No money discussed as MLB, players' union talk restart of season, source says

MLB and players’ union leaders ended several hours of talks Tuesday, a source said, without broaching perhaps the most important issue: money.

On the first day of meetings meant to decide on parameters for a pandemic-shortened 2020 season, commissioner Rob Manfred and other league officials did not make their economic proposal — a 50-50 revenue sharing system for owners and players — to union boss Tony Clark and the MLB Players Association.

Negotiations are expected to continue in the coming days, a source said.

An agreement on players’ pay is critical to the season happening. And the union has indicated it is not OK with MLB’s revenue sharing idea — which was leaked to the public before the sides began talking — because it perceives it to be a de facto salary cap.

Already, players agreed to an approximately 50% salary reduction as part of a larger deal pertaining to the sport’s indefinite pandemic shutdown. The parties in March decided on prorated salaries for a season of less than 162 games, and now they hope to play about half that many games.

But because there won’t be fans in the stands, and thus less money coming in, team owners want players to share in that financial pain by taking further pay cuts.

Health issues are also a priority in these talks. The details of MLB’s proposal to keep players and everyone else involved safe — sanitation norms, acquiring COVID-19 tests, protocol if someone tests positive — are not publicly known.

Tuesday marked the sides’ first formal discussions about the 2020 season since late March, when they agreed on the prorated salaries bit, a $170 million advance on salaries and a full year of service time in the event of a canceled season, among other items.

Now, the talks revolve around restarting the season — and the clock is ticking.

Working backward on the calendar, the goal is for Opening Day to be in early July. That would come after about three weeks of another spring training, which would start in early or mid-June. And figure everyone will need a week or two before that to get the organizational wheels turning — implementing health-and-safety protocols that stem from a hypothetical MLB-MLBPA agreement, arranging for players to arrive in their regular season or spring training locales, etc.

That leaves the owners (via MLB) and players (via their union) with a few weeks to solve their problems.

As negotiations progress, the baseball bosses will monitor the degree to which each state re-opens, since approval from government and public health officials is necessary.

In Arizona, for example, pro sports can resume as of Saturday, the state announced Tuesday. But Los Angeles County is expected to keep stay-at-home orders in place for the next three months — which would make it difficult or impossible to play at Dodger Stadium.

MLB’s proposal has teams playing in home ballparks wherever possible, but includes spring training sites or neutral sites as backup plans.

Some outside the negotiations, meanwhile, began to chime in Tuesday. That included JB Pritzker, the multibillionaire governor of Illinois, home of the Cubs and White Sox.

“I must say I’m disappointed in many ways that players are holding out for these very, very high salaries and payments during a time when I think everybody is sacrificing,” Pritzker said during his daily coronavirus briefing. “If they’re able to come up with safety precautions, as has been suggested by Major League Baseball, that work, I hope that the players will understand that the people of our United States need them to recognize this is an important part of leisure time that all of us want to have in the summer: to watch them play baseball, to root for our favorite teams. We need that back. We need that normalcy.”

Former Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira said on ESPN, for which he is an analyst: “I would rather make pennies on the dollar and give hope to people and play baseball than not make anything and lose an entire year off their career.”

With David Lennon