After a day of little baseball news as owners and the MLBPA tried to find a way to play baseball in 2020, things got serious at 9:09 pm Tuesday night when Max Scherzer, a member of the Players Association Executive Sub-committee, tweeted this:
— Max Scherzer (@Max_Scherzer) May 28, 2020
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Scherzer’s tweet followed a day of speculation as to whether the MLBPA would agree to the owners’ proposed salary cuts. Daniel Murphy and former Rockie Chris Iannetta are also on the Executive Committee. (Read Ben Kouchnerkavich’s analysis here.)
At 10:20, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich reported on the players’ counter-proposal, which includes the flowing:
- The players will insist on keeping their full prorated salaries.
- They will ask for a schedule that includes more than 82 games.
According to Rosenthal and Drellich, the players have “loosely” discussed playing games above the 82-game minimum without pay or allowing owners to defer payment of the 2020 prorated salaries. However, it is unknown if the players will include this in their counter-proposal to owners. As Jeff Passan reports, “The union’s desire to play more games could ultimately be used as a chip for a negotiation to reach a return-to-play deal.”
Although there are still disagreements over health and safety concerns, Rosenthal and Drellich report that the players see those differences as resolvable. However, Rosenthal and Drellich write, “The bigger issue, perhaps, is that players object to a situation they see as sharing the financial risk with owners while taking all of the health risk themselves.”
The hope is to begin spring training in mid-June with the season beginning in early July.
Purple Row will continue to monitor this fast-moving story.