Manfred: coronavirus, not feud over salaries, kept 2020 season to 60 games
If you’re frustrated by Major League Baseball just now picking back up, Rob Manfred wants you to blame the coronavirus, not the commissioner.
Manfred defended the lengthy season pause — largely defined by the acrimonious negotiations between the league commissioner and players — by claiming that 2020 MLB season wasn’t going beyond 60 games due to the ongoing pandemic. The commissioner’s bold claim about the late restart came on Wednesday during a radio interview with Dan Patrick.
“The reality is we weren’t going to play more than 60 games no matter how the negotiations with the players went, or any other factor,” Manfred told Patrick. “I think this is the one thing we come back to every single day: We’re trying to manage something that has proven to be unpredictable and unmanageable. I know it hasn’t looked particularly pretty in spots, but having said that, if we can pull off this 60-game season, I think it was the best we were going to do for our fans given the course of the virus.”
Manfred added: “I don’t see, given the reality of the health situation over the past few weeks, how we were going to get going any faster than the calendar we’re on right now. No matter what the state of those negotiations were.”
Though spring training was postponed on March 13 by a still-raging viral pandemic, the subsequent standoff hinged around whether the league should honor a March 26 agreement made with the players guaranteeing their contracts would be prorated over the course of the 2020 season. The league offered the union multiple proposals, but none compensated players according to the reported terms of the agreement until June 17, when Manfred and union president Tony Clark hammered out a starting point. The prolonged negotiation compromised the league’s ambitious July 4 restart hopes.