Kovacevic: If baseball bails, blame the players taken in the Strip District (DK'S GRIND)

PNC Park, General Robinson Street. - DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS

There's no agreement between Major League Baseball and the Players Association, and there never was one. Not a completed one, anyway.

It's essential to know this before delving any deeper into how dumb it'd be for both sides to blow up a 2020 season.

On March 26, a couple weeks into the coronavirus crisis, MLB and the union signed an agreement that called for players to be paid a pro-rated share of their regular salaries in the event of a shortened season. The players snapped it up. Hands were figuratively shaken. The camaraderie was hailed in headlines across the sports world.

So when MLB and the union resumed a couple weeks ago setting the stage for the actual return of baseball, and MLB used its national media surrogates to broach the subject of splitting revenues 50/50, now that it was clear fans won't be allowed inside ballparks ... boom went the dynamite.



Blake Snell, the Rays' outstanding pitcher, embarrassed himself, his team and pretty much all of civilization with this reaction: "Y'all gotta understand, man, for me to go -- for me to take a pay cut -- is not happening, because the risk is through the roof. It's a shorter season, less pay. No, I gotta get my money. I'm not playing unless I get mine, OK?"

Tony Clark, the union chief, predictably cried foul that revenue sharing leads to a salary cap, undercutting this particular union's very reason for being.

Scott Boras, the super-agent with irrationally outsized influence on the union, protested that much more vocally and concluded, "We already have an agreement."

Well, yes and no.

They had an agreement. But within that agreement, as has since been affirmed by leaked documents, not least of which is a smoking-gun email obtained this week by the New York Post's Joel Sherman, MLB included a plainly worded stipulation that "a reconsideration of salaries must be undertaken if there are no revenues from attendance."

Which, of course, there won't be.

I'm not buying MLB's claim since then that they'd lose an average of $640,000 in stadium-based revenue for every game that's played -- and not just because it'd be way lower than that in Pittsburgh, as that's another story -- but I'm also not nuts enough to presume it's nothing. I mean, take an average ticket cost of, oh, $20, multiply it by the standard crowd of 25,000, add in luxury suites, sponsorships, concessions, parking ... again, it's not nothing.

Oh, and that's to say nothing of the hundreds of workers -- most of them low-wage earners -- who won't be allowed inside. No vendors, no ushers, nobody.

And here's the thing: If you're Trevor Williams or Joe Musgrove and you take the mound at PNC Park in July, step off the rubber and look around ... you'll be looking at exactly that. You'll be looking at the lost revenue. You won't have to wonder if Bob Nutting or some other evil owner is lying about it.

They'll know it's true. And more pertinent to this topic, we'll know it's true. We already do.

The second round of talks are underway and, to date, they've been an under-the-radar tiptoe. Yesterday, great progress was described in the union gently counter-proposing on MLB's 67-page document on safety regulations. That's encouraging. If they can see eye to eye on where to spit and when to shower, it's a start. But it'll be far more meaningful today if the union takes seriously MLB's semi-ultimatum from earlier this week to produce a new financial plan or, hey, just sit out and don't collect a penny while we all wait for the vaccine.

In a normal setting, given this union's history, I'd be as pessimistic as possible. But there's a difference between obstinate and obtuse.

If this union, representing these players, can't recognize right now that they'd be blamed for shutting down baseball ... during a pandemic ... while people are dropping dead and losing their livelihoods across the country ... while a lot of those unemployed would normally be working for their own teams in their own stadiums ... while the NFL, NHL and NBA all get back in action, in part because they have far more flexible salary-cap systems ... then they're obtuse beyond hope.

Doesn't matter if it'll be fair or not. Perception's all that's on the table here. And the players will be crushed.

I sure won't line up in front of those bullets.

• Critical asterisk: The one city in which the owner would be blamed over the players is this one. But it's still 1/30th.

• How to solve it?

Make 'em all Bobby Bonilla by offering deferred payments. All the players get the money they're owed, but they get it spread out over a few years when it couldn't crush teams' cash flows. They're deferring money in the NFL all the time, even the biggest of stars. From the standpoint of the individual player, no harm done.

If this isn't what the players propose, this will get ugly beyond recognition.

• One rub: The owners will eventually recoup all that money. Because all that deferred money will count, in its own way, against future payrolls. Same way the Mets have to file Bobby Bo's perpetual $1 million payment on their official payroll, and the same way they still have to write the check. One way or the other, theoretically, that's $1 million that could go to a current player and doesn't.

• One side I will take with the players: So much of that 67-page safety booklet is beyond silly.

I'd try to express that myself, but Paul DeJong, the Cardinals' shortstop with a biochemistry degree, did that beautifully yesterday in an interview with my friend Derrick Goold at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, saying, "The daily testing, I'm a fan of, to quickly determine our status every day. But given that, I'd like to see the freedom operating in the clubhouse and on the field. ... Just the things inside the clubhouse we'd like to see intact as much as possible. ... Not being in the indoor [batting] cage, using batting gloves, the sunflower seeds and spitting thing. What if I got dirt in my mouth?"

And this from an anonymous player to ESPN's Jesse Rogers: "If we all test negative, why do we have to use separate baseballs?"

Exactly. I've been writing from the outset that all that matters is testing, testing, testing. Once there's a daily test, everyone who enters that venue should be able to behave normally. Everything else is for optics, and that's a waste of everyone's time.

This stinks. For all teams. For all people. Equally.

• For the record, Nutting can't cut his own pay to correspond with those moves. He doesn't draw a salary from the Pirates. Never has. That doesn't mean he doesn't benefit financially from the franchise -- appreciation alone is massive and real -- but it's a singular point.



• Realizing that the NHL's plan for the Stanley Cup playoffs isn't final, shouldn't it still be a much bigger deal that the Penguins appear destined to face the Canadiens in a best-of-five preliminary round?

That's how it looks now, anyway.

Twelve teams in each conference, with the top four getting a bye, means the Flyers are fourth and the Penguins fifth. In a normal year, they'd face each other in the first round. In an apocalyptic year, per the plan in the link above, the fifth seed will face the very bottom seed, or the No. 12 Canadiens.

Anyone frightened by this?

Not to suggest Montreal's got even half the roster the Penguins do, but Carey Price is the very definition of the goaltender capable of stealing a series, much less one that could be over in a weekend.

If the Penguins prevail, by the way, because the plan comes in the form of an NCAA-style bracket, they already know their next opponent: Flyers.

(Maybe. We'll see if there's a separate seeding tournament for the current top four seeds, as is currently being discussed.)

• The NHL's players are expected to deliver a vote today on the 24-team concept. They'll ratify it. They'll play. But baseball might not. Because baseball's special.

• From now until Downtown jaywalking is illegal, every NHL coach will cite 2020 as an example of every regular-season game counting. Had the Penguins not fallen into that 3-8 funk before the stoppage -- and had the Flyers not become the league's hottest team -- they wouldn't have been frozen three points behind Philadelphia.

• At least both teams played 69 games. No room for complaint. Not so in the West, where the No. 5 Stars finished a point behind the No. 4 Oilers but also had two games in hand.

• Why 12 in each conference?

Please. Look at the standings. New York, Chicago, Montreal. Don't overthink it.

Matt Murray or Tristan Jarry?

The most Jim Rutherford answer ever would be both, and that's essentially the one he gave to Dave Molinari to lead this week's Friday Insider. Lots of good material in there.

Rutherford's got a point: Another year of both comes with one potentially huge benefit that supersedes expansion, free agency and other issues. We saw that in 2017.

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