It’s all gloom and doom when it comes to the negotiations between MLB owners and players, which have come to an impasse that may result in a lost 2020 season.
If this is where we’re at now, then the future is so much bleaker.
There was already a possibility of labor strife after 2021, when the collective bargaining agreement expires. As I wrote recently, the game of baseball has woefully fallen behind other sports in terms of popularity and continues to lose fans or fail to gain younger ones.
So if this is how it’s going to be now, with owners digging in their heels over the prospect of losing money in 2020 and the players very publicly calling out commissioner Rob Manfred minutes after he speaks, then the next negotiations are bound to be nightmarish.
How do you come back from a few months of negotiations that went south in a matter of weeks? There’s no Men in Black device that will wipe everyone’s memories clean of Manfred telling the world that baseball in 2020 will “100 percent” happen and then saying he isn’t confident there will be a season just five days later, followed by players rightfully picking apart his statements and surmising that he’s playing his negotiating cards in a deceitful manner. In the court of public opinion, as my colleague Nate Scott wrote, the players are winning.
But no one will win when both the owners and players will go into those 2021 negotiations with a wickedly bad taste from these talks, whether they result in a 2020 season or not. There was too much ire, too many accusations of not negotiating in good faith. When talks about the future begin down the road, they’ll start in a horribly bad place.
What will it take, then, to extend an olive branch that could put the post-2021 negotiations in a better starting point? It seems simple to me.
The owners need to give in and deliver full prorated salaries to the players in an abbreviated 2020. Their negotiations were heading in that direction anyway, with the last offer for 72 regular-season games and 80 percent of salaries.
Owners are already facing the prospect of losing a lot more if there’s a prolonged work stoppage. No matter what they do, they’ll lose money in 2020. But at the end of the day, they’re billionaires.
What they’d be paying for is future of the sport and the value of their franchises not to take a dive. And although the end of 2021 is far away, it all starts now.
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