Players balk at proposal
League offer to delay spring training, shorten season shunned by union
Baseball’s simmering labor battle, which informed the sport’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic and led to an acutely shortened 2020 schedule, has complicated plans to launch the 2021 season, with one critical difference: With talks between MLB and the players’ union stalled, the default outcome this time would be an on-time start to spring training and a full, 162game season, as risky as that might be.
With roughly two weeks until spring training camps are scheduled to open, the MLB Players Association on Monday rejected a proposal MLB submitted over the weekend, calling for a onemonth delay to spring training, a 154-game regular season (with players paid for 162), a designated hitter in both leagues and an expanded postseason wrapping up in the first week of November.
MLB’s proposal was based largely on the recommendations of health officials and a belief that a delay — amid current, nationwide infection rates that dwarf those of last summer and fall — is the sport’s best hope for a successful season that includes in-person fans in greater numbers.
The union rejected MLB’s proposal without offering a counterproposal, saying in a statement that the players “will instead continue preparations for an on-time start to the 2021 season, and will accept MLB’s commitment to again direct its clubs to prepare for an on-time start.
Logic might suggest a one-month delay to the 2021 season is warranted, with the lost weeks made up on the back end, allowing time for infection rates to decline and for the emerging vaccines to be distributed more widely, as well as the possibility of fans returning to stadiums in larger numbers deeper into the year.
However, as always, the animating force at work in baseball is not logic but economics. For starters, MLB’s television network partners don’t want the postseason to extend past the first week of November, a reality that boxes the sport into a limited calendar. A compacted schedule, featuring fewer days off and more doubleheaders, increases the chances of widespread disruption if outbreaks occur.
For the players, the economic concerns in 2021 are both short-term — making sure they are paid full salaries, after earning just 37 percent of full pay for the 60-game 2020 season (and having to fight the owners just to get that) — and longterm, reflecting the players’ growing belief that the sport’s current economic model fosters anti-competitive behavior on the part of teams.
Although MLB’s proposal this weekend called for players to receive their full 2021 salaries, despite a schedule shortened by eight games, union officials were quick to point out the proposal did not guarantee those salaries. Instead, it gave commissioner Rob Manfred wide powers to postpone and cancel games, or even halt the season amid outbreaks — powers the union views with unease.
The MLB proposal, the union said in its statement, “offers no salary or service time protections in the event of further delays, interruptions, or cancellation of the season.”
MLB, though, sees those powers as necessary to deal with the many unknowns and contingencies inherent in attempting to play through an ongoing pandemic — at a time when the vaccine rollout has been slower than hoped and different variants of the virus are emerging — but the mission would be to play as many games as possible. The proposal also outlines specific circumstances under which Manfred could cancel games, including government restrictions on gatherings and travel, and issues of competitive integrity.
In 2020, after the sides were unable to reach agreement, Manfred implemented a 60-game season, with players receiving prorated shares of their full salaries. Although the season nearly came apart in late July amid outbreaks on the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals, ultimately just two games were lost all season, with 28 of baseball’s 30 teams completing 60 games, and the other two, the Cardinals and Detroit Tigers, playing 58.
“Players know first-hand the efforts that were required to complete the abbreviated 2020 season,” the union’s statement said, “and we appreciate that significant challenges lie ahead.”
MLB officials have claimed the sport lost billions of dollars in revenue from the shortened, fanfree 2020 season — underscoring the importance of playing as many games as possible with as many fans as possible in the stands in 2021 — although union officials are skeptical of those claims.
MLB’s proposal for an expanded, 14-team postseason in 2021 — down from the 16-team field of 2020 but up from 10 teams under the usual format — presents another point of contention. MLB, seeing the potential revenue gains from an expanded postseason, has offered to give the players the universal DH in exchange.
However, the union sees expanded playoffs as problematic on a fundamental, economic level — disincentivizing spending on the part of owners, and thus damaging free agency, because a team would need fewer wins to reach the postseason — and thus too large a bargaining chip to give away for a rule change, the universal DH, that both sides want.