PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan)- It can be hard to keep up with the ping pong match that MLB owners and the MLBPA continue to play in trying to hammer out details to get baseball games played this summer.
It was reported late Monday that the league's next counter-proposal could include a 50-game regular season, down signficantly former the 114-game season the players proposed recently. According to ESPN's Jeff Passan, the owners believe commissioner Rob Manfred to implement that if the two sides can come to an agreement.
New York Post baseball columnist Ken Davidoff joined The Fan Morning Show Tuesday to review some of the details and possibly fill in some gaps of understanding what's going on here.
"The owners really did not come back with a hard proposal, that 50-60 (games). They mentioned that could work to get their prorated pay. This is ugly. Baseball has a history of labor discord, as those of us of a certain age remember. This is ugly because the two sides not only dislike each other but I like disrespect each other.
I would get off the 55-60 games. It's not really in the conversation. It was more MLB making a point that, 'Hey, if you want you're prorated pay, we could do at this number."
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Davidoff thinks 82 games is the more feasible number, which is what they originally proposed. He also believes that both sides realize how devastating it would be for the league and the sport not to have a season, so he thinks an agreement will come to pass.
But where both the player's union and the league may have erred (and have argued about since) is that March agreement in which players conceded to have their salaries prorated.
"It's in writing. It's a written agreement from March 26th. It's worded vaguely. There's one paragraph that says, 'Alright, if we resume the season, players will be paid prorated salaries, per day salaries.' And then there's a complete other section that says, 'If we have to play without fans, then we have to have another discussion about the economics.' Which, reading between the lines means further paycuts.
Now, it clearly could have been worded more clearly. It's vague. That's on both sides. But there is certainly documentation that the union knew what it was signing."
So yes, the blame is on both sides for creating a vague document and an unclear agreement. But, as Davidoff stated on the show, Tony Clark has done a pretty poor job as the leader of the union to not sniff out the language that an extra conversation would be needed if it was established that games would be played without fans.
Oh, and there's still that pesky coronavirus out there to be concerned about...
"The thing is, even if they do hammer out the health and safety stuff and they hammer out the financial stuff, there's no guarantee that they'll be able to pull this off. If there's an outbreak among the players or among bus drives or hotel workers, that's it. It's over."