TIME TO SWEAT
Confident a week ago, now Manfred’s not sure there will be a season at all
At least somebody wants to play baseball in 2020. Gerrit Cole broke his work from home routine and pulled up to Yankee Stadium to give fans 11 tantalizing seconds of baseball action.
The very short video Cole posted to his social media begins with Cole driving across the Macombs Dam Bridge toward his new office, scored by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” the all-but-official anthem of the 2009 Yankees’ championship run. Then, in dramatic slo-mo, Cole loads and fires a strike from his new team’s home bullpen.
So, yeah, that’s it for now while Cole, and all of baseball, remains on lockdown because the league and MLB Player’s Association — the player’s union — have yet to agree on a relaunch plan.
And according to Rob Manfred, you may want to savor that tweet. Despite the commissioner’s confident proclamation last Wednesday that the chance of a season was “100%” and that “we are going to play Major League Baseball this year,” he admitted it might be the last action you see for a while.
“I’m not confident,” he said Monday on ESPN. “I think there’s a real risk, and as long as there’s no dialogue, that real risk is going to continue.
“It’s just a disaster for our game, absolutely no question about it. It shouldn’t be happening...
“I had been hopeful that once we got to common ground on the idea that we were gonna pay the players full prorated salary that we would get some cooperation in terms of proceeding under the agreement that we negotiated with the MLBPA on March 26th,” Manfred said.
The commissioner continued with a swipe at Cole’s union boss, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark, who traded blows with the league over the weekend, arguing that the union’s counterproposals had “fallen upon deaf ears.”
Clark slammed Dan Halem, who accused the MLBPA of failing to negotiate in good faith, for sending a letter to the union “filled with inaccuracies and incomplete facts,” which prompted the commissioner’s response.
“Unfortunately, over the weekend, while Tony Clark was declaring his desire to get back to work, the union’s top lawyer (Bruce Meyer) was out telling reporters, players and eventually getting back to owners that as soon as we issued a schedule — as they requested — they intended to file a grievance claiming they were entitled to an additional billion dollars,” Manfred said.
“Obviously, that sort of badfaith tactic makes it extremely difficult to move forward in these circumstances.”
The LA Times reported on Monday that MLB would pull the plug on a season if the union files a grievance.
The players have their own reasons to assume bad faith from the league and owners’ circle.
League owners have proposed a number of different ways of paying players roughly one-third of their agreed-upon contracts — all of them varying in games and schedule, but not conceding much in total dollar value spent on payroll. The league’s intransigence was based on an alleged lack of money available due to the coronavirus pandemic, a claim that union rep Max Scherzer said the league was not willing to defend by opening its books.
The MLBPA balked at the offers, clinging to its March agreement to cut pay on a prorated basis. If an agreement isn’t reached, MLB is reportedly considering using the league’s power, established in the same March agreement, to enforce a prorated 50- to 60game micro season.
If the league goes the nuclear route, that’s well below the 114-game season the union had once hoped for, and far less than the usual 162-game grind.
For now, the negotiation is stalled. Plus, the league is still finalizing a health and safety protocol for a 2020 season. It’s about time, as only a handful of local health departments have publicly confirmed involvement with their respective club’s safety planning. (Some told the Daily News they had yet to be contacted at all.)
“The owners are a hundred percent committed to getting baseball back on the field,” Manfred claimed. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that I’m a hundred percent certain that’s gonna happen.”
With that in mind, Cole’s video — one of a few posted by players around the league showing them working out in cages and on mounds — is anything but subtle: There’s one side in the ongoing labor war that wants to return to work, and it’s not management. As Athletics reliever Jake Diekman quipped, five of the six major American pro sports leagues will “have their s—t together” with a relaunch plan.
But, as Manfred suggested, there’s a chance that Cole’s slick bullpen session will be the only pitch we see anyone throw from Yankee Stadium, or any big-league park, all year. Keep those 11 seconds on loop.