Snell’s take on return plan an insult to baseball

The four most horrific words in professional sports first leaked through social media, were picked up by ESPN and, by Thursday, had come to define a moment in baseball history.

They dripped from the mouth of Blake Snell, a Tampa Bay Rays pitcher with a Cy Young Award on his wall and $50 million contract in his portfolio, and they had to make every professional athlete cringe.

“Just not worth it,” Snell was quoted as saying.

The left-hander’s point was that baseball’s latest plan to return after waiting long enough through a pandemic would include the players accepting pay cuts to risk their health.

Baseball, its own greed evident from the parking lot fees to the beer prices, has even tried to use the health crisis to sneak in a revenue-sharing plan, which would be the first in the history of the sport. That’s horrible form, too. So there will be negotiations. There always are. Management asks, the rank and file bristle, and ultimately there is a work agreement.

It is just that a gripe like Snell’s in an industry where the workers can gain multiple generations of wealth for playing games is bad business for everybody.

It is easy to take that the stance that players are paid too much and the customers are ultimately made to provide the financing through ticket prices and cable-TV fees. But when Snell dismissed baseball as an inconvenience, it was an invitation for those who’d suspected it all along to conclude that the players are fundamentally cold to the realities of the outside world.

“Bro, I’m risking my life,” Snell said in the ESPN report. “What do you mean it should not be a thing? It should 100 percent be a thing. If I’m gonna play, I should be getting the money I signed to be getting paid. I should not be getting half of what I’m getting paid because the season’s cut in half, on top of a 33 percent cut of the half that’s already there. So I’m really getting, like 25 percent.

“On top of that, it’s getting taxed. So imagine how much I’m actually making to play, you know what I’m saying?”

It’s clear what he is saying. He is saying he is not anxious to put himself or his family at a health risk by working during a pandemic. That decision is reasonable. Yet as Snell endeavored to claim the high ground of health concerns, he revealed his true feelings. That, he did by putting a price on that fundamental decision. That, he did by letting it be known that if he were paid his full salary, which this season would have been $7.6 million, he would take the ball every fifth day from manager Kevin Cash and accept whatever safeguards baseball had in place for workplace safety.

So are the concerns about a virus so overwhelming that Snell should choose not to pitch? Or would the exact same concerns magically vanish at a higher price?

That scrambled message is why the “just not worth it” defense is an insult to ticket-buyers at a time when the unemployment rate is pushing 20 percent.

“Y’all gotta understand, man, for me to go, for me to take a pay cut is not happening, because the risk is through the roof,” Snell said. “It’s a shorter season, less pay. No, I gotta get my money. I’m not playing unless I get mine, OK? And that’s just the way it is for me. Like, I’m sorry you guys think differently, but the risk is way the hell higher and the amount of money I’m making is way lower.

“Why would I think about doing that?”

Accepting Snell’s math that baseball’s demands, heavyhanded as they are, would mean a 75-percent pay cut, he would still earn $1.9 million for an 82game season in which he might make 17 starts. But apparently that doesn’t meet the “get mine” threshold. Even if his achievements in a more stable market would yield more cash, a bucknine-million should be enough for Snell to summon the manners to not complain about it while his industry attempts to ramp up to a necessary return.

When a ballplayer announces that he has to think about whether or not to work, or that his take-home pay will be lesser after taxes, it only widens the canyon between the closed society that is a baseball clubhouse and the world where people use sports as an escape.

The overwhelming majority of ballplayers understand that, are decent to fans, charitable with their riches, thankful for their blessings and not obnoxious about their wealth. All, though, are muddied when only one publicly sniffs at a multi-comma paycheck.

Already, Snell has begun to walk his comments back, texting to the Tampa Bay Times, “I mean honestly it’s just scary to risk my life to get Covid-19 as well as not knowing and spreading it to the others. I just want everyone to be healthy and get back to our normal lives cause I know I miss mine!” Then act like it. Everyone has a reason to be running a patience deficit after too many weeks of house arrest. Blake Snell is not the first person ever to pound a send button before it is wise. And everyone has the right to be concerned about health. But there are some things in sports that are taboo under any circumstance. A millionaire ballplayer snarling that the compensation is not worth the trouble is the most horrifying.