2021: The winter of our discontent

The 2021 off-season should be the most challenging in MLB for years

Now comes the MLB winter of our discontent. Followed probably by the summer of our despair. And by next winter, who knows.

Baseball fans hoping for a return to normalcy now that the trying events of 2020 are over and the turn of the calendar can be imagined are almost certainly in for a major disappointment. How could 2021 be worse? How could it not be?

The Coronavirus, after all, remains with us. In the large majority of MLB cities, it remains illegal for a gathering of any significant size to assemble. Projections regarding when a vaccine may be in widespread use remain unoptimistic. Just this week, the BBC projected no widespread distribution of a vaccine before next summer, and that’s at the earliest.

What that means for baseball is at minimum the start of another season with limited to no on-site fan involvement, and possibly with jury-rigged scheduling to reduce travel. Home games in Canada may continue to be a no-no. Do not be surprised if MLB sets up multi-team bubbles in select locales.

All of this, of course, will follow protracted, painful, and – if 2021 follows 2020 – unsuccessful negotiations between the commissioner’s office and the MLBPA, over the precise terms of those old-new playing terms.

That last paragraph sets the stage for the biggest 2021 problem of all. Those talks about 2021 playing terms will be taking place as a prelude to talks over a new Basic Agreement. The current one expires at the end of the 2021 season.

When the commissioner and union failed to come to an agreement on health, safety, and related financial issues for a restart this past summer, commissioner Rob Manfred unilaterally dictated the terms. If Manfred has to act unilaterally again to set terms for an abnormal and possibly bastardized 2021 season, it will not auger well for the success of the next Basic Agreement negotiations.

Even under the best of circumstances, those negotiations would be difficult. Tony Clark, head of the MLBPA, told the New York Times in 2019 – before the onset of Covid-19 – that he believed the game’s underlying structure was “broken.” As Clark saw it, the basic problem was a disincentive of non-contending teams to spend money.

Too many teams, in Clark’s eyes, were willing to lose big – and spend cheaply in doing so.

Obviously, with Covid sucking all the energy and attention from progress on more standard fronts, nothing has happened since then to change the Association’s opinion.

Players reportedly are also upset about what they view as the slow growth of player salaries generally relative to team and league revenues, the manipulation of service time to delay the onset of free agency, and a growing gap between highest and lowest-paid players.

The solution to all those problems is money. But if Covid forces the 2021 season to proceed in as revenue-restricted a method as it did in 2020, it may be difficult for owners to project when they will be able to resume a “normal” operation with “normal” revenue streams.

And if they cannot make a reliable revenue projection, they are unlikely to agree to Association revenue demands.

The bottom line? It is the prospect of limited baseball in 2021, followed potentially by no baseball in 2022, either due to a lockout or strike.

We may soon learn something about owner perceptions of the future. A new group of free agents hits the market in a couple of weeks. Will they find the usual market, or a severely restricted one? If the latter, it is yet one more sign that the MLB’s troubling times are not yet past us. In fact, they may only just be beginning.