NEW YORK — Of course the MLB season should be delayed; professional sports shouldn’t be playing in this country at all right now. But the safety of their players and employees isn’t why owners want to delay the MLB season, no matter how hard they try to pretend.
The latest attempt to shame the players for their desire to show up and get paid for doing their jobs involves a leak to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. Rosenthal reported Wednesday night that the players’ union “skipped” a call between the owners and the Biden administration, although later in his story, he mentioned that the players had a similar call of their own scheduled.
It’s the content of the call that the owners are weaponizing. According to Rosenthal, government officials told the owners that the league should implement a “one-month delay, with the idea of getting players vaccinated in time to start the season.”
Again: The season should absolutely be delayed so that players, fans, and staff can be vaccinated, and players should be close to last in line for the vaccine. But stopping the spread of COVID-19 isn’t why owners want to delay the season. If it were, they would have offered the players a delayed season with full pay and no other strings attached months ago; if it really were, they wouldn’t be playing at all.
But that isn’t what they’ve offered the players. What they have offered is a shortened season with no guarantees for canceled games, an expanded postseason that will depress player salaries by making it easier to make the playoffs, and a universal designated hitter that offers no financial benefit. The compressed and delayed season would also put players at risk of getting hurt — something that was evident by the explosion of injuries in 2020. (It’s not all about screwing the players. A later start to the season means more vaccinated butts can get in seats.)
In short: The players rejected all this from the owners last week because a shortened, compressed season is very likely to cost them money or risk injuries, and despite what the owners seem to think of a universal DH, their bosses offered them nothing in return.
To make the players look like the bad guy here, the owners are leaking to media about how the players are actually the ones who don’t care about health and safety. Even by the facts of the report, that’s nonsense. A one-month delay wouldn’t speed up vaccination efforts, something that Rosenthal acknowledges later in his story. And players didn’t blow off the government; it seems they just didn’t want to be thrown into a labor negotiation on the owners’ turf.
Giants pitcher Alex Wood pointed out as much, ripping Rosenthal for saying the players “opted out” of talking to government officials.
The Biden administration has made a big show of being pro-labor, with the president firing several Trump hacks from the National Labor Relations Board on Day 1 and claiming that Bernie Sanders was his top choice for Secretary of Labor. If Biden’s team is serious about backing workers against their billionaire bosses — don’t hold your breath — they shouldn’t be letting baseball owners use them for a PR stunt.
