There were never going to be more than 60 games, Rob Manfred told Dan Patrick yesterday. It was all over the baseball media because, well, when the commissioner admits that the owners were never bargaining with the players in good faith, that tends to get some attention.
Here’s the full quote from Manfred (transcribed by Yahoo Sports):
The reality is we weren’t going to play more than 60 games no matter how the negotiations with the players went, or any other factor. I think this is the one thing we come back to every single day: we’re trying to manage something that has proven to be unpredictable and unmanageable. I know it hasn’t looked particularly pretty in spots, but having said that, if we can pull off this 60-game season, I think it was the best we were going to do for our fans given the course of the virus.
This was in response to Patrick asking Manfred how he would rate his own performance in the negotiations, by the way, and the immediate defensiveness is kind of a tell here.
I’ve seen the argument made that Manfred wasn’t saying what it sure seemed like he was saying, that there was an undercurrent of “With the negotiations running as late as they did…” Sure, maybe they could have gotten 75 games in if they’d reached a deal earlier, the deviladvocating goes, but they didn’t, so 60 was the maximum possible.
That line of thinking doesn’t hold water, and there are a lot of reasons. The biggest is that the owners offered more games multiple times. On May 26, the owners made their first offer of 82 games. On June 8, they made their second offer, which was for 76 games. June 12: 72 games. The players rejected all of these deals because they came with significantly reduced pay — the players were being paid for 50ish games in every one of those scenarios — but the offers were made. These things were on the table. More than 60 games, from a scheduling perspective, was something the owners could do.
On June 17, five days after the 72 game proposal, the owners offered 60 games. Even if you accept literally everything else the owners did as a good faith effort to play as many games as possible (this would be a stretch, he said with characteristically detached understatement), it is impossible to view this in the same light. If the clock was truly ticking, with every day that passed taking a possible game day off the calendar, then this would have been a 67 game proposal (and the players almost certainly would have accepted it).
Instead, the players rejected this deal and five days later, this deal was imposed upon them. Again, if 60 games was possible five days later, then why wasn’t 65 possible in the original proposal? The math literally does not add up.
Manfred has an explanation, though. First off, he said that the end of the season had to be etched in stone:
One of the pieces of advice we received early on from the medical experts, the pandemic experts that we’ve been working with, is that by the end of September, the risk of another spike and a shutdown was going up dramatically. Given that, one of our guiding principles, we were gonna finish no later than September 27, which was the scheduled date, and we were gonna play the postseason on its normal calendar.
And why couldn’t they start earlier? Well, duh, the pandemic!
Given that hard end date, what I said about the calendar before and the 60 games, if you look around the country, there was no possibility of us resuming operations either in home markets or in Spring Training facilities, at a materially earlier time than July 1. It just was not consistent with the public health situation.
But then…how were they proposing to start the season earlier? What happened in the five days between 72 games and 60 games? The coronavirus curve had deflattened, but it wasn’t at today’s “Oh shit” levels yet — levels that in any rational country would mean the MLB season got canceled, by the way — so that’s not it. No, what happened is the owners got it through their skulls that the players would not accept a per-game pay cut, so they (the owners) decided to play fewer games.
There was never a good faith effort by MLB to play as many games as possible. There was never going to be. When Patrick asked him what he would have done differently if he’d known in March what he knows now, Manfred’s response wasn’t to work with the players on health guidelines, or consult experts early to figure out how to safely play. No, his answer was all about beating the union:
I just think that we would have been more explicit about the need for subsequent negotiation. I think the agreement was clear that it contemplated playing in stadiums with fans. We had no obligation to play unless we could play with fans and the players understood that. We thought it made clear that there would have to be a discussion of playing empty. I think I just would have written the words, ‘If we’re gonna play empty, there needs to be another negotiation.’
It’s about money. It was always about money. When asked how he would have used foreknowledge of the pandemic, Rob Manfred was thinking about putting clauses in agreements to keep players from receiving full prorated pay. Manfred got the commissioner job based on beating the players in negotiations. That’s the only game he ever really cared about playing.