Since we last checked in on the possibility of baseball's return, Major League Baseball was about to propose a 50/50 revenue split with the MLBPA.
A formal presentation on that matter still hasn't happened. So far, league has issued a 67-page health and safety proposal, which helps. It's also presented dire warnings about revenues and leaked an MLBPA email, the benefits of which are less clear.
I'm inclined to set aside the specifics of billionaires vs. millionaires vs. fans, because no matter who wins, they'll go on to face the pandemic, which has home field advantage and is well rested coming off a bye.
The Athletic published an in-depth reviews of the safety protocol, and ESPN.com followed up with a review that put all the elements into the greater context of the national struggle to take the virus seriously enough to contain it.
It's a mess the way everything else is a mess. At the start of the stateside pandemic, the stoppage of professional sports leagues were the most powerful indication that Something Was Wrong, because few other positions of prominence took it seriously. Now, there are a lot of forces trying to pressure professional sports leagues to indicate that Things Are Gonna Be OK, even if sizable parts of the country haven't done the hard work to earn such a shot at pseudo-normalcy.
When you consider that teams need 67 pages (and counting) of behavior alterations to give them a chance to pull it off, it's hard to imagine it working at all. It's also hard for me to understand why players shouldn't be paid the previously agreed upon amount, considering they're the ones encountering 67 pages of risk for the only revenue possible this season. The people paying them can all work from home.
As somebody who runs a website that's ultimately reliant on baseball resuming despite our best attempts to distract, it'd sure be fun to be surprised. But if the entire 2020 season is scratched because the economic gap is never resolved, I don't think I'm going to fall into the offended camp national baseball writers fret about.
That's a bizarre perspective to me, because the "current national context" is what makes a lost season so easy to explain, even if it's the economic issues that get in the way. It'd be far more damaging to lose weeks, months or another World Series because the league and players can't agree on restructuring parts of the system during a rising tide. That would be truly regrettable and damaging.
But in this "current national context," I only feel comfortable talking to people when wearing a mask, and haircuts are both an ethical dilemma and a national flashpoint. There's no inherent reason to expect anything easy or good from these conditions. If the league can resist using a national crisis to gin up disdain against its partner, a lost season can be easily spun as "baseball didn't happen because everything sucked." I think that's something the citizenry can ultimately swallow, especially if it has no choice. And it probably doesn't.
More of my head and heart is concerned about minor leagues, since the fortunes of those franchises rely directly on serving the average fan. They were already fighting an uphill battle against Major League Baseball in hopes of avoiding widespread contraction, and reports from Sports Illustrated and Baseball America paint an even uglier picture.
