The winter professional sports of the NHL and the NBA, combined with the autumn one of the NFL, are closer to finalizing a return after their COVID-19 shutdowns than the summer sport of baseball. The issue? Among other things, baseball players are blowing it with their messaging.
Earth to Major League Baseball folks: With others in the sports universe closer than you to returning after their COVID-19 shutdowns, are you paying attention to those among the professional ranks?
None has players sounding like this. . .
“Y’all gotta understand, man. For me to go, for me to take a pay cut is not happening, because the risk is through the roof. It’s a shorter season, less pay. I gotta get my money. I’m not playing unless I get mine, OK?”
Yeah, OK.
That was Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Blake Snell, a former Cy Young Award winner scheduled to make $7 million this year. He would earn only a couple of million or so under the baseball owners’ proposal that would apply a sliding scale of pay cuts (with the high-salaried players sliced the most) courtesy of a drop from the normal 162 games for a season to 82 due to the coronavirus.
“I should not be getting half of what I’m getting paid because the season’s cut in half, on top of a 33% cut of the half that’s already there,” Snell added. “So I’m really getting, like,25%.”
Earth to Snell in particular: Dude. At least you would be getting something when many folks in this country are getting nothing during a pandemic in which Forbes.com estimates the 14.7 % unemployment rate at the end of April was the highest since The Great Depression.
Major League Baseball is going, almost gone.
Attendance declined last season for the 12th consecutive year, and baseball’s top stars don’t shine as brightly as those named LeBron James, Tom Brady or Alexander Ovechkin.
