Major League Baseball hopes to return to action. The owners of the various Major League Baseball teams first want the players to agree to a 50-50 revenue share, given that the revenue will be dramatically reduced this year by the absence of fans at games.
The players are balking at this. On Wednesday, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Blake Snell, a former Cy Young winner, posted a video on social media making it clear that he won’t take a financial haircut to accommodate baseball in an age of delayed actual haircuts.
“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,” Snell said, via ESPN.com. “It’s a shorter season, less pay.
“No, I gotta get my money. I’m not playing unless I get mine, OK? And that’s just the way it is for me. Like, I’m sorry you guys think differently, but the risk is way the hell higher and the amount of money I’m making is way lower. Why would I think about doing that?”
Snell is due to make $7 million this year. By playing in the midst of a pandemic, Snell risks catching the virus, and he earns less money than he ordinarily would.
“Bro, I’m risking my life,” Snell said in response to a comment on his Twitch channel. “What do you mean it should not be a thing? It should 100 percent be a thing. If I’m gonna play, I should be getting the money I signed to be getting paid. I should not be getting half of what I’m getting paid because the season’s cut in half, on top of a 33 percent cut of the half that’s already there -- so I’m really getting, like, 25 percent.
“On top of that, it’s getting taxed. So imagine how much I’m actually making to play, you know what I’m saying?”
Snell has taken plenty of flak for his comments, in part because many insist that young people have no risk at all of dying of COVID-19 and in part because sports fans are conditioned to blame the players not the owners when a financial battle deprives sports fans of sports. Because it’s easier to pressure players to yield than it is to pressure fans to yield.
Already, plenty of media types are pressuring baseball players to accept the 50-50 split, supposedly for the good of the country. No one is pressuring the owners to take less than 50 percent, even if the owners could take less than 50 percent and still make a profit this year. And even though the owners are taking no risk by intermingling with others while playing baseball and preparing to play baseball and traveling to and from baseball games.
The better argument from Snell, one that he eventually texted to the Tampa Bay Times, is that he’s both assuming the risk that he’ll get sick and that he’ll spread the virus to others in his orbit, including family members whom the virus could kill. If he’s already getting less than 100 cents on the dollar for the full season based on the cancellation of games (baseball has proposed 82 regular-season games), how much less would he or should he take before deciding based on the money he has saved during his career that it’s not worth playing until the world returns to something approaching whatever the new normal will be?
So why is this relevant to an NFL-based media outlet? Eventually, the NFL and NFL Players Association could find themselves engaged in similar negotiations about the contours of a 2020 season, and some NFL players may feel the same way Snell does, if they’re going to be expected to take less in order to give fans more (or any) football.