IT'S TIME TO STOP BALKING & GET IT DONE!

Baseball is already a "GO".... just not here. The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) has been playing games, and on Monday Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) will kick off its regular season on June 19th. Games will be played without fans in attendance, but even in a condensed season they are preparing to play 120 games out of the normal 143-game norm. It's encouraging for MLB fans to see that logistically it IS possible for baseball to return. Now if we could just figure out the financial parts of this we'd all be happy....but it's not sounding good.

Even outside of baseball, other sports have resumed or they are in the planning stages and we should be much further along. NASCAR is already back in action. The PGA Tour will be back in two weeks. The NBA is working on a July return, likely in Florida. Tuesday afternoon the NHL announced the leagues plan to get back to playing. The regular season is over but playoffs will begin likely in July and may be hosted in two different cities. Sports are on the comeback, just not baseball. The union and owners are still striking out in negotiations....and it is driving us all crazy!

On Tuesday, owners gave the players union their latest proposal on player salary. No more 50-50 revenue sharing plan that prorated salaries based on the number of games played, now owners propose a pay scale where the higher paid players will take a bigger salary cut and lower paid players will not take the same salary hit. That's a much better deal for maybe younger players, or those who earn closer to league minimum but big stars like Gerrit Cole for example, take a huge hit. ESPN gave a good breakdown on the salary scale HERE.

So we can probably all guess that this new proposal didn't go over well. In fact, two players tweeted about it and MLBPA executive director Tony Clark immediately shot down the proposal calling it a salary cap.

Brett Anderson isn't saying anything we've already talked about on BYB but Marcus Stroman's tweet hits me the hardest. We've all known this salary feud was going to be a challenge, but we have all been clinging on to hope. Blake Snell already said he was going to plan for 2021, and now Stroman says the 2020 season isn't looking promising and that he was going to look at "life after baseball" projects.

Players are balking and the more we see it on social media the more I wonder if 2020 will be a lost season.

I really hope that's not the case. If all of these other sports are playing and baseball isn't then shame on BOTH PLAYERS AND OWNERS. There has to be concessions on both sides. Why not consider a deferred compensation program? Seriously, it could work and it sounds like the players union will counter this in the coming days.

Here's the basic idea behind it....I'm not an expert but something along these lines might work.
I mentioned above that Gerrit Cole would one of the players that would lose the most amount of money under the owners new pay scale proposal.

He's owed $36 million in 2020. Instead of the 20% payment that the owners proposed, take a large chunk of the funds owed to him for this season and tack them on to the back of his contract.

Do I like the idea of paying Cole a lot more money later when he well past his prime (assuming he doesn't opt out)? No. However, this allows the owners not to pay a lot of money in 2020 where they will be losing a lot of revenue and pay it later. The players still get all of the money owed to them and owners have time to make some money back and pay it in the future. Players get paid their full contracted amount eventually and owners may not lose up to $4 billion in one season as Rob Manfred estimated last week.

Is it a perfect solution? No, but it might make the players a little bit happier in the long run and we could get baseball back sooner. Time is of the essence here....if baseball is going to start in July after a 3 week training camp a compromise needs to get done in the next few days.

If the 2020 season doesn't happen BOTH sides are to blame. I get it billionaires and millionaires don't want to listen to each other talk about money.....but neither do all of us. It's not a good look for baseball.

--Jeana Bellezza-Ochoa
BYB Managing Editor
Twitter: @nyprincessj