Mark Madden: Players are right, owners are wrong, and labor issues could be fatal mix for baseball

There are two sides to every story. But not when it comes to the conflict between owners and players over MLB’s pay scale for what will be an abbreviated 2020 season.

The players are 100% right. The owners are 100% wrong.

It’s impossible to logically think otherwise, though many will.

MLB owners have profited big for decades. Since TV paydays rose to gargantuan levels, it’s a foolproof business.

The only thing that could knock that askew is a force majeure — like, say, a pandemic. That’s happened, and the owners want to hand the risk of ownership to the players on the rare occasion of that risk being realized.

But it’s not the players’ responsibility to make the owners whole. MLB owners keep their teams as long as they like, handing them down through generations. (Someday Pirates fans will moan about how cheap Bob Nutting’s three daughters are.)

The average MLB career lasts between five and six years. That’s too brief for the players to sacrifice for the billionaire owners, even for one season.

Player salaries have risen 40% over the past decade. The value of MLB franchises has gone up 300%.

The plan devised by the owners is insulting to the players, so much so that the union is acting like it never happened. It’s designed to pit baseball’s highest paychecks against the lower earners, which is how NFL owners got that league’s latest CBA passed.

Those making baseball’s minimum wage of $563,500 get their salary slashed by 10 percent. The scale of pay cuts ascends according to what each player makes, with those making $20 million or more getting just 20 percent of their contract. Those percentages are applied after prorating salaries as per the proposed 82-game schedule. Bonuses would be given to all players if the season makes it through the World Series, with the biggest-salaried getting the biggest payments.

Gerrit Cole, ex of this parish, was contracted to make $36 million pitching for the New York Yankees this year. If the season finishes, Cole gets around $8 million by the owners’ plan. That’s not a cut. That’s an amputation.

The MLB Players Association did right by not even putting this mockery to its membership for a vote. It’s toxic and divisive. It also might have a chance, because 65% of big-leaguers make $1 million or less. Just 10% of the players make 50% of the money. Perhaps Bernie Sanders should be MLB commissioner.

What if the MLBPA approved the plan, but the stars refused to play? The union would be dead.

The players responded by proposing the schedule be 100-plus games and salaries be prorated, period. No cuts. Because the owners claim they will lose $640,000 per game, demanding a longer schedule equates to an upraised middle finger.

The players maintain the owners agreed to prorated pay in March. But the corresponding document allows further discussion if fans can’t attend, which is the case.

That $640,000 figure is likely a whopper of a lie. If that’s really the per-game loss, baseball should be put on hold until tickets can be sold. There’s a report some owners want to do exactly that.

The players are in the right, but not sympathetic figures. Players like Blake Snell and Bryce Harper chased the owners’ bait early in the conflict and came off poorly. Ex-pitcher Tom Glavine correctly said the players will be blamed no matter what.

“They get millions for playing a children’s game. I’d do that for free, etc.”

The owners have lots more money but are relatively anonymous. The players represent baseball.

If there’s a compromise, it’s hard to see. The sides are extremely far apart. The bickering is unseemly in the middle of a plague, but you knew it would happen.

Baseball has to play. The stench of cancelling the 1994 World Series because of labor problems lingers ever so slightly. What if baseball is the only sport that doesn’t play, and it’s because of greed, not the health crisis?

Yes, baseball has to play. But it might not. Its players are the biggest prima donnas in sports. That, too, has a scale that ascends according to pay grade. The owners are old, insanely rich jerks who want their own way all the time. Could be a fatal mix.