MLB leaders have pitched to players an 80-odd-game season in which teams would play against others in their regions and the players would get prorated salaries based on the number of games played. AP
It’s supremely obnoxious in this time of COVID-19 craziness: a fight over big dollars to play a game — while millions of people now go unemployed. That’s the back-and-forth between Major League Baseball’s owners and the Players Association.
MLB wants to start play by July 4, meaning that in order to get in three weeks of “spring” training, players need to be ready by mid-June.
Earlier this month MLB leaders pitched to players an 80-odd-game season in which teams would play against others in their regions and the players would get prorated salaries based on the number of games played — as the players agreed in March.
But the money fight persists, because, as The Post’s Joel Sherman notes, “MLB’s first offer was so punch-in-the-face not conciliatory that it galvanized the players.” It looked like a divide-and-conquer bid: Players making the minimum salary ($563,500) would earn roughly 93 percent of their pay, while those on the top of the pay scale would take a cut of more than 50 percent.
So now the players’ union reportedly plans to counter the league’s offer with: players receiving their full prorated salaries . . . and a schedule longer than 82 games.
Sherman fears that “the longer the fight, the greater the risk to not just reputations, but bodies. The sooner players can get to camps and the longer they can stay there, the better.”
To management and the union: Get yourselves together and give us poor folk stuck in quarantine some baseball, for goodness’ sake.
Source: NYPost
