Desperate to broker a deal with summer approaching, MLB’s owners presented a “new” proposal Friday, offering players a 72-game season at 70 percent of their prorated 2020 salaries. While the owners may see this as a peace offering to players seeking a longer season, Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer isn’t buying it.
After crunching the numbers, Bauer found that MLB’s new proposal would pay players exactly the same as they’d earn playing 48 games at their full, prorated salaries, which is what the league had originally offered. So essentially, the owners are proposing players play an additional 24 games, increasing their chance of injury (and potentially damaging their future earnings as prospective free agents), without seeing a penny more.
Since we know that’s not happening, where does baseball go from here? Players fatigued from months of haggling with stubborn owners have become increasingly resigned to playing a 48-game season, with one quoted as saying, “Just tell us when to report.” MLB’s freshly-inked $1-billion television deal with Turner Sports won't make players, many of them still fuming over recent comments made by Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt (who claimed the sport isn’t “profitable”), any friendlier in negotiating the league’s return from COVID-19.
Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen, the father of two young sons, equated MLB’s treatment of players to a parent withholding juice from a potty-training toddler. “I know we agreed on juice,” said McCutchen in a Twitter video that quickly went viral. “But what about water?”
“What about water in a bottle?” asked McCutchen, mocking MLB for its tendency to repackage old proposals. “What about water in a coffee mug?”
“Look it doesn’t matter that we agreed on juice. I’m your dad and you’re drinking water,” said the former NL MVP, alluding to MLB’s long-forgotten promise to pay players their full, prorated quota. “Now either you drink this water or you don’t drink anything at all.”
McCutchen’s hilarious 40-second clip perfectly encapsulates not only MLB’s embarrassing attempt to pull the wool over players’ eyes with reworded proposals, but also the hypocrisy displayed by owners, who instantly reneged on their spring training agreement to pay players at their prorated salaries. The current standoff between players and owners is only the precursor to what figures to be an arduous battle ahead of the new collective bargaining agreement, which expires after next season. If this is how far apart we are now (Joel Sherman of the New York Post has derisively called MLB’s ongoing labor war “the email negotiation”), there’s no telling how bad things could get in 2022.
Neither party has shown much of a stomach for compromise throughout this process, but would it kill the two sides to stop disguising Poland Spring as Capri Sun? Because insulting each other’s intelligence with low-ball offers is clearly getting us nowhere.
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