A critical week in baseball’s quest to launch its delayed 2020 season began with a squabble over money and ended with a dissection of safety and testing protocols. But the sport, despite its efforts, is materially no closer to getting back on the field – a reality less about any fundamental rifts between owners and players than about the unsettling truth about this global pandemic: the coronavirus is still in charge.
As soon as Friday, Major League Baseball is expected to give its union an 80-page document laying out its proposed medical and safety protocols for starting the season, which has been delayed for nearly seven weeks and counting the pandemic.
Commissioner Rob Manfred spelled out many of its details on an interview with CNN on Thursday night: Players and other personnel would be tested “multiple” times per week, supplemented by daily temperature checks and occasional antibody testing. The Utah lab that administers baseball’s drug-testing program will run its coronavirus testing. A positive test from a player would not necessitate a two- or three-week shutdown of the sport, or even the player’s team, but would require the player to be quarantined until testing negative twice within a 24-hour period.
“Our experts are advising us that we don’t need a (leaguewide) 14-day quarantine,” Manfred said. “The positive individual will be removed from the group (and) quarantined, then contact tracing with the individual and point-of-care testing with the individuals to minimize the chance there’s been a spread.”
But it was perhaps most telling that Manfred, when asked by CNN host Anderson Cooper how likely it is that fans will see baseball this year, spoke not in terms of confidence, but of hope.
“I think it’s hopeful that we will have some (baseball) this summer,” Manfred said. “We are making plans for playing in empty stadiums. But as I’ve said before, all of those plans are dependent on what the public health situation is and us reaching the conclusion that it will be safe for our players and other employees to come back to work.”
There are important negotiations still to come regarding the logistics, the medical protocols and – yes – the economics of getting back on the field, all of it saddled with a rough deadline of the end of this month, with baseball targeting a mid-June opening of “spring training 2.0” and a regular season of 82 games starting on or around July 4.
The union will want to know, for example, whether MLB – which says its tests will be manufactured and administered out of the Utah lab, and thus won’t be diverted from the general population – can ensure that the deployment of thousands of tests per week can be done ethically, given reports of shortages in some states.
Players will want to understand the ramifications and ensure access to testing for immediate family members. Some, including those with preexisting medical conditions, will want to know what happens if they opt out for health reasons. Although Manfred told CNN no one would “force” those players to pay, what would be the personal cost for opting out, in terms of lost income or service time?
And while MLB has yet to present an economic plan to the union – which contends the economic plan was already settled by a March agreement that called for players to receive prorated portions of their 2020 salaries based on the number of games played – that fight lingers out there as another potential roadblock.
The union’s icy reception earlier this week to leaked details of MLB’s proposed 50-50 split of revenue in 2020 – union chief Tony Clark called it a “salary cap” and a non-starter – could prompt the league to modify its economic proposal when it eventually makes one. But what remains clear is the players’ firm disinclination to accept a further reduction on salaries on top of the one it made in March.
Manfred pegged the industry’s losses in the event of a canceled season at $4 billion, and the union reportedly has asked MLB for financial documentation of its massive projected losses. One of the league’s biggest fears is playing a full regular season – with players receiving their prorated salary shares – then losing the postseason, when MLB makes the bulk of its national television money, to a second wave of coronavirus.
Although the discussions over safety and money are fundamentally separate ones, players rightly see them as interconnected, since they will be the ones – along with their coaches and managers – taking on almost all of the health risk.
This point was driven home by a widely viewed rant by Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Blake Snell on his personal Twitch channel this week, in which he said, among other things, “Bro, I’m risking my life ... If I’m going to play, I should be getting the money I signed to be getting paid.”
Cincinnati Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer was equally dismissive of MLB’s plan, saying in a video he posted to YouTube: “The ask is basically: ‘Take more risk by getting back sooner and take less pay than we’ve already agreed.’...It doesn’t sit well with me.”
Manfred downplayed the financial fight – “I have great confidence we’ll reach an agreement (on) the economic issues,” he said – but working out the money, despite its potential for public rancor, might be the least of his worries.
If baseball could just magically teleport some 900 fully prepared players into 15 stadiums at a moment’s notice, it wouldn’t be necessary to start potentially painful negotiations now – some seven weeks ahead of the targeted opening day, with the landscape of the country’s fight against coronavirus shifting almost daily. But teams need a week or more to mobilize operations, and pitchers need several weeks to build back up the arm strength that has been lost since spring training camps were shut down in mid-March.
Despite MLB’s hope to stage games in teams’ normal home stadiums, there are some where that may not be possible. Canada’s automatic, 14-day quarantine for foreign visitors would seem to preclude the Toronto Blue Jays from hosting games. California, home to five MLB teams and under stricter stay-at-home mandates than the rest of the country, could also present problems.
But baseball hopes those issues will be minimal, with Manfred saying he has already spoken to governors in every state with a big league team.
“Most governors expressed hope that we would be able to use facilities – initially without fans,” he said. “But we do have contingency plans if in fact there was a problem in a particular market, where that team could play somewhere else, at least temporarily.”
What Manfred essentially did Thursday night was offer a “hopeful” snapshot of how baseball, in the middle of May, views its best path forward for a season that would begin in early July. But there is only so much he can do, and so many answers he can give.
In truth, even two months after the sport was first shut down, Manfred still can’t say definitively when, where or how baseball will return. Only the virus can do that.