Mark Madden: Sympathetic figures lacking on both sides of MLB labor dispute

The MLB labor dispute that erupted from a health crisis is reminiscent of “Breaking Bad”: No sympathetic figures are to be found anywhere.

The owners are employing distasteful opportunism by trying to shame the players into revenue-sharing, however temporary. That is a de facto salary cap, and the players would be fools to allow such a precedent to be wedged in. Next season, if fans still can’t attend, the owners would say, “Revenue’s still down, and it worked last year, so…”

MLB’s owners have profited insanely for years. That includes the North Shore’s hillbilly prince. The owners agreed in March to pay pro-rated salaries to the players for a shortened season. That should hold.

Sometimes a business loses money. MLB’s owners can take the hit for a year. It’s difficult to come up with one good reason to protect Bob Nutting. The owners are at minimal risk if MLB resumes. They won’t catch covid-19 in their luxury suites.

MLB’s owners know exactly what they’re doing. It’s going to be tough to get baseball going even if the players agree. By pitching a proposal the players won’t ratify, the owners set up the players to be the bad guys if the season doesn’t occur.

But the players aren’t the good guys, either. This isn’t “workers of the world unite.” Don’t call Cesar Chavez. This is billionaires fighting millionaires over your money. “We’re all in this together,” right? Nope. Not in MLB, or in enough other places.

The optics will be bad for the players. But you can’t make a bad business decision for the sake of good PR. Baseball would benefit from a salary cap. So would the Pirates. But the players wouldn’t, and now isn’t the time to open that door.

The rest of MLB’s proposal to begin play sounds OK.

The schedule is 82 games with limited travel. The NL East, for example, only plays games within the division and against AL East teams. Same goes for the Central and West divisions in each league. (The Pirates won’t lose 100 games. Well, probably not.)

Rosters would be 30 players with a 20-man taxi squad.

Seven teams in each league (14 total) make the playoffs.

The designated hitter gets used in both leagues. Outrage over that poses a greater health risk to old-timey baseball purists than covid-19. (I like the term “universal DH.” That implies it will be used in the AL, NL and on Mars.)

But problems exist beyond the proposal, and besides the financial issues.

MLB has teams in 17 states, D.C. and Canada. That’s lots of different situations regarding the virus, and 17 different governors with 17 different agendas making 17 different decisions. Mayors and a prime minister will be involved, too. How can MLB plan? How many teams can be relocated?

Los Angeles County’s stay-at-home order is extended three months. Arizona is right next door. Sports can resume there Saturday. It’s hard to imagine New York-based teams playing home games. Canada requires whoever enters to spend 14 days in isolation, and that’s even if no symptoms are shown.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker admonished the players for trying to dodge a pay cut: “Everybody is sacrificing.” Should a governor worry about that? Why can’t the owners sacrifice? The owners have a lot more money. (By the way, MLB has yet to formally propose the 50-50 revenue split, so the players haven’t turned down anything yet.)

The players will want absolute safety, if not God reaching down and granting them immortality. Big-time athletes live in a bubble. The virus may have burst that bubble for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. But the players will still want safety guarantees that can’t be made before there’s a vaccine (if there ever is).

I’m with the players when it comes to money. But the employment of many thousands depends on MLB. The players should absorb some risk, or accept being quarantined during the season. They should feel some responsibility to get baseball on the field. They won’t be asked to play games inside a nursing home.

But it’s not a matter of when MLB starts. It’s a matter of who gets blamed when it doesn’t.

For safety’s sake, maybe MLB’s owners should hold off on playing until, say, 2023. But, long before then, 90% of MLB’s players would offer to swim across a lake filled with covid-19 if their paycheck was waiting on the far shore.

One of the media’s baseball stooges summed up the disconnect between big-time athletes and sports fans when he tweeted that MLB players should bargain for more geographic-based scheduling on a permanent basis because “the public doesn’t understand how grueling travel is.”

Baseball players fly charter, and every seat is the equivalent of first class. That doesn’t sound “grueling” to “the public.”