Let me start things off with a summary of Major League Baseball’s latest proposal to the union…
After much disapproval from players and MLBPA chief Tony Clark’s quick rejection over a revenue-sharing plan for the 2020 season, owners went back to the drawing board and formally presented their first economic proposal to the MLB Players Association. The plan now involves cutting the salaries of players on a sliding scale, according to USA Today’s Bob Nightengale. This means that the highest paid players will take the largest cuts while the lowest paid players would earn most of their guaranteed prorated salaries.
The exact percentages for how much players will be earning via this scale is unknown. MLB insider Jon Heyman reports that some people with knowledge of the situation say the biggest stars might only make 20-30 percent of their salaries.
The New York Post’s Joel Sherman added a little more clarity to this in his column.
“MLB’s plan called for those making the least, perhaps due $1 million or less on their 2020 salaries, to be made close to whole on a prorated basis for games played. Thus, if someone were making the MLB 2020 minimum of $563,500 and 82 regular-season games (almost exactly half a season) were played, they would receive roughly half their pay, about $282,000.”
“But players at the top of the pay scale such as Gerrit Cole and Mike Trout would get less. If that were in the 50 percent range — as an example — then Cole, who was due $36 million, this year would receive half of the about $18 million he would be due for half a season, or roughly $9 million. One source, though, said MLB’s current plan does not even call for 50 percent for that level of player.”
As you can imagine, the union and players are not pleased with this latest idea.
Brewers’ starting pitcher Brett Anderson also chimed in with a tweet.
In addition to everything above, owners have discussed sharing a portion of the money made from postseason games with the players. Nightengale reports that owners would be guaranteed $777 million in postseason television revenue, though that total could actually be closer to $1 billion with the format expanding from 10 to 14 teams if a season is played.
All in all, this is definitely not the start to negotiations that we could have hoped for. Joel Sherman says the union will go back to the players for their thoughts before deciding whether or not they would like to proceed with this plan. As for Major League Baseball, they said the following:
“We made a proposal to the union that is completely consistent with the economic realities facing our sport. We look forward to a responsive proposal from the MLBPA.”
It is important to remember that this is the first proposal and that both sides will be working throughout the next week or two to get something done. There is still A LOT of ground that needs to be covered in all aspects if the goal is to resume spring training and begin a season by July 4th. Heyman said a soft deadline for reaching an agreement has been placed on June 1st, and Nightengale believes something has to be done by June 6th. I have a hunch that owners pitting players against each other financially doesn’t really help much in trying to achieve that. We’ll see what the MLBPA fires back with.
In the meantime, all we can do now is keep our fingers crossed and wait. Pay the players.
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