WILL THEY PLAY BALL?

Sometime in the past few days, I was struck with an epiphany: as a baseball fan, I was born under a bad sign.

In my youth, things seemed great as Major League Baseball added multiple expansion teams in the 1990s.

First, in 1991 they added the Colorado Rockies and the Florida Marlins. Then, six years later the world met the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

New teams meant new baseball cards back when collecting those was considered cool.

However, in the middle of that can the players strike of 1994 and the use of replacement players to start Spring Training in 1995.

Baseball shot back to life in the summer of 1998 with the home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Both players would later be linked to steroid use with McGwire admitting as much in and interview with Bob Costas in 2010.

Somewhere in there we also lost the Montreal Expos although fans in the nation’s capitol are glad to have their own team in the Washington Nationals.

Whatever goodwill baseball, its owners and players have built up over the years is in real danger of washing away this summer.

While other sports leagues work diligently to reopen and find ways to compromise, baseball keeps shooting itself in the foot.

Last week, I wrote about the competing proposals made by owners and players.

To recap, owners sent an offer of an 82-game season with salary reductions while players sent their own 114 game plan with no further reduction in pay. Both sides agreed to prorate player salaries when the sports world stopped back in March. This allowed owners to take less of a financial hit with no gameday (ticket and merchandise sales) or TV revenue coming in.

Both sides rejected the others’ offers and we were back at square one until Monday morning when the owner sent another proposal; this time for a 76-game season with players getting prorated salaries.

A key sticking point is how much prorated salary the players get. If the league finishes the full regular season and postseason, players get 75% of their prorated salaries. This amount drops to 50% of prorated salaries if the postseason is cancelled.

Looming in the background is a mini-season option of sorts as described to ESPN’s Jeff Passan for an article published June 1. The gist is that the league can force a return to play in the form of a 50-game season with full prorated salaries. This option is considered a last resort and stems from language in the March agreement.

Passan’s ESPN colleagues, Jesse Rogers, Bradford Doolittle and David Schoenfield provided an excellent breakdown of MLB’s most recent proposal and why the players would probably reject it.

They found that a completed season would net players 35% of their original salaries. Their research also showed players would make essentially the same amount of money in either scenario making playing an additional 26 games during a pandemic that much more of a risk.

Hopefully, the sides can bridge the divide and patch up their differences. But until they say otherwise, sports fan like this guy will have to watch something else.

Hey folks, does anyone like German soccer?