Marc Normandin, Author at Marc Normandin is creating baseball coverage, featuring leftism

Please stop both-sidesing the MLB labor battle

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With MLB commissioner Rob Manfred now saying he can’t 100 percent guarantee that there will be Major League Baseball games played in 2020, we’re about to witness a flood of “if only the two sides, equally at fault, would work together” sentiments. This was a take I was marinating even before Buster Olney woke up this morning and decided to both-sides what have very clearly been bad faith negotiations by the league:

There's no chance '20 baseball happens unless the two sides collaborate and try to make it work in the face of unprecedented circumstances. And both sides probably cannot get there unless they introduce new brokers to the conversation — likely impossible given time constraints.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) June 16, 2020

Olney, at this point, is either willfully ignorant of reality, or incapable of comprehending what’s going on. It doesn’t matter which it is: the material damage is the same.

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Is having a season or harming the union more important to MLB’s owners?

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Do Major League Baseball’s owners actually want to have a 2020 season? It’s a fair question to ask, especially given their behavior surrounding the negotiations with the Players Association on how to go about actually hosting a 2020 campaign. As Craig Calcaterra pointed out, all of the movement has been one-sided: the players keep making adjustments in their proposals, while MLB keeps repackaging the same proposal over and over with slightly different looks that change none of its material purpose, then going to the media to complain about the players. A media, in many cases, that is all too willing to repeat what they’re told by the league.

The owners claim having a season where the players are paid their full salaries — where “full” is “prorated salaries equivalent to the number of games played,” not “their full guaranteed salaries laid out in their contracts” — will bring financial ruin to the league. The players, not interested in taking a second pay cut after agreeing to the first one, asked for proof of the owners’ claims, for ownership to open up the books and show some receipts. The owners did not give them said proof: as Ken Rosenthal reported, the answers the PA did get back, according to a union attorney, were “so heavily redacted as to be essentially meaningless.”

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MLB considering allowing fans mid-pandemic another sign money is all that matters

Leagues speaking up about Black lives rings hollow

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New Orleans Saints’ quarterback Drew Brees deserves to be derided for somehow still not understanding what the protests that saw Colin Kaepernick blacklisted from the National Football League were even about, but he’s far from alone in who we should be judging in this moment in time. The various sports leagues themselves have released statements that read like they knew everyone was expecting them to say something about the protests against police brutality of Black Americans, but wanted to make sure they said as little of substance as possible in the process.

This compulsory form of statement-releasing and posting is essentially a call of “Please Like Me” to a wide array of fans. These teams, leagues, and even some of the athletes within them want to be recognized as not explicitly racist or tone deaf, but they also don’t want to actually do anything besides collect on that acknowledgement. Take a look at the NFL’s statement, signed by commissioner Roger Goodell, for instance:

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MLB, MLBPA moving closer on compensation, but what about safety?

MLB expected to cut 1,000 minor leaguers, while A’s won’t even pay the ones they kept

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As of this writing, it’s May 30. The last day of pay for Minor League Baseball players facing a postponed — and potentially canceled — season is May 31. Around half of Major League Baseball’s teams have stepped up to extend that pay a month, or through the rest of what would be the regular season for MiLB, but that’s not a universal solution. Baseball America has a continually updating story on just which teams have agreed to pay their players $400 per week beyond May 31, and while it’s a growing list, it’s not as long as it should be.

Some background: Minor League players, after initially being sent home without any direction from teams besides “stay in game shape without financial assistance from us,” were given $400 per week from the scheduled start of the Minor League season in early April through May 31. That $400 per week was, embarrassingly, a significant raise for low-level players, and an even more significant pay cut for those who had already escaped the tremendous indignity of the lower minors and were used to being a little better off thanks to the the wages of the high minors, which nearly approach the poverty line instead of sitting miles below it. As of a week ago, there had been no word from any teams about how they were going to handle the post-May 31 pay situation. Reports trickled out during the week, with some clubs extending things through June, others through August, but still, around half of the league has remained silent, and we’re one day from the final day of the initial promise.

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An MLB sliding salary scale could work. Just not this one.

MLB, MLBPA will start talking return economics this week

Minor League player pay isn’t guaranteed past the fast-approaching May 31

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The dispute between Major League Baseball and the Players Association has loomed large over the sport essentially since the 2020 season was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not the lone story out there. Minor League Baseball players aren’t sure if they are going to have a season, either, and the temporary pay solution put in place to help get them through their own postponed 2020 is set to come to an end… with no real sign that it will be extended, either.

Said temporary solution — $400 per week — came in the wake of MLB being criticized for essentially forcing their minor leaguers to pack up and go home, but stay in game shape to be recalled at a moment’s notice, and all without any financial support from the league. Minor League players, still under contract, couldn’t apply for unemployment, and with no idea of when they were coming back, couldn’t necessarily apply to other part-time or temporary jobs, either. That’s still the case, and yet, after May 31, their $400 per week will come to an end.

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Debt service, and MLB’s obfuscation racket

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Major League Baseball is concerned that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the drop in revenues that will come with a shortened 2020 season, is going to make it more difficult for teams to pay off their debt. You might be familiar with the debt service rule in MLB: it arose from the collective bargaining of 2002, and was an attempt to make sure that teams actually had the money to pay their bills by limiting their debt to 10 times their annual earnings. You might also not be familiar with it at all, because it’s barely ever mentioned by the teams or the media, and even now it being brought up is more a negotiating ploy than a real thing to be concerned about.

Keeping in line with the debt service rule isn’t something that’s going to get teams in trouble with some financial authority like a bank: it’s just an internal MLB thing that’s meant to keep teams from promising to be able to pay more than they’ll be able to. And yet, despite the institution of this rule in 2002, nine clubs were in violation of the debt service rule in 2011. MLB didn’t go after most of those teams: they did go after the Dodgers for violating the debt service rule, though, that was because everyone wanted Frank McCourt to get kicked out of the league. The Mets were in violation at the same time, thanks to the Wilpons’ involvement with Bernie Madoff, but they were allowed to keep their team, because then-commissioner Bud Selig and the rest of the owners didn’t despise the Wilpons like they did McCourt.

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