7:00 AM PT
Jeff PassanESPN- This week is going to be ugly. There's no getting around that. Every negotiation starts at opposite ends of a spectrum, and the chasm between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association is wide enough that as they navigate a return-to-play agreement to set the stage for the return of professional team sports in America, a fight is almost guaranteed.
Where these discussions go, and how the principals involved steer them, mark the most consequential moment for the sport since it barely averted a work stoppage in 2002. The coronavirus pandemic is altering the world. Unemployment is historically high. The future is impossible to forecast. And Monday, as MLB owners rubber-stamped the league's proposal that it intends to share with the union in a meeting Tuesday, the conversation focused on money.
- This week is going to be ugly. There's no getting around that. Every negotiation starts at opposite ends of a spectrum, and the chasm between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association is wide enough that as they navigate a return-to-play agreement to set the stage for the return of professional team sports in America, a fight is almost guaranteed.
- What followed surprised no one. This is not how it had to go, but it was how it was always going to go, millionaires and billionaires pitted against one another in a game of chicken. Stake out a position. Refuse to budge. The coming days will reflect that intransigence until the reality of a ticking clock forces its abandonment. When that happens, when the posturing abates, the ugliness will burn off like the morning fog and there will be hope for a deal -- for baseball.
Baseball could be on its way back. Jeff Passan explains how it's all going to work, and gives an update on timing, revenue split, the use of home stadiums, and more logistics. Listen to ESPN Daily
As the sport with the clearest path and greatest appetite to return, baseball has an opportunity to illustrate the importance of equitable, shared sacrifice, to be a model of togetherness amid division. All of that, of course, is merely talk -- admittedly naive, unquestionably hopeful, ignoring what's of greater import than rich people being a little less rich: that if baseball does relaunch, it does so with the health and safety of players, managers, coaches and all those in its orbit in mind. That it prioritizes what warrants prioritization.
What baseball needs, in the end, is neither words nor bluster. It needs substance, foresight, action. And over the next two weeks, as the season hangs in the balance, action there will be. It's up to the leaders of both sides to decide what sort.
