It's a big week for baseball, and not just because Japan's NPB set a new 2020 Opening Day of June 19.
No, as ESPN's Jeff Passan put it this morning, "I try not to be a prisoner of the moment, but I believe this is going to be the most consequential week in Major League Baseball in the last quarter century."
Granted, it can be outdone, and maybe in short order. In his "20 questions" column he posted on Sunday, Passan wrote, "The 2021 season has a chance to make this tiff look like a slap fight." Enough obstacles remain in terms of safety that economics may not be the cause of the 2020 season's death. Still, it'd be nice if MLB and the union could hammer out an agreement to give themselves an alibi in that regard.
Major League Baseball is expected to finally deliver a formal economic proposal today, which marks the official start to negotiations. Passan's column covers plenty, including the not-quite-answerable question I've been curious about: whether the divide between cash-poor owners and owners with liquidity will present a rare fracture in the ranks on the league's side.
Passan doesn't quite get to that, but he said the fallout could be widespread, and exacerbate differences between teams. There's the matter of which teams lay off or furlough which employees, whether the reduction in cash will reverse the recent trend of major front office growth, and whether some teams will have to borrow money to get by.
That all could be beneficial for the players when it comes to striking deals over the next two years, but they may have to absorb a frigid free agency climate first:
The easiest answer is free agency. This goes back to the earlier point about '21. Right now, somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.6 billion worth of contracts are guaranteed for 2021. This year, arbitration deals were worth another $700 million-plus, so even if teams are extraordinarily selective with whom they tender contracts, the arbitration market will be, at worst, worth more than $400 million. Which brings us to the tidy number of $3 billion in salaries.
The free-agent squeeze this winter has a chance to be brutal for players. "Teams aren't even going to have to collude to collude," one agent said this week, acknowledging that financial issues have been laid bare inside of ownership and front-office circles. Executives know who's got money and who's poor. They see who's cutting staff and who isn't. It's far easier to assess a market when it's clear who won't be participating.
The White Sox's books have spent a lot of time on the Fundamentals Deck, so it'd seem like they could put their good standing to use. Of course, they didn't take advantage of a favorable playing field two winters ago, but they also didn't think they were ready to win. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy for certain, but last winter's activity shows that particular element is out of play.
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Passan makes it sound like the health and safety protocol is more a matter of fine-tuning. Both sides seem to agree that if it's not enough to preserve a full season, it won't be for a lack of thoroughness.
I still wonder if and how player habits will change, and Sports Illustrated's Stephanie Apstein was the latest to take a crack at the hygiene angle.
The San Francisco Chronicle's Susan Slusser previously wrote a story about baseball's sanitary issues, but while the current and former Oakland A's she talked to all agreed the game's disgusting habits will be hard ones to break, all of them tried to sound cognizant of their contributions and open-minded about changes.
A couple of the players Apstein talked to did not aspire to rise above it all, which is either stubborn or honest.
“Wait, what?” [Charlie] Blackmon says. “I’m 100% gonna spit. That’s ingrained in my playing the game. Whether or not I’m dipping or chewing gum, I’m still gonna spit. I have to occupy my mind. It’s like putting things on autopilot. You see it like with Hunter Pence, where he would constantly be adjusting his uniform. I don’t have this idle time where my consciousness wanders. I fill my time with thought processes that are like a cruise control.”
Ironically, this is a great argument for wearing masks on the field, if only because they'd force players to develop new habits and tics that take oral fixations off the table.
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Unless I missed something, recent golf enthusiast Dylan Cease might be the clubhouse leader among White Sox players for closest COVID-19 run-ins.
I wasn't sure what I'd be making of Cease's reasons behind the NBC Sports Chicago headline "Why White Sox starter Dylan Cease thinks he was 'very exposed' to coronavirus," but it's substantial, not clickbait.
After spring training was canceled, Cease flew from Arizona to Georgia to stay at his brother’s place. About a week after he arrived, his brother’s girlfriend, who was living with them, became ill.
“She had a fever for like 17 straight days. For three weeks she was basically asleep all day," Cease said. "It probably took her a week-and-a-half, two weeks after that to start feeling more normal, but she’s good now. I wasn’t able to leave my place for three weeks to a month.” [...]
The puzzling part is that when she went to get tested for COVID-19, the result came back negative.
“There was something funky with it,” Cease said. “She doesn’t think they did the right thing. They didn’t swab her nose. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t done correctly, because why else would she have a fever for three straight weeks? Her cousin is a doctor, and he said, ‘You got this, so don’t leave the house.’”
Cease is aware that he could've been an asymptomatic carrier before or after, so it's good to see that he's bringing attention to one of the risks baseball assumes by restarting. Hopefully he and his brother's girlfriend will get a proper nasopharyngeal swab and antibody test at some point to confirm or refute said suspicions.
