I’m sure if he had to do it over again, Blake Snell would have handled the question a little differently last week rather than blurting out, “I’m not playing unless I get mine, OK?”
Yes, we know. The Tampa Bay Rays pitcher was responding to a proposal by Major League Baseball that a previously agreed arrangement for pro-rating player salaries over a short season might be null and void if, as it now appears, there will be no fans in the stands. The view here is that the owners should have thought of that when they made the deal in the first place.
But Snell, in voicing objections – supported by other players, including one Clayton Kershaw – to a 50-50 revenue split that to players sounds suspiciously like the salary cap concept that the Players Association has fought against from day one, basically made himself the bullseye for every frustrated fan who is convinced that he’d play for free, so why should the players make so much?
(Time out here for clarification: If you were among the 750 best in the world at what you do, even if it’s a vocation associated with the word “play,” you would not work for free. You would bargain for every dollar you could get – or better yet, hire Scott Boras to do it for you – and you know it.)
That said, was Snell wrong? No, if you’re talking about a deal being a deal. But also yes, in applying yesterday’s rules to a workplace, and a world, that is already changing so dramatically that we can’t even begin to imagine with any accuracy what the future will hold.
Monday there was a little clarification from Sacramento for sports in this state. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who had previously been far more pessimistic about sports events returning to California for months to come, said at his daily briefing that sports could come back, without fans and with what he termed as “modifications and very prescriptive conditions,” as early as the first week of June assuming that the state’s progress in dealing with COVID-19 doesn’t take a sudden left turn.
The MLB plan is for a brief training camp starting in mid-June and an 82-game geographically limited schedule beginning in July, in home parks where possible. It comes with a 67-page plan regarding health and safety issues that includes, among other things, no spitting, bench players sitting in the stands to observe social distancing, no mound visits, and regular testing.
How many of these measures are temporary precautions? And how many of the innovations that come out of Pandemic Baseball will be the new normal?
Financially, the players probably should fasten their seat belts. In a depressed economy, with immense job losses and businesses large and small going bankrupt or closing down altogether, the conditions that have enabled both teams and players to prosper in all major professional sports, not just baseball, have ceased to exist.
“With all this, looking at close to 20 percent unemployment and 100,000 small businesses possibly closing, where are (people) going to get the money to be paying for luxury suites and everything else?” asked Gil Fried, chair of the sports management department in the college of business at the University of New Haven. “When people aren’t getting money for their employees and are having a hard time and laying off employees, I think they’re going to have to take a second look at whether or not they want to spend money on sports. So that’s going to affect the bottom line.
“And so players could say, ‘Look, we deserve it. We need to get paid.’ Yeah, you should get paid. But should you be getting paid $15 (million) or $20 million a year? You know, I think it’s going to be a hard argument for them coming forward.”
Especially if the new normal involves fewer people in the seats. We’ve previously discussed polls that have suggested that a good percentage of fans will be very hesitant to return to stadiums and arenas even when fans are allowed, at least until a vaccine is available and in some cases even beyond that. Baseball’s owners have suggested they’ll lose more than $640,000 per game for every time they play with no paying customers, and commissioner Rob Manfred tossed around a figure of $4 million in combined losses for 2020.
It’s worth noting that the sides have a collective bargaining agreement to negotiate before the end of the 2021 season, and will also have new national TV rights deals starting at that point. So keep that in mind when considering those numbers, and also keep in mind the various ways ballclubs can fiddle around with revenue streams.
Still, what happens if they open the gates and lots of seats remain empty? That’s ticket, parking, concessions and merchandise revenue lost.
Beyond that, will corporate partners maintain anything close to their pre-pandemic level of support? And what will advertising rates look like for televised games? The ratings should be enormous, but set ad rates at a high enough point and businesses might balk. (I could see a scenario where PACs and political campaigns buy up most of the air time. A steady stream of political ads on game broadcasts might chase viewers away, no matter how hungry they are for live sports.)
Life is about timing, right? This is a horrible time to become a free agent, as the Dodgers’ Mookie Betts – it’s still strange to type that, by the way – and the Phillies’ J.T. Realmuto are about to find out. It is safe to predict there will be no record contracts given out this winter. And just imagine what’s in store for the second and third tiers of free agents.
But even with the possibility that a free agent market that has been grim the past two offseasons is about to crater, it’s hard to imagine the players ever accepting a revenue split arrangement of any sort for any length of time. Then again, it’s hard to imagine the owners ever opening their books for the players to see exactly where the sport is financially.
Maybe it would take one to achieve the other. Maybe it will require a pandemic to achieve both. But I wouldn’t count on it. Let’s just hope the sides can agree to disagree long enough to just play baseball and give the rest of us a break.
jalexander@scng.com
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter
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Alexander: Will we have a baseball season? It’ll likely come down to money - OCRegister
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