Hazard pay for a pro athlete? Give me a break
Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association should do everyone a favour and remain quiet about financials until an agreement has been reached on a proposed 82-game schedule for the upcoming season.
Now is not the time to air dirty laundry. Arguments over dispersing millions of dollars are hard enough to justify at the best of times. It’s an even more difficult case to make when unemployment is reaching almost unprecedented levels and families are struggling just to make ends meet.
The problems of millionaire athletes and their billionaire team owners shouldn’t concern us, not when so many others around the game have been furloughed, had their salaries slashed or were outright terminated. There have been a lot of victims during the global pandemic and economic recession. Big-league players and owners are not among them.
That’s why one of the last things the league and the MLBPA needed this week was the tone-deaf approach taken by Blue Jays right-hander Anthony Bass. The 32-year-old reliever with more than five full years of service in the big leagues was so upset by the league’s proposal to split revenue 50/50 with the players, instead of honouring previous contracts, he felt the need to lash out on social media.
“I understand it’s an initial proposal by MLB but there is no way players will agree to another pay cut from the already agreed upon deal,” Bass wrote in a now-deleted tweet. “If anything, hazard pay should be added as we are putting ourselves and families at risk to play baseball.”
Hazard pay for a professional athlete? Give me a break. There are a lot of people who have become everyday heroes during the pandemic and none of them are athletes, unless you’re talking about someone like hockey player turned aspiring emergency room doctor Hayley Wickenheiser. The real inspirations are the nurses who kept our hospitals operational, the delivery people, the TTC workers, the grocery-store cashiers and processing-plant employees who have kept the supply chain going throughout this crisis. It’s not someone who throws a ball 60 feet, six inches.
To be fair, Bass doesn’t possess the glamour lifestyle of a stereotypical pro ballplayer, so he has more financial concerns than some of his peers. As a fifth-round pick in 2008, he wasn’t eligible for a large bonus and he has never signed a multi-year deal. The $1.5 million (U.S.) that Bass was set to earn in 2020 was more than twice as much as he made in parts of eight seasons. By baseball standards he’s poor, yet in the real world he’s elite with career earnings that exceed $2 million. Excuse the lack of empathy, but even those in the lower class of MLB will be just fine.
Criticizing a player for his outspoken remarks typically leads to predictable results. Whoever makes the argument draws accusations of being anti-labour, pro capitalist. Some suggest it’s like choosing Walmart over the cashiers, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos over his warehouse employees. Not exactly. A lot of baseball players come from blue-collar backgrounds, but they don’t have blue-collar lives. The league minimum salary last season was $563,500. One doesn’t have to stick around very long before securing financial freedom. Find a better example for the common man.
Neither the owners nor the players are the good guys because the people in need during these trying times will be left out of these negotiations entirely. The security guards, food vendors and ticket reps who face uncertain futures. Team employees behind the scenes in community events, fan engagement, social media and merchandising who are stressed about possible cuts. The players and owners have the resources to ease those concerns, but it’s obvious they won’t. As MLB and the MLBPA were negotiating how to divvy up hundreds of millions of dollars, reports Wednesday indicated the Miami Marlins were expected to furlough 40 per cent of their baseball operations employees June 1. Tuesday night, the Seattle Mariners quietly announced they were cutting the salaries of 60 employees with the hopes of avoiding layoffs. The Jays previously announced they would pay their full-time staff through the end of May, but what happens after that remains unclear.
The funding that teams provided to stadium workers over the past two months to compensate for lost shifts has been depleted. Outside groups such as the Team Toronto Fund — organized by local team presidents Mark Shapiro, Masai Ujiri, Brendan Shanahan and Bill Manning — can only do so much to fill in the gaps. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake.
Then there are the minor leaguers, the ones who don’t earn livable wages even when baseball is being played. Those players have the biggest needs, but they are not represented by the union, so they are of no concern to the negotiations. In fact, the MLBPA seems to care so little about its future members that it had no problem allowing the league to shorten this year’s draft to five rounds, costing more than 1,000 players the opportunity to be drafted and receive signing bonuses.
This is the ugly side of the sport, the one that only focuses on the bottom line. The players have every right to fight for their fair share, while the owners should be expected to play hard ball as they attempt to protect assets. No matter what people say now, a deal will be finalized and baseball will be played.
Until then, excuse those of us who don’t care about the financials. We all want to see baseball return as a muchneeded distraction in our lives, just spare us the details on how it gets done. Most of us have bigger things to worry about.