Drew Kerekes

Plans seem to be in place for the resumption of the NBA season, as Adrian Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne reported Friday the league’s board of governors was expected to approve a plan to host the remainder of the regular season and the playoffs at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.

The plan owners favor, according to the report, is having 22 teams within six games of each conference’s final playoff spots return to action and conclude the regular season before transitioning to the playoffs. The NBA season has been suspended since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it looks like we’re going to get more basketball after all.

There have been whispers of alleged plans to resume the season since early May when an idea of bringing the teams to Las Vegas was floated around. Now, it looks like Orlando will be the site of the 2019-20 season’s conclusion should this plan be approved as expected. With NASCAR already back and professional golf just over the horizon, it appears the NBA is next in line as sports begin to trickle back into America’s day-to-day activities.

And then there’s Major League Baseball. The latest report by ESPN’s Jeff Passan Monday has the league proposing a 50-game schedule with prorated player salaries. A report by Passan on Sunday said the MLB Players Union wanted a 114-game season. We know there will be a universal DH. Mostly, though, we’ve just heard the bickering between MLB owners and players.

When the start of the season first got postponed due to the coronavirus, the players agreed to prorated salaries. In other words, if a player makes $200 million over the course of 162 games, that’s just over $1.2 million per game. Let’s round it up to $1.3 million — so if there are only 82 games this year, for example, that player will earn $106.6 million in 2020. MLB owners, though, previously proposed a revenue-sharing plan as part of their larger plan to begin the season. They argue if teams are forced to play in empty stadiums due to not wanting to spread the coronavirus, those teams would lose significant money if players were given their full salaries.

The players balked at this idea, no pun intended. They feel they’ve already agreed to a pay cut in the prorated salaries and likely believe further cuts are just meant to keep owners’ pockets at least close to as heavy as usual. The owners and players have been leaking proposals to the media in recent weeks, likely in hope the public will take their respective sides and accuse the other side of “holding baseball hostage.”

Notice how there was no players-ownership bickering done through the media with the NBA? Granted, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison as most of the NBA’s season had already happened with ticket sales, whereas a fan-less 2020 season would mean approximately 40% of MLB’s annual revenue would be lost. Still, by the owners and the union leaking these proposals to the public in hopes of fans viewing the other side as the “bad guys,” we’re entering a territory where no one is going to win.

Let’s say distrust continues to breed — it already existed between players and owners prior to COVID-19 — a deal doesn’t get done and the season doesn’t happen. Those old enough to remember would point to the 1994 strike, where there was no World Series that year and fans became turned off by the game. It wasn’t until 1998, which featured a home run chase fueled by performance-enhancing drugs, that baseball really recovered in the arena of public opinion. Given what we know now about that season now, a canceled 2020 that happens over money has the potential to alienate fans even further than they might have already been when they found out the chase for 62 was PED-fueled.

Someone once asked me why some restaurants would choose to close rather than offer takeout only in the early days of the pandemic. My belief was for some businesses, there was no way takeout was going to cover operating costs, so it was better to just lose a little money in the short-term than a lot of money and hope renters would be forgiving. What if MLB owners decide they’d rather lose a little by not having a season rather than a lot by having a fan-less season?

It’s risky, for sure, due to what I mentioned above: Instead of it being a safety issue — not wanting to potentially expose players and staff to the virus by playing games — it could be perceived as a money issue by fans, affecting interest in the game beyond 2020. But as much as I want to totally side with the players and tell the owners to suck it up and take a hit this season, it’s simply not realistic to expect businessmen to operate at a loss.

That’s not to say it’s realistic to expect players to simply play for love of the game, and I get a good chuckle at everyone I see on social media proclaiming they would play for free anytime one of these stories about the bickering pops up. One, no you wouldn’t and, two, no one would tune in to watch you strike out four times on 12 pitches.

I do think ultimately the sides will come together and agree to play in 2020 if it can be done safely. But if there’s one piece of advice I have for both the owners and the players, it’s this: Have all of your discussions behind closed doors. Stop leaking things to the media in an attempt to make the other side look bad. Get in a room, negotiate and figure out an agreeable solution. There’s potentially too much to lose if the sides can’t come together, and the finger-pointing isn’t helping matters. 

Drew Kerekes is the sports editor at The Meridian Star. He can be reached at dkerekes@themeridianstar.com.