[ESPN] MLB suspends spring training, delays Opening Day at least two weeks

Guess they're using split-squads if all teams are playing at their home ballparks opening day?

 

Or maybe he means all teams will be playing in their own stadiums during the year and not Florida/Texas/Arizona?

 

I don't doubt Plouffe heard that. But I find it hard to believe it is that definite.

 

Maybe, maybe no.

 

Pasaan and Rosenthal also now reporting that clubs have told players to “get ready” but most without specifics. Said the Indians threw out the June 10th and July 1 dates, and quoted Girardi as saying he had “heard” July 1

nothing is set obviously but looks like it’s getting closer at least

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Aqied-buV601O_HfLqG2A/videos

"I'm Warner Fusselle for This Week in Baseball"

 

Current hope:

10 round draft in June

7/1 or 7/4 opening day,

100 game schedule thru 10/15, each city playing according to present local restrictions (games cancelled or relocated as needed if home city not able to host)

MLB active rosters expanded to 40; AAA season cancelled

playoffs 10/15-11/30 in neutral tbd stadiums

AA plays 80 game season 7/4 - 9/30; rosters expanded to 35; fan attendance based on local restrictions

High A, A, A-, Rk leagues cancelled

complex leagues play 60 game season 7/4-8/31 with unlimited roster sizes; no fans; season cancelled if any player gets covid

 

could see all of that except AAA

too many people living in fear right now. Do I think AAA could and should be played, yes. Would shock me if it happened though

It’s gonna take a long time for people to get rid of their fear of going places, the media and government has told them the world is too dangerous to enter and they bought in

 

FWIW, Here's what Longenhagen said in a chat today about the structure:
While roster rules haven’t been delineated, or probably even truly decided by MLB, teams anticipate having their 26-man roster expanded (to 30? people are just guessing, nobody knows), plus another roster’s worth of players (the other guys on the 40-man, plus some hand-selected prospects up to a certain amount, again, nobody really knows how many) as a taxi squad buffer for injuries. There might be a fall league of some kind that enables more prospects to get some reps.

 

Nothing is official. Major League Baseball will discuss its plans for the 2020 season in a conference call with owners on Monday. If the owners give their approval, the league will present its proposal to the players’ union on Tuesday.

As previously reported, even a formal plan would be subject to change; the details are pending ownership and union approval, and the unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic might force the league to adjust locales and schedules before the season begins and after it is in progress.

Any plan also would require sign-off from medical experts and confidence that testing for the virus would be sufficiently available. But here is a rough outline of some of what the league would like to do, according to four people with knowledge of the league’s intentions:

A regular season beginning in early July and consisting of approximately 80 games. The number might not be exactly 80 — 78 and 82 are also possibilities.

The schedule would be regionalized: Teams would face opponents only from their own division and the same geographic division in the opposite league. An NL East club, for example, would face teams only from the NL East and AL East.

A 78-game schedule might look like this: Four three-game series against each division opponent and two three-game series against each non-division opponent.

• Teams would open in as many home parks as possible, with even New York — the major-league city hardest hit by the coronavirus — potentially in play by early July.

Toronto also might open by then, though nonessential travel between the U.S. and Canada is restricted through at least May 21 and all travelers to Canada are subject to a mandatory 14-day quarantine.

Teams unable to open in their cities temporarily would relocate, either to their spring training sites or major-league parks in other parts of the country. The same would apply to spring training 2.0 if the league decides to use mostly home parks as opposed to returning to Florida and Arizona.

Not all clubs agree they should train in their home parks, believing spring locales offer a less densely populated, more controlled environment.

• Expanded playoffs similar to the idea first reported by the New York Post in February, with an increase from five to seven teams in each league.

Under this plan, the team with the best record in each league would receive a bye in the wild-card round and advance to the Division Series. The two other division winners and wild card with the best record would face the bottom three wild cards in a best-of-three wild-card round.

• Because games, at least initially, will be played without fans, the players would be asked to accept a further reduction in pay, most likely by agreeing to a set percentage of revenues for this season only.

The idea behind such a plan, from the league’s perspective, would be to protect the players and owners against the economic uncertainty created by the virus.

The players agreed in March to prorate their salaries in a shortened season. Those salaries cover the regular season only, while postseason shares are based upon gate receipts. If the players agreed to a set percentage of revenue, they also would share any additional national TV money generated during the postseason.

Without the players making such a concession, league officials say they will spend more on player salaries than they would earn in revenue for every incremental regular-season game played without fans. The union believes the opposite to be true and that postseason TV and other revenue will further enhance the league’s financial position.

The salary issue remains a source of friction. If the owners say it is not economically feasible to play games without fans, the union almost certainly would ask to see financial proof. The teams do not provide the players with full access to their books.

A number of other considerations, financial and otherwise, will enter the discussions between players and owners. An expanded roster of as many as 45 to 50 players is expected. The parties also would need to determine medical protocols — for instance, how they would react if a player becomes infected with the virus.

The final details are to be determined. But a preferred blueprint is in place.

 

They have to figure out the money issue. At this point, the logistics of playing should be straightforward.... daily testing, no fans (for now), limited schedule of division vs. division in both leagues, expanded rosters.

 

I for one welcome our new Southern California and New York fans. Or they can get off the Astros nuts and start tweeting about their own teams.

 

NEWS: Of the 5603 MLB employees who were tested for Covid-19 antibodies, 0.7% were positive:

Anaheim and the two New York teams reported the highest number of positive cases, but the numbers were much smaller than the counties those teams play in

"Covid-19 has not yet affected 99.3% of MLB's population," said the lead researcher, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. "It indicates the epidemic has not spread very far. But at the same time, we have a zero percent mortality rate"

Sixty MLB employees tested positive for the Covid-19 antibodies. The .7% rate is adjusted for testing error. The stadium workers who were tested were not spring training employees, but regular season workers across 26 different cities

Researchers said this is the largest national antibody in the US study to date. Eighty percent of those in the testing pool were white. The gender breakdown was 60/40 male/female. And the group had a higher socioeconomic status than average

Both MLB and the players union assured me this test was simply an effort to help provide public health officials information and NOT tied to when the baseball season will re-start again.

 

This is awesome. Rent-free! The Astros are so epic, they get more attention from New York than the Yankees do. AND, we've knocked them out of the playoffs three times. #theDynastyLives

 

I'm just glad I'll be getting my money back. Took forever to announce it and another month before it actually happens (4 games)...Cmon Stros!

I also had tickets to the Astros vs. Rangers in the new Arlington stadium in April, still waiting to hear from the Rangers about a refund...

 

Spoiler

An economic system in which player compensation would come from 50 percent of league revenue in 2020 instead of the current salary structure is a non-starter for the Major League Baseball Players Association, union officials told The Athletic on Monday. The union believes such a system amounts to a salary cap, while the league disagrees.

Citing the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, MLB wants to make a major (if temporary) change to the sport’s economic system, basing salaries only for this season upon the percentage of revenues generated by the sport.

League officials say the one-time arrangement should not be considered a cap because it includes no minimum or maximum payroll. Instead, the league views the plan as a partnership in which players would simply prorate their salaries to match industry revenues at a time when the league does not know if and when it will open its parks to paying customers.

The union, however, has long considered a system in which overall compensation is both reduced and tied directly to revenues to be a cap. The players already have agreed to a pay cut, prorating their salaries on a per-game basis as part of a March agreement with the league. But the league wants to revisit player compensation, saying it will lose too much money by playing games without fans — a belief that is not shared by the union, particularly when postseason revenue is added to the equation.

The economic divide is expected to be a major topic of conversation when the parties meet digitally on Tuesday. The owners on Monday approved a proposal the league will present to the union outlining its vision of the 2020 season.

The league’s attempt to adjust salaries is expected to draw a request from the union that MLB provide financial data proving its peril and need. The league’s full books are not publicly available, and while it shares some financial documents with the union regularly — including audited financial statements — the MLBPA is likely to request an increased and more detailed picture.

“We lose money on every single game (without fans),” one league official said. “We have to propose that they take something less than they already negotiated. We thought the most persuasive way to make that proposal was to explain: here’s what we’re going to make in revenue and we’ll split it with you and here’s how it turns into player salaries.

“You take everything, tell ’em this is everything we’re going to make, we’ll give you half of it. … If we do better, we’re not going to ask you to rely on our projections. We’ll give you this as a minimum, if we make more, we’ll give you half of what the more is.”

Said MLBPA executive director Tony Clark: “A system that restricts player pay based on revenues is a salary cap, period. This is not the first salary cap proposal our union has received. It probably won’t be the last.

“That the league is trying to take advantage of a global health crisis to get what they’ve failed to achieve in the past — and to anonymously negotiate through the media for the last several days — suggests they know exactly how this will be received.

“None of this is beneficial to the process of finding a way for us to safely get back on the field and resume the 2020 season — which continues to be our sole focus.”

Three other major professional sports — the NFL, NBA and NHL — operate with a salary cap that includes players receiving a set percentage of revenue. The trade-off players make in the other sports for a guaranteed minimum of owners’ revenues is a maximum. The MLBPA maintains a longstanding philosophical objection to a cap, and the last work stoppage in the sport, a strike by the players in 1994-95, was centered on the league’s attempt to implement such a system.

This proposal is different, the league says.

“Think about the NBA cap system. It is true that they have a system that divides revenues,” a league official said. “But, they then have a maximum payroll: no club can spend more than this, a minimum payroll: everybody has to spend at least that.

“We don’t have either of those. And the whole purpose of a cap is to say, when you’re out there negotiating with LeBron James, your negotiation is limited by this top and this bottom. Our individual negotiations for this year are over … We’re not trying to regulate payrolls, we’re not trying to set a precedent, none of the above.”

The complete list of revenues MLB would count or not count toward the pot it divides with the players is not known. In sports in which players and clubs already share revenue, the parties regularly have disputes over the definition of such revenues.

The agreement between the MLB and the MLBPA in March outlining how the sport would proceed amidst the pandemic included the provision that players will be paid based on the number of games played. But the document also provided for the possibility of a discussion about the “economic feasibility” of starting games in instances where there are no fans, giving the owners an opening to say they will not play unless the economics are revised.

The union believes the March agreement addressed MLB’s concerns about salaries and does not wish to engage in another negotiation. Player advocates note the league does not directly share its profits in seasons in which it does extraordinarily well — a trickle-down effect in free agency aside — but is asking players to directly share in losses for this year.

Because MLB’s books are not public, it is difficult to verify MLB’s revenues. An industry source said that 40 percent of the league’s overall revenue is gate or gate-related, while 51 percent of local revenue is gate or gate-related. Those figures vary from club to club.

 

I'm sure the players trying to play hard ball will go over really well.

I'm pretty much indifferent to labor relations in general, rich people fighting over their slice. But their treatment of young players, amateurs and minor leaguers leaves me with really f**king strong dislike of the players union. They're supposed to fight for the players, but they really only fight for the 5%

 

Pretty much true of any company with a top heavy power structure... and the young players comply with it because they could one day benefit from the same rules.

Have NFL players agreed to a salary cut/revenue sharing program if there are no fans?