Major League Baseball Players Association representative Tony Clark said the latest offer from the owners of 72 games and cuts in player salaries was unacceptable on Sunday (USA Today file photo)

MLB Commissioner: Not Sure of a Season

That’s Amaury News and Commentary

By Amaury Pi Gonzalez

Last week Commissioner Rob Manfred said “100 percent is going to be a season”. Today after his weekly conference call with the 30 owners said he was “not very sure we will have a season”. According to Manfred the league doesn’t want to open a season with the risk that the union could file multi-billion dollar grievance saying that MLB did not act in good faith to play as many games as possible this year. With the Covid-19 situation players could choose not to report for work.

The Commissioner lacks the ownership votes to open the season. MLB/owners after they rejected the 72-game proposal by the MLPA this past weekend, and after the union told the owners they are “done” negotiating, and told them to “go and set a schedule”, the players now do not seem to want to go any further.

This is what the Commissioner told ESPN today. “I had been hopeful that once we got to common ground on the idea that we were going to pay the players full prorated salary that we would get some cooperation in terms of proceeding under the agreement that we negotiated with the MLBPA on March 26th. Unfortunately, over the weekend, while Tony Clark was declaring his desire to get back to work, the union’s top lawyer was out telling reporters, players and eventually getting back to owners that as soon as we issued a schedule — as they requested — they intended to file a grievance claiming they were entitled to an additional billion dollars. Obviously, that sort of bad-faith tactic makes it extremely difficult to move forward in these circumstances.”

Commentary: Many epitaphs will be written about MLB 2020, I believe it will be remembered as the weird year where greed killed the game, suicide by the numbers. Nobody was arguing about a $15 per-hour salary here, in a game where the owners can make billions in television deals and a rookie makes around $563,500 per-season, and the rest of the country is struggling in many ways with 30-40 million unemployed, many will lose their jobs and businesses forever, this was as ridiculous as it could get.

Unless there are last second surprise(s), the great Lon Simmons would say today about the 2020 season: “Tell it goodbye!”

Stay well and stay tuned.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice for A’s baseball on the A’s Spanish radio flagship station 1010 KIQI San Francisco and does News and Commentary each week at http://www.sportsradioservice.com