MLB Owners Want To Use The Coronavirus Pandemic To Bust Baseball's Players Union - HuffPost

The 2020 Major League Baseball season, already on hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, is now at risk of not happening at all, thanks to team owners’ demands that players accept draconian salary cuts in order for the season to begin, whenever that might happen.

The league and its owners insist that the proposal they unveiled Tuesday, which would require some players to forgo more than half of their salary, is a serious pitch meant to stave off further hardships.

That has been the owners’ goal since the day the union was recognized in 1966, and they have continued to wage covert war against players throughout the period of relative labor peace that followed the fall-less 1994 season, when players staged a 232-day strike ― and even canceled the World Series ― over owners’ demands that they agree to a hard cap on salaries. .

The owners are gambling the 2020 season, and the game’s future, on the idea that the MLBPA won’t fight back the way it did 26 years ago ― and that fans will take the billionaires’ side if players do. .

The MLBPA ought to call their bluff, even if it means there’s no baseball this summer, and even if it means 2020 becomes as ugly a memory in baseball history as the strike-shortened season of 1994 is often portrayed.

The players have already agreed to prorate salaries for whatever portion of the season they are able to play, a more generous concession than they had to make.

Two weeks ago, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Blake Snell said that restarting the season wasn’t “worth it” if players had to take big pay cuts, and New York Mets pitcher Marcus Stroman tweeted, then quickly deleted, that the Tuesday plan made a 2020 season unlikely.

As a result, the share of league revenues that goes toward player salaries has fallen to modern lows, even without the dreaded salary cap that players once walked off the field to prevent.