Report: MLB can furlough non-players

Anyone who works for a baseball team but can’t pitch, hit or run might have one last paycheck to last them through the pandemic.

The Athletic reported Major League Baseball will inform teams Monday that they can furlough or reduce the pay of coaches, managers, scouts and some front-office personnel as soon as May. Though ballclubs aren’t required to shave payroll, commissioner Rob Manfred’s planned May 1 suspension of Uniform Employee Contracts permits teams to make cuts at their discretion to manage plummetting revenues during baseball’s ongoing coronavirus shutdown.

Manfred has so far declined to activate a similar provision in its major league Uniform Player Contracts, which lets the commissioner suspend contracts “during any national emergency during which Major League Baseball is not played.”

Forbes’ latest MLB valuations estimate that 29 of MLB’s 30 teams are worth at least $1 billion. TThe Marlins were the lone exception — estimated at $980 million.

Brawl erupts in Chinese League game: The Chinese Professional Baseball League this week became the first major league to open its baseball season amid the coronavirus pandemic. The CPBL, based in Taiwan, took precautions like eliminating fans from the stadium, imposing facemask regulations on team staff and upholding normal socialdistancing guidelines in the dugouts.

But the CPBL did not anticipate a benches-clearing brawl like the one that took place between the Fubon Guardians and Rakuten Monkeys on Sunday in Taiwan.

Fubon righthander Henry Sosa, former MLB pitcher for the Astros, threw four fastballs inside to Rakuten second baseman Kuo Yen-Wen in the fourth inning. The last of those drilled Yen-Wen near his hip area and the Monkeys and Guardians instantly stormed out of their dugouts for a brief benches-clearing brawl in the center of the diamond.