PLAYING GAMES

Despite contentious back and forth between owners and players, MLB will play a season in 2020

192 players a year ago who qualified for salary arbitration, which resulted in an average of $754 million in spending the past three years.

It means you’re a year closer to free agency. There were 131 players who qualified for free agency last winter, resulting in $1.722 billion in contracts the last three years.

It was an issue that had owners splintered, with a few believing they were giving up far too much by letting players reach arbitration and free agency a year early, no matter how many games were played.

Now is a different story.

The owners are unified in their belief that the players should take the same 40% reduction in revenue they are incurring playing games without fans. MLB lawyers came up with a sliding scale in pay reduction similar to the one teams are using to cut salaries, with their highest-paid employees taking the biggest cuts. The Washington Nationals just announced a plan in which employees earning $100,000 or less will receive a 10% pay cut, while those earning at least $300,000 will receive a 25% cut.

In this case, players such as Mike Trout and Gerrit Cole — who were scheduled to earn $36 million this year — are taking a whopper of a pay cut. In MLB’s proposal, players originally scheduled to earn $35 million or more now will be paid $7,843,363, which includes a postseason bonus. Since the union already agreed to be paid on a prorated scale, that translates to a 55.7% pay cut from the $17.7 million prorated salary the players in the upper class are scheduled to earn based on an 82-game season.

But, players who earn $1 million or less — which consists of 65% of all major-league players — would receive a 14.2% pay cut.

The owners insist under this proposal that players would receive about 60% of the clubs’ projected 2020 revenue, compared to 47% a year ago.

The union isn’t buying it and wants proof. No one is naive enough to believe any team will turn a profit this year, but as the players will remind you, clubs weren’t handing out Christmas bonuses on the profits they’ve turned every year, either. Forbes estimates that clubs earned about $5 billion over the past five years, which MLB strongly disputes.

It will be MLB’s turn to provide its counterproposal next week, and this time it might include an overall pay-reduction plan without differentiating between the highestand lowest-paid players.

There’s no reason to offend the biggest stars of the game. They’re the highest paid for a reason. They are the TV attractions. The sides will come up with a compromise. Maybe MLB will agree to let the players keep the $170 million in advance fees that ended May 24.

Maybe the union will figure out a way to share the risk if a second wave of COVID-19 hits this fall, canceling the World Series and costing MLB about $1 billion in TV revenue.

Maybe they can figure out a deferredpayment plan.

Maybe they’ll agree to try to play 100 games, taking their chances they can safely play into mid-November.

Rest assured, assuming municipalities are open for business, and the safety and health protocols are satisfactory for everyone, these two sides will find a way. It just takes time.

So, sit back, relax, and try not to be caught up in the war of words.

We are going to have a baseball season. Major League Baseball has no choice.