SI's Bri Amaranthus and Chris Halicke discuss the details of MLB's economic proposal to the players union and what the coming days may hold as negotiations continue.
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00:00Baseball is trying to make a comeback for 2020 and we are all hopeful that it will.
00:06Now what are the financial options that the MLB is offering to players to get started
00:12again in 2020?
00:13Well initially they were going to offer a 50 50 revenue splits between between the league
00:20and the players.
00:21The players automatically called that a non starter.
00:24So the league dropped that and they decided to offer tiered pay cuts where the highest
00:30paid players would see further pay cuts would see the highest pay cuts after the prorated
00:36salaries and the lowest paid players would see the lowest pay cuts.
00:40The pay cuts were pretty substantial according to multiple reports like if the high end players
00:46like Garrett Cole and Mike Trout making like $35 million they would be making only $7.8
00:51million and but some of the lower guys would be making a little less than half of what
00:56they would normally make in a season.
00:58So it wasn't it wasn't something the players are very happy about.
01:03They were actually according to an article from The Athletic they were livid.
01:07So it did not go over well.
01:10This is not going to be what the players agreed to.
01:14They have a couple options going forward but this is going to it wasn't a good first start
01:19to the day whatsoever.
01:20Yeah I mean you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars millions of dollars.
01:25Was there any sort of reaction you saw on even social media from players?
01:31Well there was a couple of gif usages Denzel Washington slamming the pen down and and then
01:39there was a couple of players who were saying that this was not a good opportunity to make
01:44the players look like the bad guy and Trevor Bauer who's normally very outspoken said would
01:49you like to see me see me or see a video of me talking about how I actually feel about
01:54this or should I just shut up and play.
01:57So he's obviously one of the most outspoken players in baseball.
02:00So yes players were definitely speaking about it.
02:03Even Rangers catcher Jose Trevino said that he finds out the stuff on Twitter which is
02:09a terrible thing you know for players and anybody anybody who's depending on a livelihood
02:15the last place they should be finding out about it is social media.
02:18So definitely not a good first day for negotiations.
02:22Things need to pick up quickly.
02:23Where do they go from here it seems like they've lost just so much momentum.
02:28Yeah so what they can do is they can come up with a counter proposal or they can just
02:32completely reject the proposal altogether and then they're back to square one.
02:37Unfortunately time is of the essence it's not a luxury either side has a soft date that
02:42they need to figure this out by is June 1st which is Monday.
02:47A harder date is probably closer to like June 6th somewhere around there.
02:53They want to get spring training started or spring training started rather quickly with
02:58the season starting at the beginning of July.
03:00So they definitely need to get things figured out very very quickly in order to get in order
03:04for there really to be a chance of a season happening.