How About Roman History?

Let’s go back further than Shakespeare with a trip to Ancient Rome and the story of Emperor Nero playing the fiddle while the City of Rome suffered a huge fire. I mention this because it’s kind of the perfect metaphor for the state of MLB negotiations.

Let’s recap the action. Manfred and Clark met in person for the first time the other day and somehow one side came out of the negotiations believing a deal had been made while the other side didn’t. The owners thought a 60-game season was agreed to. The players countered with a 70-game proposal. Tonight, Jon Heyman reports that “ MLB owners are so upset by the players’ counterproposal — which is said for about $300M more — that no response is expected to be immediate. Time is obviously getting short so hopefully it’s not too long, of course.” This is where we stand in negotiations that should have been completed weeks ago.

So what happens now? Here are a few of the concrete things we know.
1- MLB needs four weeks from the day a deal is made to Opening Day. Three weeks to have Spring 2.0 preceded by a week to get players to Spring 2.0.
2- The owners have a season ending date of September 27th and will not move it.
3- Doctors the league has consulted have advised against doubleheaders because of the exposure time between players they would create.

So that means if a deal is made tomorrow, Opening Day would be July 17th and that means there would be 72 days between Opening Day and September 27th. With doubleheaders out of the question, that probably means you could schedule a maximum of 68 games, which would be very aggressive. And that is if a deal is made tomorrow, which seems really unlikely.

And it’s probably worth noting that the three most-populous states in the country, California, Texas, and Florida, saw their highest level of new Corona cases today. Those states are home to more than 25% of the population of the country and 9 baseball teams. Wouldn’t it be ironic if all of these negotiations meant nothing?