MLB Owners Approve Proposal to Start Season in July

Baseball could be coming back later this summer, but that could be contingent on an agreement with the Player's Union, a task that will not be easy to achieve according to various sources.

MLB has a proposal ready to present to the Players Union tomorrow that would begin the season in July, with a re-start to Spring Training beginning in mid-June. The plan would be to have all 30 MLB teams play in their home ballparks and play an 82-game season focused strictly on divisional play and interleague against a division from the same region, i.e. AL East vs. NL East. The season would begin around the Fourth of July weekend; playoffs would include 14 teams instead of the usual 10.

But the path to even get that far might be very tricky according to ESPN's Jeff Passan.

Passan says that the "negotiation" between the Players Union and Major League Baseball could be a "contentious" with money at the center of the issue. The Owners agreed to a 50-50 revenue split with players on Monday to conceivably cover the losses from no gate at ballparks this year. Never has there been a 50-50 split in revenue ever before.

Passan adds that the MLBPA is likely to reject that portion of the plan because of the agreement made in March for players to collect a prorated amount of their regular salaries.  MLBPA president Tony Clark even hinted as much, blasting MLB for taking advantage of the Pandemic to make a hard negotiation against the Union.

 "This is not the first salary-cap proposal our union has received. It probably won't be the last," Clark said. "... That the league is trying to take advantage of a global health crisis to get what they've failed to achieve in the past -- and to anonymously negotiate through the media for the last several days -- suggests they know exactly how this will be received."

The bigger issue is going to be semantics. How can MLB assure the safety of all its players is a big question right now. States are slowly opening, but others are not. New York, for example, remains in a total lockdown. How will this affect the Yankees and Mets? Would they have to play in Florida? The Toronto Blue Jays might have to forgo playing games in Canada this year if this 82-game season goes into effect.

Then there is the question of testing and travel. Do teams use buses only to transport players between cities? Is it safe to send entire teams and organizations onto planes during the crisis? Do players get tested daily? Weekly? Per series? These questions and more need to be answered.

While this is a good attempt by Major League Baseball to try to get the season restarted, the current circumstances do not bode well right now for competitive play to resume. If this deal falls through, it might be reason to believe that the season could get canceled.