At best, the league's initial, official economic proposal doesn't look like it'll have much traction. It involves a sliding scale of reductions akin to a tax rate, in which players making $1 million or less are paid at 72.5 percent of their original prorated amount, while those making more have parts of their income reduced by brackets.
From Jeff Passan's description:
The formula the league offered, for example, would take a player scheduled to make the league minimum ($563,500), give him a prorated number based on 82 games ($285,228) and take a 10% cut from that figure, leaving him with a $256,706 salary.
The scale goes down as salaries go up, with every dollar:
*$563,501 to $1 million paid at 72.5%*$1,000,001 to $5 million paid at 50%*$5,000,001 to $10 million paid at 40%*$10,000,001 to $20 million paid at 30%*$20,000,001 and up paid at 20%
And he used Mike Trout, the game's highest earner, to illustrate what that means:
As Craig Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus noted, this proposal could work if this structure was established to defer payments. If MLB has a number of owners who are cash poor but not insolvent, this would be a way of increasing short-term liquidity.
With no deferred payments, it can be interpreted as an attempt to divide the union between ordinary players and big earners under the guise of revenue sharing.
Perhaps the union can work with this, demanding deferred payments to make the players whole, or even a lot closer to it. But if the MLBPA sees it as an act of aggression -- trying to get the players to fight among themselves under a time crunch the league exacerbated by leaking ideas to reporters for a week before giving the players anything to respond to -- it has reasons to reject it outright.
The union also has reasons to call Major League Baseball's bluff. While the owners generally receive the support of fans in the fight between billionaires and millionaires, a couple of clubs are responding to the stoppage by taking it out on the thousandaires, and that's a lot harder to wave away.
The Angels made the first such news when they decided to aggressively furlough its scouting department in two waves -- area scouts on June 1, and the supervisors and cross-checkers after the draft. Considering scouts are the most relatable of employees, visible at games, working close to year-round and inspired more by love than money, this seemed to resonate with the national writers in a way more anonymous furloughs hadn't.
The Oakland Athletics took it a step further. Along with furloughs to their scouting department after the draft, the A's took the step of telling their minor leaguers that they'd stop receiving stipends at the end of the month ... but also wouldn't release them from their uniform player's contracts, either.
I'll admit I hadn't thought much about how durable the $400 stipend would be since it was established in spring training, but given that prospects and organizational players are underpaid on their best days, maybe I assumed that the league wouldn't want to risk drawing attention to worse treatment? It's not just that "no games = no pay," which at least passes a base level of deductive reasoning, but the existence of the UPCs render players ineligible from collecting unemployment benefits.
Anyway, the White Sox are on the record of paying all their employees, and the $400 stipend to its farm rosters, through June, which is on the more generous side of the spectrum.
Some teams have gone further, but then you have the Angels and A's expanding the other side of it. It strikes me as somewhat justifiable to play it month by month due to the range of outcomes. The downside is the risk of letting employees twist in the wind, or using their statuses as some kind of direct or indirect ransom in negotiations with the players. That wouldn't mesh with Jerry Reinsdorf's reputation of respect to his rank-and-file employees, but as expectations are lowered around the league, he wouldn't be immune from such forces.
(Photo by Arturo Pardavila III)
