COVID-19 Roundup: Everybody But Baseball?
This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.
NBA Board of Governors Officially Greenlights Return
There’s more work to be done before the NBA’s tentative July 31 return date, but team owners officially officially approved the pending proposal for the league’s restart. The vote 29-1 in favor, with only the Portland Trail Blazers voting nay because of a disagreement on the structure, and clears the NBA’s next steps: finalizing the COVID-19 safety requirements and getting the final approval of the players. To mitigate the difficulties of traveling in the midst of the pandemic, the games will be played at Disney World at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.
The players will be having a virtual meeting Friday afternoon, but the NBA and the NBPA have consistently kept an open dialogue about the status of the season and what a return would look like.
NHL Playoff Format Agreement
After an agreement between owners and players on this very subject, the NHL officially announced what the league’s playoffs will look like. After five-game qualifiers, teams will play seven-game series, with teams being re-seeded after every round instead of bracketed. An official start date has not been set, but this clears one of the remaining hurdles for the NHL to return to play, along with the NBA. What remains for the NHL is to finalize agreements for training camps, game protocols, and game hubs, the last as the NHL is unlikely to take the same “one location” tack the NBA is.
What Does This Mean for Baseball?
While the NBA and the NHL have been finalizing their agreements with players, MLB ownership has taken the alternate route of sending a public image of intransigence concerning their negotiations with players. Many writers, including my colleague, Craig Edwards, have made great efforts to point out the holes in the financial claims of the owners; whether or not you favor the owners or players, the latter group hasn’t been announcing or leaking spurious data to the public.
One thing we largely haven’t fully considered to this point is the losses beyond the season for baseball’s revenues. The owners have continually claimed that less baseball means they lose less money, but what happens after 2020? There seems to be this idea that there won’t be ongoing revenue consequences from playing no baseball into 2021. What if baseball’s recovery, after a lost season, is U-shaped or even L-shaped instead of V-shaped?. Even beyond the economic environment nationally, what happens to baseball’s revenues in a no-season scenario if it’s the only major sport not to return? People who would normally watch Mike Trout or Francisco Lindor on a muggy August evening might now watch Giannis Antetokounmpo or Alex Ovechkin. What happens to baseball, a sport that’s based on a long marathon and near-daily habit-watching, when it’s not only not there but there are other sports to replace it?
To anyone who is more sympathetic to the owners than I am, I’d ask, what will MLB’s revenues look like if they start for a permanent baseline that’s 10% — or more — off from their current figures? Why are the owners so willing to cancel the season and eager to save money in the margins of the balance sheets to gut baseball’s future?
And Oh Yeah, There’s Still a Virus Out There
Even for sports fans who aren’t into baseball, eyes should be on the Asian leagues that have resumed or will resume play, given that other sports will face many of the same challenges when it comes to keeping their players as healthy as possible. The NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) has yet to start their season, scheduled for June 19, but on Wednesday announced that two players from the Yomiuri (Tokyo) Giants, reigning MVP Hayato Sakamoto and shortstop Takumi Oshiro, have tested positive for COVID-19.
Sakamoto and Oshiro weren’t the only professional athletes in Japan to test positive this week, either. Mu Kanazaki of Nagoya Grampus in Japan’s top soccer division, the J1 League, tested positive for COVID-19 as well.
Neither of these instances have changed plans for the leagues at this time, but more mini-outbreaks could result in leagues having to rethink some of their plans for this summer based on the experiences of other leagues and that includes Major League Baseball.
Mexican League Sets Opening Day
There will be at least one professional baseball league in North America returning this summer as the Mexican League is now planning to play a 48-game season with playoffs expanded to 12 teams. The season is scheduled to begin on August 7, with the King’s Series starting in early November.
More Minor Leaguers Cut
MLB’s extensive league-wide cuts to minor-league rosters haven’t halted, with the Mariners, Reds, and Rockies joining the extensive list of teams making significant cuts.
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I’ve been very tough on the Kansas City Royals and especially moves made by the team’s general manager, Dayton Moore. But unlike pretty much every team in baseball, the Royals have made the commitment to not only continue to pay their minor league players, but tonot pare their minor league rosters to the bone. Mark this date because I may never say this again: more teams should emulate the Kansas City Royals.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
But how would NBA & NHL owners have reacted had COIVD-19 happened before their seasons started as opposed to a month-ish before the playoffs? I’m assuming they have similar deals to MLB where playoff TV revenues make those games massively profitable.
Likewise, I’d wager $1 that MLB owners would have a *completely* different negotiating strategy if their regular season was, like the NBA & NHL, upwards of 80% complete.
That may very well be true, but that’s mostly bad luck for MLB. I don’t have any belief that people watching the NBA or the NHL in August or going to think “well, it was easier for them to resume play!”
Yes it is bad luck, but it also completely alters both the financial and competitive dynamic of these leagues and thus what is an acceptable/appropriate cost-sharing arrangement. Pretending that it doesn’t — e.g., implying that MLB owners are uniquely more greedy than their NBA/NHL counterparts — does a disservice to your readers.
The NBA and NHL owners got what the MLB owners are asking for: the only regular-season games to be played without fans are the minimum necessary to set up the playoffs, because most of the loss-leading regular season was already played. And that is acceptable to NBA/NHL players because they also already have what MLB players want: something close to full payment on their contracts.
That’s the exact opposite scenario that MLB faces. Writers who compare these leagues should acknowledge that!
I don’t necessarily think the baseball owners are more greedy than the owners of other sports. I DO believe that the average baseball owner is more leveraged and has both more debt and less cash available than the average NBA or NHL owner.
It’s certainly possible. AFAIK there is no reason to think that it’s true, especially the two in combination (since funding via debt rather than equity usually frees up cash flow), but it could be.
Even if it is, though, I don’t really see what that has to do with the economics of this negotiation. That’s not why MLB isn’t playing, and it’s not why the other leagues are. The reason for that is the timing of the shutdowns and how that impacted the calendars of the different sports in very different ways.
Believe me: the MLB owners would love to just play the playoffs, pay 1/2 of the players nothing at all (because their teams aren’t in the playoffs) and the other half some fixed percentage of revenues. That’s what the NBA/NHL is doing.
This has been my concern for a while. Neither side seems to want to give in to any of the other’s demands, but if there is no season it could potentially hurt both sides for years. After the strike in the mid 90’s it took years and a home run race to get things back to normal. A missed season just hurts both sides.
Also, I’m selfish and really want baseball back.
I hope lots of us agree we aren’t watching basketball or hockey in midsummer.
With no baseball…. I might even be tempted to watch soccer, those lumberjack competitions on ESPN, or something along those lines.
Football (like O’Doyle) rules
Those lumberjack competitions are surprisingly entertaining.
I sure as hell will not be watching the nba or nhl exhibition tournaments.
Hockey, no.
I do enjoy some roundball from time to time, however.
There’s got to be some benefit to not being the first to open. The other leagues opening should give them some shelter from criticism if there should be an outbreak. Also, it takes COVID off the table as an excuse for not opening. If the other leagues can find a way to safely open in this environment, MLB should be able to as well. So, the blame will now mostly fall on the league or the players.
How does it take Covid “off the table” as an excuse? It’s like Georgia vs New York or whatever. Maybe nba is more aggressive than mlb but that doesn’t a more conservative approach is not valid
Yeah, I thought that was unclear. It doesn’t really take it off the table. It still should be a major concern, but I’m thinking of public perception. Perception will be “Why can the NBA and NHL open in this environment, but MLB can’t?” There are certainly some valid answers to this, but I think it’ll be a tough sell.
None of the league’s math adds up–I don’t know why I keep torturing myself to try and figure it out, because they’re definitely leaving a whole lot of calculations out of what they’re reporting–but I think the more important thing here is that the owners, under the current arrangement, get 100% of the TV revenue from the playoffs. Playoff shares are determined entirely from the gate.
The calculus seems to be–and this makes sense whether you think the owners are collectively making a little bit of money or losing a little bit of money per game–to pay the players a certain amount of money (which has stayed constant through every single proposal and leak) in order to get to the playoffs, where the profit margin is enormous.
As of now, I don’t think the owners haven’t made any sort of proposal to compensate the players for the loss of playoff shares. I would expect that would be in any proposal, because surely they don’t believe the players will play for free? But keep in mind that the playoff shares last year were about $80 million, so even if the owners guarantee that much they’re still walking away with $500 million (MLB seems to think that about a third of its national TV deals go to overhead).
I don’t know what the owners are thinking, but I’m pretty sure that this is a very important detail.
They’ve already offered MLBPA 50% of total 2020 revenues which I believe includes the playoffs and MLBPA rejected that. In this proposal, MLB probably offered MLBPA a choice of “progressive compensation” so that the highest paid players took the biggest hit or equal hits across the board and let MLBPA poll its members to figure out which they preferred. I’m not sure how they would handle what share players who play more games in the playoffs would get versus the rest of players whose teams were eliminated. Likewise, MLB would split their take amongst teams probably in proportion to 2019 revenues, thus NYY > BOS > … > TBR > FLM.
The owners have already agreed to share 50% of all revenues across teams, but there isn’t word on whether that also applies to the playoffs That’s where I’d look for that.
Have you seen any reporting on whether the owners’ actual offer, the one with sliding pay cuts, included details on the playoffs? All I saw was the % cut per pay tier, which is pretty different than how players are compensated in the playoffs anyway.
I would also think that the exact formula for how much individual players are compensated is not something the league is concerned about at the moment. They seem very intent on paying the players a certain amount and not more, regardless of anything else going on (number of games, for example). My speculation than the $80M is what they would offer is because that’s what they did with service time from last year, but I haven’t seen any details on what they offered. If they offered the players $400M instead of $80M in playoff shares or just general money distributed across the players (less if the playoffs are canceled) I would think that would be a really big deal. Going from 82 to 48 games is about a billion dollars from the players, so that would represent a pretty big concession.
I appreciate that you’re the only person on MLBPA’s side here who is finally thinking about how to broker a deal given the public numbers.
MLB thinks they can only afford to give MLBPA $1.45B according to Craig’s figure for the regular season and playoffs. This seems low to me because a 70% reduction in total revenues should still leave owners with $3B in revenues. I think MLBPA could potentially ask for as much as 61% of revenue (back-of-envelope calculation of sharing owners’ cost savings from not having to pay many ballpark personnel) or around $1.8B so I think the players could ask for something in the $170M (+$80 splits the $500M figure you mention)-$320M range above the $80M playoff take you identified that they normally get. And given a fixed offer from MLB, MLBPA would choose 50 games rather than 82. So that seems where they’ll eventually have to land.
There might be more revenue to share as they let fans in. Let’s see if there’s a spike in cases late next week from large public gatherings in the protests and riots and looting of the last week and we’ll be able to assess whether having masses of people together outdoors is safe. While a few were infected at the Ozarks a couple weeks ago, doesn’t appear to be a breakout.
Oh, don’t get me wrong–those numbers the league is reporting are almost certainly misleading. As I said in another thread, I have been trying to replicate the $640K loss per game ($320K per game, per team) using the league’s own numbers and they simply do not add up. I can get a $500K loss and a $540K gain, but the league’s figure comes from some accounting that is at best counterintuitive. And on relatedly, I am not even sure that loss takes into account the central revenue distribution (the team-by-team losses did not).
And this is before we take the owners at their word, which, frankly, does not line up with everything else we know about the league (and I think Craig has done a very good job pointing this out–and keep in mind I have critiqued Craig a whole freaking lot for his math in the past). It’s hard to believe that the owners are losing money on each game that is being paid, above and beyond the things they’d have to pay anyway (like stadium debt).
Since the ship seems to have sailed on the players getting anything good in return for a pay cut this year, I’m pretty sure the only way this is going to work is for there to be somewhere between 50 and 82 games, with some money deferred with interest–or for the owners to share a huge chunk of playoff revenue with the players. Otherwise the owners are playing with fire thinking that the postseason is going to really happen the way they expect it to (the players won’t strike, but I would guess mass sick-outs are on the table).
“It’s hard to believe that the owners are losing money on each game that is being paid”
Why is that hard to believe? How much would you pay for the rights to broadcast a late-August game between the Pirates and Marlins with no fans in the stadium that will be competing for eyeballs against multiple other sports (several of which are in their playoffs)? I’m guessing not very much. How about Seattle vs Colorado? Cleveland vs Minnesota? You get the idea. Honestly I’d be pretty shocked if they *didn’t* lose money on average for every regular-season game without fans.
The MLB business model is predicated on a) fans; b) the playoffs. The local tv deals don’t cover the 25-man payrolls, the national tv deals are pretty small until the playoffs, and all of these will probably have to be renegotiated (downwards) anyway: ESPN isn’t going to broadcast MLB regular season games if they have the option of broadcasting NBA playoff games instead. And they will have that option. Same with Turner sports, which also has an NBA contract.
Are these networks really enthusiastic about broadcasting games with no fans at the full rate anyway? Even if they are, ESPN normally pays about $7mn per regular season game (this buys them a Wild Card game and All-Star Game stuff, too), and obviously at most only one game will be broadcast nationally at any given time. That’s about $230,000 per team for each of those games. Not a lot to split between 30 teams that each average almost $1 million in payroll per game.
There are other sources of tv revenue, but until the playoffs start these aren’t very significant. And there are also other costs. Especially since we’re talking about expanded rosters, clubhouse enhancements for social distancing, more staff needed for testing, whatever logistics are needed to keep a 20-person taxi squad with the team at all times, etc.
The reason I don’t believe it is because even if you take all of the numbers the league has reported at face value, they literally do not add up. And that, by itself, is a huge red flag.
If the owners were expecting to lose money during the regular season, what would we expect them to propose? The minimum number of regular season games needed to make the playoffs viable (whether due to tv contracts or building up fan interest), and an expanded playoffs. Which is exactly what they proposed. If they were making money on regular season games they’d be pushing for a longer season, not a shorter one.
It’s impossible to estimate this to the dollar anyway, so I don’t get too stuck up on that. Maybe they were adding in the expected revenue losses from tv deals they’ll need to renegotiate? Or maybe they’re lying about the magnitude. Or maybe they’re estimating from a model with wide error bars. It doesn’t really matter.
We can get some understanding just by looking at the aggregates. We know how much the players’ salaries are. We know what the tv deals are. The payments from RSNs and regular season national broadcasts are less than payroll, both overall and I believe for every individual team as well. Assuming pro-ration for both, that’s a pretty strong indication that they project to lose money on regular season games.
The owners normally cover this deficit with fans in the seats, and then most of the profit comes from the higher-revenue playoff broadcasts. Now all they have is the playoffs.
Will one of these leagues have the guts to just reopen and call out the absolute farce that is the coronavirus panic? I meanthere’s only a 99.8% chance of survival for a random person if theyare infected and 99.97% if they are under 60 y/o.
The stadiums will be packed if they do. Here’s a basketball game featuring NBA star Trae Young from two days ago. Who wants to bet there will be no deaths, hospitalizations, or even symptomatic cases from any of the people here?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_jG6JlyBRw&t=93s
Go, and I can’t emphasize this enough on behalf of myself and 100,000+ families around the country, fudge yourself
I typically don’t like going to live games, but I would absolutely try to if they opened now, with not one iota of fear since CV-19 is thankfully a mild respiratory virus.
The CDC estimates 80,000 people died from the flu two years ago, I can only assume everyone here agrees we should have closed and indefinitely cancelled all live sports (and all businesses, schools, churches,etc) back then , right? After all that’s 80,000+ families whose loved ones we could have saved but didn’t because we wanted to selfishly live our normal lives, right?
Your numbers are comically and absurdly wrong and I can only hope that you are innumerate or use completely wrong news sources rather than just being a contrarian for kicks.
When you see the percentage of people with mild-to-moderate symptoms, that is the percentage of people who do not need supplementary oxygen. All-cause mortality increased by 25% when coronavirus hit the US. This thing is real and brutal, and we’re awfully lucky that heat and sunlight seems to play a pretty important role in stopping its spread–an advantage that, I might add, would not apply to domed stadiums.
Please enlighten me as to which numbers are ‘comically and absurdly wrong’.
It’s true, per CDC data, all cause mortality did go up for a few weeks in April (see link below). However, you can now see for the past couple weeks there are significantly less deaths per week than average. This would be consistent with the fact that CV-19 is really only dangerous for the very old and very sick (like most respiratory viruses). The median age for CV-19 deaths in almost all areas is around 80. In many states, the majority (if not vast majority) of deaths are from nursing homes. Nursing home residents have an average life expectancy of ~5 months.
It’s obviously sad and unfortunate, but many of those very old and sick people who died in April that caused all-cause mortality to rise would have died of another cause in the near future which explains the drop we are starting to see now.
If anything, nursing homes and the most vulnerable should be protected, but to lock everyone and everything down is and continues to be insanity, and not driven by any kind of science or data.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
The number of flu-related deaths in a terrible flu year is somewhere about 80,000 people. These are estimates through a number of indirect measures using more generalized surveillance, and for the entire year–it is approximately six times higher than deaths from confirmed cases. COVID-19 has killed over 100,000 people in confirmed cases, meaning that compared with a really bad flu year COVID-19 is thirteen times deadlier if not a single person more dies from COVID-19. If the number of deaths slows to the point where you get the same number of deaths over the next 7 months as the 4 months we just had, we’ll be at 26 times deadlier, and we’ll have spotted the flu a month since it wasn’t really here much in January.
Meanwhile, there’s evidence that a non-trivial number of people are disabled for months afterwards, and that children are experiencing Kawasaki-like syndrome at a rate 30x higher than normal in hard-hit places.
And this is all on top of the flu. It’s not like we also don’t get the flu because we’re too busy getting COVID-19. And before the consider the social costs of medical rationing, which is the real reason places shut down. And, perhaps most importantly, that the number of COVID-19 deaths is predicated on there being enough medical resources available–the percentage rises as health care resources are stretched thinner.
And on top of that, all-cause mortality has just returned to anything like we’ve seen in the past 10 years. I don’t know what numbers you’re looking at but all-cause mortality usually shows a drop in the last couple of weeks, no matter when you take it. Take a look at projections and how they get revised upwards as more and better data comes in.
But then again, it shouldn’t be that surprising. A non-trivial number of people need supplementary oxygen (which is probably the most wrong thing you said–that most cases are mild. The mild-to-moderate cases are still likely worse than anything you’ve ever had). And it’s as contagious as a cold, because it is a cold. This thing is pretty serious.
That last paragraph is simply wrong, Most cv19 infections aren’t just mild, they are totally asymptomatic. I’ve seen the estimates anywhere from 50-80% of all people infected with CV19 are asymptomatic. See below for one example:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/50-percent-of-people-with-covid19-not-aware-have-virus
It’s also a bit rich to minimize the CDCs estimated flu deaths for some convoluted deaths per confirmed case metric. There are obviously going to be a lot fewer confirmed cases per actual cases of the flu than coronavirus, relatively speaking, since everyone knows (under normal circumstances) what the flu is and what the symptoms are and aren’t going to waste their time or money getting a lab test to confirm it. With coronavirus, anyone who goes to the doctor with a runny nose or goes withing 20ft of a hospital, or goes to a drive thru clinic, etc is getting tested.
Also any appeal to avoiding medical rationing or overwhelmed hospitals as a justification for lockdowns is, at this point, ridiculous. That was obviously the original justification for all of this, all based on modeling which reality has shown us was very wrong, for whatever reason. There wasn’t a single hospital in the US that every came remotely close to having to ration care due to too many CV patients.
NYC, the ‘epicenter’, famously converted the javits center into a 1000 bed triage center and brought the USS Comfort navy ship to handle the expected deluge of covid patients. Both never had more than a handful of patients at one time before they were dismantled/dismissed after a few weeks.
Literally everything you have just said about counting deaths is wrong. This is about confirmed deaths. The CDC has never, ever, confirmed more than 16,000 flu deaths in a year. Ever. Even during H1N1. That’s over 12 months. However, we’ve confirmed over 100,000 coronavirus deaths in 4 months. That means that if you just use the raw numbers, this is literally EIGHTEEN TIMES worse than the single worst flu season where we’ve actually bothered to count the dead. Now, there are some issues with doing that, because I’m pretty sure that the remaining months won’t be as deadly on a per-person basis as the first four, but also, that’s comparing it to the worst flu season ever. So let’s take more reasonable assumptions here: Let’s say we assume that it’s a more normal flu season (10K counted deaths) and that only another 50,000 people die over the remaining 7 months (which would mean it’s something like 1/3rd as deadly). In that case, the mortality rate is still 12x higher using the same counting methods. And on top of that, that’s spotting the flu January (since it wasn’t really here then).
That 80,000 number you used before is based on surveillance methods. So the CDC takes the number of excess deaths in an area, maps it against the surveillance methods they use to figure out where the flu is surging, and figures out how much of the excess deaths is due to the flu. If they can even do the same for COVID-19 given that it’s a novel disease, they’re going to find brutal numbers.
Your comment about how to compare deaths may be the single most objectively wrong thing anyone has said in the Fangraphs comment section. I’ll tackle the rest of your post–which is also wrong, but not nearly as much–in another comment.
The USS Comfort was not taking coronavirus patients, which is why it was empty. People all over NYC were dying in hospital waiting rooms because they couldn’t get in enough that it was pretty. Not in large numbers, but it literally did outstrip the ability to process people. They literally couldn’t process people fast enough.
Now, let’s take the % asymptomatic and what that means for your argument, which is not an objectively wrong statement but also the most important one to apply correctly. The Iceland and cruise ship data is by far the highest quality data we have here, and it shows that 50% of cases are asymptomatic. It might be a little higher or a little lower, but if so, it’s not much.
The China study–the largest study of who needs what medical care, about 44K participants–shows that 81% of people have asymptomatic, mild, or moderate symptoms, 14% need supplemental oxygen, and 5% suffer something super bad like organ failure. But this study has a flaw: Probably the vast majority of the people here are symptomatic. 50% of cases are asymptomatic, or something like it. So what that means is that 7% need supplemental oxygen and another 2.5% have something really bad like organ failure. For anything as contagious as a cold (because it is literally a cold) this is way, way beyond anything we’ve seen in either of our lifetimes, unless you happen to be more than 100 years old. And this is also why deaths are higher when medical resources are stretched–a substantial majority of that 9.5% who needed some real help survived. Without it, that proportion drops a lot.
Deaths in the China study were 2.3%, which as we’ve discussed, is almost certainly inflated due to the low number of asymptomatic individuals. Cut that in half and round down and you’ve got 1.1%. Is that a reasonable number? Let’s look at serosample data to find out. In Spain, they found 5% of the population had 27K deaths. In a population of 47 million, that means that the fatality rate is…1.14%. In NYC, we have 13,000 deaths around the time they did their serosample, which found approximately a 20% positive rate. That gives us a death rate of 0.77%. Most likely the difference between them is the age distribution of the population in Spain/China vs. NYC–NYC is way, way younger (and the rest of the US is a lot more like NYC than Spain).
Aside from Iceland and the NYC and Spain studies, most of the serosamples have some real problems because they weren’t conducted in populations where community transmission was widespread. That means that a lot of what they were finding was error. So they were finding that, say, 1% of a population was infected where there was no community transmission at all.
In short, this is the single worst upper respiratory pandemic we’ve seen in over 100 years. Just about the only good news is that it’s not going to be as bad as the Spanish Flu, which did crazy things like kill a measurable percentage of Colonial India’s population. But also, our medical systems are way better now. This is some bad stuff, and you do not want it spiking again.
Thank you, sadtrombone. This is why you are one of my favorite commenters here.
Thanks. I don’t know why that bothered me so much, but I think it’s because it hit on two of the things I hate the most in the world: Endangering others, and a complete disregard for measurement and denominators. (So I guess that’s three things?)
We are right now only, at most, halfway through the coronavirus deaths from this year, and we are already well over 100,000 (states and the federal government are mostly only counting deaths that say “Covid 19” on death certificates).
We also undertook huge and unprecedented measures to try to stop the spread of Covid, something we don’t do for flu.
So let’s maybe wait until the end of the year before we start saying with certainty that it’s “no worse than flu.”
Not going to downvote, because I can understand this thinking. Different regions have had very different experiences with this. If I’m someone in a rural county with a half dozen cases, I’m probably pretty upset with the shutdowns. But, to call it a farce is to deny what happened in Italy, NYC, and, as we speak, is happening in Chile and Brazil. And that would be silly. Caution kept most places from being these places. Caution, will, hopefully, allow for a safe MLB reopening. Unfortunately, I think there will be cases, but, with care, these can be minimized.
I would extremely skeptical of the claim that caution (ie lockdown measures) did much of anything to prevent most places from being like NYC, but otherwise I think this is reasonable.
To be clear, CV19 isn’t fake, there are obviously people dying from/with it, the reaction and panic is the farce. There are now very large serology studies coming out (I saw one from Colorado with a sample of 55K people), that are revealing CV19 is way more widespread than the experts assumed, meaning it was here much earlier than March and is much less deadly than first assumed. Again, the data from Colorado suggests a IFR of .2% (Common flu IFR is generally cited around ~.1% and is much more dangerous for the young)
Unless you think sports (along with every other social institution in the country) should be shut down every flu season, there is no rational justification for continuing these restrictions. The MLB season should never have been postponed in the first place, but to continue this charade in the face of the mounting data about the overall mildness pervasiveness of the virus is absurd.
The assertion that a nearly complete shutdown and face masking for 2 months did nothing to control a highly contagious virus is ridiculous.
I smell a Trump cultist
To anyone who is more sympathetic to the owners than I am, I’d ask, what will MLB’s revenues look like if they start for a permanent baseline that’s 10% — or more — off from their current figures?
I don’t see a lot of folks who are sympathetic to the owners. I do see a lot of folks who are sympathetic to their current position, in light of the deal the Union signed in March.
The owners’ intention in March was clear – we renegotiate salaries if there are no fans in the stands. I dare say that they wouldn’t have signed the March agreement if it didn’t include those terms. And now they feel burned that the MLBPA isn’t upholding the language they signed, and the deal they agreed to.
So maybe it’s all timing… if the Union had rejected the language they signed in March, there never would have been a March deal… and baseball might be better off for it, because we’d clearly be better off if both sides were negotiating rather than intransigent. Instead, the owners thought they had an agreement only in the event that fans could participate, and an agreement to negotiate further if that wasn’t the case.
Again, the lawyers and negotiators on both sides should all be sacked for creating, reviewing, and signing such a poorly written document.
Huh? How do you get to that from Dan’s question?
I don’t. Sorry. It’s a comment. The answer to his question is unknowable and the question itself seems somewhat rhetorical. But I’m just commenting in general and also responding to his comment on the owners’ intransigence, which is kinda one sided. Even Jeff Passan admits that both sides are guilty here.
“Mark this date…” June 5th 2020. One more day and it could have been on the 76th anniversary of the D-Day Invasion of Normandy (June 6th, 1944) and we could have remembered it as Dan-Day. 😉
Seriously though, I think there could be significant consequences to MLB not having an MLB season. The number of fans could drop considerably (thus, lost future revenue from the owners’ perspective), and not just out of anger or frustration. We are creatures of habit and we will find viable substitutes for our habits. If I like a cup of coffee in the morning and suddenly there is no coffe for a year, I might take up drinking green tea. Then, in a year coffee becomes available again. But, I’ve come to like my green tea… and it’s good for my health (as my wife says).
I guess I’m pro-owner because I accept owners will make money or not bargain, have good lawyers, won last CBA, and don’t think players have offered any concession. Feelings aren’t going to win over the owners. When it it looks like owners have feelings, it is just a PR move to help them down the road.
On future revenues, I expect they are going to be very low relative to previous seasons with or without a 2021. A lot of hardworking players under arbitration are going to get cut and not have jobs in 2021 with or without a season. More arbitration players will lose their jobs next season if veteran salaries are deferred as players proposed. Also, players will strike at end of next season as they are going to be furious with what happens this off-season.
If players were forward thinking, they would look to get some huge pro-player revision (maybe require a minimum player payroll for 2021) for next season in exchange for some salary relief this year. I think a lot of owners are more concerned with riding out the storm in 2020 than maximizing future profits in 2021 and beyond.
“To anyone who is more sympathetic to the owners than I am, I’d ask, what will MLB’s revenues look like if they start for a permanent baseline that’s 10% — or more — off from their current figures?”
I assume that owners are already planning on a much greater revenue reduction than 10% for 2021, in addition to all of the losses from this year, and it has nothing to do with the goodwill of casual fans who aren’t paying attention to these negotiations anyway. It’s because we’re in a very deep crisis that will take quite a long time to fully recover from, and that’s assuming there won’t be any more major public health setbacks (and there will be). No matter what happens to MLB in 2020, if the players (and the pundits who support them) think that we’re just going to wake up one day and proceed as we did in the pre-Covid period then quite frankly they are idiots.
Once you start thinking this way it becomes even more obvious why owners would not want to give away essentially all of 2020 revenues to the players, which is the current players’ demand, and/or have to go into greater debt to make payroll: they cannot count on revenues going back to “normal” for the foreseeable future, yet they still have a bunch of financial liabilities that aren’t going away.
I know that it’s a popular belief that the owners have money printers. They don’t. The economics of baseball are going to change a lot in the coming years, and the players aren’t going to like it. They can either confront that constructively or try to fight it. If they fight it they’ll lose. Just as they’re losing right now.
“I assume that owners are already planning on a much greater revenue reduction than 10% for 2021”. To your point look to the NFL (Mike Lombardi’s 6/1 Athletic column), smart teams are budgeting a 2021 15% cap number reduction. Which in actual terms is more like 20-25% when factoring in “dead money”. Dead money makes the near term hit greater, but the non guaranteed nature of their contracts allows for greater long term cost flexibility. Sadly, the Athletic had to implement cuts as well.
Right, and the cap is tied to expected revenues. The same is true for the NBA and NHL too. The MLB players don’t have that exact worry, but the money has to come from somewhere. If the players currently under contract aren’t going to accept any hit then the money will come out of future contracts.
I.e., if the MLBPA thought the free agent market of the past couple of years was bad then they need to buckle up.
I agree with some of the sentiment here. I’m not necessarily pro-owner, but I think the players need to start thinking outside the box. As much as I love baseball and fantasy baseball, demographics are not on my side. My son prefers other spots. I go to a MLB game every 2 years, if that. Players and owners may be deluding themselves to the popularity of their sport. Younger kids don’t aspire to play baseball like they used to, and MLB does not bend over to get kids of color and low socioeconomic status to play their sport.
Even if the owners are the bad guys, the players need to understand the current situation. If so much emphasis is on gate revenues, it can only be anticipated they will go down in a post covid environment. Structural changes in our labor force may take years to work through. An average ticket of 32.99 per person is not going to fill parks.
Players should be making a deal in line with the next CBA…what does the free agent landscape look like with less fans in seats? They don’t want a “salary cap.” The players current situation of significant pay variance hurts it. Cole at 35,000,000 versus minimum hurts the union overall. Finding deals to raise minimum and get more pay up front, and possibly giving up the mega jackpot contracts, may help the union overall in the long run. They should take the high road here.