations surrounding the issue took place between that conversation and the actual ratification of the agreement. While this email certainly indicates that the two sides discussed the matter, its status as a true “smoking gun” is up for interpretation.

The league will surely seek to use this as ammunition to argue that the MLBPA represented a belief that spectator-less games would need to be accounted for in a separate negotiation. The MLBPA took a similar approach recently when agent Scott Boras ardently stated that ownership “represented during that negotiation that they could operate without fans in the ballpark,” ultimately declaring that there will be no renegotiation of the standing agreement.

Late last week, commissioner Manfred suggested that owners were facing a collective loss of as much as four billion dollars — a grim portrayal which the league argues as the driving factor in its reported proposal for a revenue-sharing plan with the players. However, Travis Sawchik of FiveThirtyEight reports that the players are of the belief that, based on what ownership has presented, they’d benefit from a season of prorated player pay much more than by simply canceling the season (Twitter thread). The league’s revenue projections, for instance, did not account for the expanded playoff format that has been suggested but not yet formally proposed, according to Sawchik. If that’s the case, the players likely feel they still have leverage.

To that end, MLBPA senior director of collective bargaining Bruce Meyer tells Sherman: “the contract itself is very clear that in the event of a partial season players will get paid pro rata salary — whether with fans or without.”

That much seems debatable based on the portions of the agreement that have been made public, but the MLBPA nonetheless appears set to stand firm on that assertion. Meyer also confirms multiple reports that the league has yet to formally propose a salary scale (presumably due to the union’s refusal to even consider the 50-50 revenue share that was reported last week).

“Rather than actually negotiating over these issues the league is focusing on leaking self-serving internal memos to the media,” Meyer tells Sherman. He goes on to add that the league has yet to provide the Players Association with any documentation to support that their revenue losses would actually align with the extent of their claims.

It’s frankly baffling that things have reached this point. The two sides swiftly worked out an agreement not two weeks after the league was shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the document produced by those negotiations inexplicably failed to address this very scenario in a decisive manner that left no room for other interpretation. The implementation of a prorated pay scale in a shortened season seemed straightforward, but a later clause stating that the two sides will “discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators” has proven nebulous enough to bring about the current stalemate.

The optics of a billionaires-versus-millionaires standoff is always cringe-worthy but is particularly egregious at a time when so much of the country has been laid off or furloughed. As both sides squabble over enormous sums of money, many in the general public look on with frustration and resentment.

It’s understandable that the players feel they’ve already made concessions and have now had the aforementioned “good faith” violated by the league’s call for additional cuts, but it’s also confounding that first iteration of their agreement left the door open for this publicly unfolding drama. It’s not as though playing games without fans in attendance was a radical concept at the time of the agreement; it had been a heavily speculated-upon possibility. The fact that it wasn’t expressly accounted for is a staggering omission.

If both sides are indeed drawing a hard line and are entirely averse to renegotiated terms, it stands to reason that the eventual outcome could be litigation. At that point, an arbitrator would need to consider the language within the original agreement and the alleged representations made by the league, weighing those against the purported email proof and any other evidence ownership wished to present.

Today saw a major run of political support for the launch of a big league season. Several big-state governors expressed a willingness to host professional sports in their biggest cities on a timeline that would support MLB’s hopes for an early July launch.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo (via Denis Slattery of the New York Daily News), California governor Gavin Newsom (via Jon Passantino of CNN.com reports on Twitter), and Texas governor Greg Abbott (via Rebecca Hennes of the Houston Chronicle reports) each announced support for a summer return to play. Of course, in all cases the continued threat of the coronavirus will make in-person attendance impossible at the outset.

Television-only baseball isn’t optimal, but it’s certainly a worthwhile goal if it can be accomplished in a manner that accords with overriding public health needs. Opinions vary as to the merits of MLB’s proposals to date, which would rely upon frequent testing of participants and the elimination of certain activities that may carry a greater risk of transmission.

The concern remains that the benefits of staging a campaign don’t outweigh the dedication of resources and added potential for spread of the virus. Given the ongoing debate, this (seemingly somewhat coordinated) series of announcements represents a notable vote of confidence.

“I think this is in the best interest of all the people and in the best interest in the state of New York,” Cuomo said of the return of professional sports. “And then they’ll be up and running and when we can fill a stadium again, we can fill a stadium.”

The increasing likelihood of play resuming also draws more focus to ongoing economic chatter between the league and union. As Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic report (subscription link), the standoff on player pay continues as the sides wait for another to blink.

It seems the most immediate dispute is rather narrow — and, frankly, a bit hard to comprehend. Despite publicizing a 50/50 revenue sharing concept — but not ever making clear just what revenue would be shared — the league has yet to formally propose that approach to the players.

At the moment, per The Athletic, the league’s position is that “the union needs to drop its stance that the salary matter is closed before it makes a new proposal.” On the other hand, the MLBPA “does not think it should discuss sacrificing additional pay until the league demonstrates its financial distress.”

This seems either to be a symbolic battle that shouldn’t need to be held or yet another instance of the sides jockeying for technical advantage rather than just diving into the many practical issues that confront them. Either way, there’s obviously a need both for the league to come forward with information regarding “economic feasibility” of fan-free games and for the union to consider whether it is sufficient to justify modification of the pro rata reduction of pay that was already agreed upon.

If the negotiating parties had a greater degree of trust, they probably wouldn’t be grounded on this particular sandbar. There’s so much to lose for all involved that they’ll surely find a way to make progress. But every moment of financial bickering represents a mutual lost opportunity to generate goodwill through the return of the game. And the only lack of trust ramps up the potential risks, given that the league and union are only just beginning to jointly navigate the unknown waters of baseball in the era of the coronavirus.

 

Playing an 82-game season without fans in attendance and with players still making prorated salaries would cost Major League Baseball over $4 billion in free cash flow, as per a document presented from the commissioner’s office to the MLB Players Association earlier this week, The Associated Press reports.

Beyond the obvious medical and health concerns due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of player pay has been one of the major obstacles in any attempt to launch the 2020 season.  The league has made the argument that players will need to accept further salary cuts than the ones already absorbed by the MLBPA as part of the March agreement between the two sides, as going ahead with a season without the added revenues of fans at ballparks would create too much of a financial burden for the league.  The players, on the other hand, have argued that the March agreement has already settled the matter, as players were to receive a prorated version of their original 2020 salaries based on how many regular-season games ended up being played.  In the event of an 82-game season, players would already be losing roughly half of their initially agreed-upon salaries.

The report from the commissioner’s office, a 12-page document titled “Economics of Playing Without Fans in Attendance,” details the purported losses facing the league under the current arrangement.  Every game would lead to a loss of roughly $640K, and all 30 teams would face losses of at least $84MM, as per a chart of projected earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.  The Tigers are at the bottom of the list with an $84MM projected loss, while the Yankees would lose $312 in projected local losses — far more than the $232MM loss projected for the Dodgers, who place second on the list.  (This ranking doesn’t factor in money gained from MLB’s national media revenues.)

The AP piece details many of the main points of the report, including various figures detailing how projected 2020 figures will drop significantly from projected revenue for the year (before the pandemic wreaked havoc on the world), and how these numbers stack up in comparison to revenues generated by the league during the 2019 season.

While there is no question that all parties will take a big financial hit from the abbreviated 2020 season, the MLBPA has maintained that the losses faced by the league and team owners aren’t as dire as claimed.  To this end, the Associated Press writes that the players’ union “already has requested a slew of documents from MLB” for further clarification about the details of the original 12-page presentation.  Earlier reports have indicated that the owners will propose a 50-50 split in 2020 revenues with the players, which the union has already shot down as a non-starter in negotiations since the MLBPA views such a split as a version of a salary cap.

Most agree that staging a 2020 MLB campaign is a worthwhile goal, so long as it can truly be done safely and responsibly. Dividing the spoils of a baseball season? That isn’t a reasonable priority given the present state of the world. But it does need to be done. No matter one’s view on the right approach to a tough issue, it’s tough to understand the reflexive vitriol launched at the players, many of whom don’t even earn monumental sums. Just like the owners, they’re merely engaged in a necessary economic negotiation — the latest round of which was spurred by the league’s decision to propose a further salary reduction and introduce it through the media.

• Rays lefty Blake Snell sparked the latest round of controversy in the MLB-MLBPA salary battle when he offered some pointed comments during a Twitch stream. Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times covered the story. Snell directly connected the matter of health to that of pay, saying he’s not willing to accept a further reduction of salary given that “the risk is through the roof.” Snell, who cited the possible long-term risks from the disease and worries about spreading it to family members, tells Topkin that he’s genuinely unsure whether to play even if the economics are sorted to his liking. While it wasn’t the smoothest delivery of his message, Snell seems genuinely conflicted and concerned with matters of real importance. The star lefty says he is still preparing for the 2020 campaign, but indicated he has begun to shift mentally to a 2021 return.
• Snell found some support from one of the game’s biggest stars, Phillies outfielder Bryce Harper. As Corey Seidman of NBC Sports Philadelphia reports, Harper said in his own Twitch session that the hurler is “speaking the truth.” Now, that’s something far shy even of Snell’s warnings that he may or may not play. There’s no indication at the moment that Harper is considering a similar course. But it is a notable bit of star player unity on the matter of compensation.
• Rockies star Nolan Arenado also saw merit in Snell’s comments. He tells Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic (subscription link) that Snell was “just being real” but also expressed understanding that it rubbed some the wrong way. Arenado says the players “understand we’re not going to get paid everything we thought we were getting this year” and are okay with that. He also took a more measured view of the health situation, while noting it is a legitimate concern. Ultimately, Arenado believes the sides had a deal and should honor it and move forward: “It is a risk. We did negotiate a deal. I think that’s the thing: We negotiated a deal. Now let’s go play. Let’s get to work. That’s where we as players are coming from.”
• Cubs owner Tom Ricketts claimed yesterday that fully 70 percent of his team’s revenue comes from gameday operations. As Rob Arthur notes on Twitter, that sounds like a figure that may reflect a selective snippet of the real balance sheet of the multi-faceted Cubs-related empire. This goes to the main problem behind the league’s reported 50/50 revenue-sharing plan: it’s impossible even to assess unless the full picture is available. While teams may not believe players are entitled to a share of regional sports network revenue, surrounding real estate, and other such broader initiatives, the organizations do stand to profit from those adjacent activities. And given the league’s claim of potential losses in a spectator-free season — which is a relevant aspect of the recent contract agreed upon between the sides — it seems only fair to consider the full picture.
• If you thought Snell’s comments sparked a firestorm, let’s see how this plays out … Alex Rodriguez, who earned more money playing baseball than anyone, just released an odd video calling upon players and owners to work out a 50/50 split. It’s mostly a bland call to work together, but A-Rod’s controversial background (not to mention his recent dalliance with purchasing the Mets) puts a different spin on the generally mundane words. Thing is, the owners know that going halfsies sounds fair. But the real question isn’t the relative split, it’s the absolute size of the pie the owners are offering to carve up — and how close it comes to the pro rata pay (approximately half pay for a half season) the players believe to be appropriate.
• Even if (likely when) the matter of salary is resolved, it’s clear there are quite a few complicated questions, as Jayson Stark of The Athletic (subscription link) nicely breaks down. The one that stands out: commissioner Rob Manfred says that individual players won’t be forced to play once the finances are sorted out. But what does that mean in terms of salary, service time, and the like? There’s quite a lot still for the sides to work through.

MLB’s thirty teams are likely to suspend revenue-sharing for the 2020 season, according to Ken Rosenthal and Even Drellich of The Athletic (subscription link).

Whether and how the 2020 season will resume remains to be seen, but it’s now a certainty that fans won’t be in the seats when it does. And any hopes for a return of fans this year — at least in significant numbers — seem rather optimistic, though surely some jurisdictions will handle things quite differently than others.

The typical sharing of 48% of gameday revenue really won’t be possible in a season in which there likely won’t be any to pass around. Rather than trying to distribute whatever might otherwise come within the purview of the program, it’s expected to be scrapped altogether.

The MLB Players Association has already agreed to allow modification of revenue-sharing rules for 2020 and 2021. It’s obviously too soon to know what plans might be proposed for the latter campaign.