TORONTO — The risk for everyone right now continues to be in underreacting, not in overreacting to the COVID-19 outbreak. As much as we’d like this to pass quickly, the unrelenting firehose stream of daily developments, including U.S. President Donald Trump declaring a national emergency, won’t make it clear.
Strap in for extended uncertainty.
To wit, Major League Baseball and the players association settled Friday on three options for where players can live while the season is postponed, although as a union memo to its members noted, there are dozens of other questions that will be addressed in the coming days.
For now, the sides agreed that players can stay around their team’s spring training facility, travel to a team’s home city or go to their off-season home, with clubs to either make travel arrangements for the player and his immediate family, or reimburse any incurred costs.
Spring training housing allowances will continue for those who chose to remain around their organization’s facility in Florida or Arizona, while field and training facilities are to remain open with appropriate support staff and meals provided, where possible.
Later Friday, Major League Baseball announced the suspension of all spring training camps. The Toronto Blue Jays sent an email message to their minor-leaguers saying the majority of them “will be encouraged to return home,” while the team would recommend that a smaller group of players stay back “due to various reasons.”
The moves are the latest confirmation that the delay on opening day is going to last a whole lot more than the “at least two weeks” mentioned in Major League Baseball’s historic suspension announcement Thursday.
Not that there should be any surprise about that with the entire continent methodically grinding to a halt.
Also unsurprising is the looming tug of war between owners and players over the financial implications of the season’s suspension on compensation, an area that has yet to be figured out.
A shortened season, seemingly inevitable at this point, creates all sorts of issues, prime among them whether players will be entitled to their full salaries or a pro-rated portion based on the number of games played, and how service-time will be calculated.
Some context for the salary issue comes from the 1995 season, when salaries were cut by 11.1 per cent after the players’ strike that started in the summer of ’94 led to a reduced schedule of 144 games.
What happens this year, of course, will be the result of a national emergency, a situation covered by some language in the standard players contract that MLB could try to exploit.
Even stickier could be how service time is calculated over whatever the 2020 season looks like, an issue with millions of dollars at stake.
The simplest solution is to reduce the full season of service time threshold from 172 days to a pro-rated number based on the number of games played, but that will potentially alter totals for determining Super 2 arbitration status in years to come.
Questions on the players’ side scale down to whether roster moves are even allowed during the current pause.
While it’s impossible to imagine teams making trades right now, the non-roster invite unlikely to make the club could be re-assigned to minor-league camp, impacting housing allowances and per diem. The same holds for the 40-man roster player in camp destined to be optioned before opening day.
Developments from the season’s suspension are moving so fast that one player contacted Friday said it was impossible to stay current.
“Landscape changing hourly,” is the way one coach put it.
That’s in baseball, in all sports, and society as a whole right now, and responsible, social-distancing actions can’t happen fast enough to limit community spread of the coronavirus. The fallout from the reactions to all those actions, big and small, is only just beginning.
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