A lot to lose, with little sign of progress
Professional sports leagues across North America have spent the last several weeks plotting their returns.
The NHL recently formalized plans for a 24-team playoff format with speculation that training camps will open within three weeks. The NBA announced its intention to resume play with 22 teams on July 31 at Disney’s Wide World of Sports complex near Orlando, Fla.
The NFL still appears on track to begin in September. The PGA Tour restarts Thursday with the Charles Schwab Classic at Colonial in Fort Worth, Texas. The IndyCar series returned this weekend, and Major League Soccer has lifted its moratorium on team training. The list of positive developments goes on and on.
Major League Baseball? Well, that’s another story entirely. The sport with arguably the most to lose during the coronavirus pandemic — and ensuing economic recession — still isn’t close to getting back on the field. At a time when everything in the world seems to be changing at rapid speed, bickering between wealthy players and even richer owners remained constant.
The success of other leagues in formulating their return to play has been notable. Each sport still has work to do with health and safety concerns, but at this point official agreements are a foregone conclusion. The NBA involved multiple high-profile athletes in its negotiations, the NHL received similar public support and the NFL has a few more weeks before it must worry about any of this.
Baseball has been the lone exception, and as a result its reputation has been dragged through the mud. The public wonders how the sport could be at war when other leagues resolved their labour issues with relative ease.
There’s no excuse for a lack of baseball this summer, at least one that isn’t tied to health and safety. The league brought accusations of greed upon itself, and yet direct contrasts to other sports aren’t fair because the landscape of the NBA, NHL, NFL and other major sports has nothing to do baseball. When analyzing labour deals, context is everything, and this is one where the players and owners have a lot at stake.
One obvious difference between MLB and other leagues is that its season had yet to begin when the coronavirus hit in March. Player salaries for the 2020 season were estimated at $4.2 billion to $4.4 billion (U.S.), per ESPN. Of that amount, $170 million was paid upfront as part of a previous deal, which left more than $4 billion still owed.
By comparison, the Raptors have already played and been paid for 64 of the 82 games originally scheduled for this season, all in front of fans. According to The Associated Press, the NBA’s latest proposal would cancel approximately 15 per cent of the regular season. Based on that amount, players could be asked to forfeit upwards of $610 million in salaries. A lot of money, but small potatoes vs. baseball.
Then there’s the league’s salary structure. The MLB players’ association is fundamentally opposed to the implementation of a salary cap. The union has successfully fought for the rights of players with a certain amount of service time to sign for whatever amount they can get. A free and open market has been the centrepiece to every collective agreement, and players fear what even a short-term revenuesharing plan would mean for future negotiations.
MLB has no limits on term or dollars for player contracts. Teams can bid whatever they want and worry about the consequences later. There is a luxury tax, which some argue acts like a modified cap, but teams are permitted to exceed it through trades or free agency. The only penalty is a fine.
The NBA has a “soft” cap based on a percentage of the league’s revenue from the previous season, and limits what teams can do through trades or free agency. The NHL, NFL and MLS have hard caps which cannot be surpassed, and are also tied to complicated revenue-sharing formulas.
It makes sense that sports that had revenue deals already in place would require less time to get a new deal done. In baseball, owners and players have never trusted each other enough to make much headway, with the union’s familiar refrain being that teams cook the books to turn profits into losses while overall values of franchises continue to soar.
And so here we are approaching mid-June with no end in sight to this labour dispute. To date, the players have refused to play for anything less than the full prorated amount of their salaries. The owners countered with threats of limiting the season to 50 games, which would cut player compensation by more than two-thirds while still permitting teams to collect postseason television revenue this fall.
MLB deserves all the criticism it has been getting, but the optics are bad enough. People don’t need to pile on by pointing out how much better other sports have done during the middle of a global crisis. Labour negotiations for the NHL, NBA, NFL and many others — at least this year — are child’s play compared to what baseball is trying to sort through.
When team owners made their first proposal last month, they suggested an 82-game season with camps set to resume June 10. It’s now all but certain that date will come and go without a new deal. The start of the regular season could be pushed back until early August, so there is lots time to get a deal done, but whether it will be enough to bridge this giant divide remains the big unknown.