Major League Baseball finally turned up its collective spigot Friday, though it still didn’t meet its players’ request for full-blast — which means this saga very likely ain’t over.
According to multiple industry sources, commissioner Rob Manfred’s third formal offer to the MLB Players Association, as the two sides try to negotiate the terms of a 2020 restart, features a 72-game regular season, running from July 14 to Sept. 27, in which the players would be guaranteed 70 percent of their prorated salary and would receive another 10 percent — plus an additional $50 million pool to be divvied up among playoff participants — if the postseason concludes as scheduled.
The package also includes an expansion of rosters for the season’s first month — 30 for the first two weeks, then 28 for the subsequent two weeks before dropping to the expected 26 — granting an opportunity for more players to earn major league salaries and service time.
If it goes down as an improvement, however, it almost certainly won’t end this marathon negotiating session. When The Athletic’s Evan Drellich tweeted that MLB told the PA it faced a Sunday deadline to accept these terms, Pirates pitcher Trevor Williams retweeted that with the telling comment, “It expired as soon as they hit send.”
Manfred owns the right to unilaterally institute a season of any length as long as the players receive their full prorated pay, as per the March 26 agreement the two sides collectively bargained, and Manfred has floated the notion of holding a season of 40-50 games at that cost to the union. While the commissioner owns a history of preferring collectively bargained deals to unilateral implementation, time is running out to get the season going in some form, and Manfred has made clear, both publicly and in conversations with the union, that there will be a season even if he has to dictate the terms of it.
As a reflection of the bad blood between the players and owners that has only intensified during these talks, deputy commissioner Dan Halem ripped into the PA’s top negotiator Bruce Meyer in a letter that accompanied this offer (first reported by The Athletic), challenging the union’s stance of not accepting a pay cut despite language in the March 26 agreement allowing for further talks if the games are held without paying fans, which they will at least at the outset.
In the players’ most recent counteroffer, they asked for an 89-game season with the players getting their prorated pay. The owners’ first two proposals (an 82-game season with a sliding scale and a 76-game season with as much as 75 percent prorated pay), plus a revenue-sharing idea that was floated but never reached the players, all featured very similar dollar totals presented differently.
This offer, though, does move the needle financially. It would guarantee the players $1.27 billion for those 72 regular-season games, a higher amount than if Manfred implemented a 50-game season with prorated pay. If the playoffs get completed, then the players will have earned some $300 million more than they would from a 50-game schedule at prorated pay.
The players, however, have been resolute in their belief they deserve their full prorated pay given that they are the ones putting themselves in harm’s way when the coronavirus is clearly not gone; they also feel the owners haven’t provided sufficient documentation to substantiate their claims of financial distress. Would the players take less money on the principle of getting a full day’s pay for a full day’s work? It’s a dilemma the owners have placed in their hands.
In addition to pay, the two sides continue to disagree about the timing of the schedule. The PA asserts that the postseason can extend well into November, while MLB, pointing to both medical concerns about the return of COVID-19 in cooler weather and their broadcast partners’ preference to air the playoffs in October, want to keep the baseball calendar on its traditional path.