Michael Baumann – The Ringer: There are a number of issues with Major League Baseball playing in 2020. This site has discussed many of them and the online baseball community has hit this topic hard over the past few months. Clearly the topic hasn’t been hit hard enough because now MLB executives and team owners have formulated a concrete proposal that they are planning to submit to the Major League Baseball Players’ Association. To keep it simple, it is nowhere near safe enough in the United States or Canada to play baseball at any point now or in the remainder of 2020.
Rob Mains – Baseball Prospectus ($): In all the hoopla over MLB’s dumb revenue-sharing idea there is one undeniable truth, MLB is lying through their teeth. The numbers have been crunched by numerous outlets, all of which stand to profit from MLB returning to action mind you, and they simply do not add up. That MLB is shady as all hell is not news nor is it a surprise. What is surprising is that MLB has been able to get more than enough national baseball writers to peddle their woe-is-us narrative that there’s nowhere near enough pushback towards their lies as there should be.
J.J. Cooper – Baseball America ($): Every time a new story comes out about MLB’s plan to utterly annihilate Minor League Baseball I am sad. It’s not that I’m sad for MiLB ownership, it’s that I’m sad for people across America who are going to miss out on cheap, fun baseball. They will have that baseball taken away from them because the owners want to make $7.2 million in profit instead of $7.1 million in profit. There’s nothing about MLB’s destruction of MiLB and the affiliated baseball landscape that is anything but sad and hurtful. That is Rob Manfred’s legacy, the destruction of all that MLB and MiLB had built as affiliated baseball.
Lead photo courtesy of Jonathan Daniel – Getty Images
