Texas Rangers: MLB Sends New 2020 Season Proposal to Players

Texas Rangers baseball continues to wait as the league and MLBPA continue to hash out an agreement on terms of a 2020 shortened season.

After plenty of back and forth between the MLB and the Player’s Association regarding how to approach the 2020 season’s start. For Texas Rangers’ fans, the season was being approached with much anticipation as the club looked to enter a new era inside the newly-constructed Globe Life Field. However, as we approach mid-June, neither side looks close to an agreement on how to address the season.

Both sides seem very far apart on an agreement with the players taking to social media often to voice their frustrations with how the negotiations were proceeding. Having already agreed to a 50 percent salary reduction earlier during the delay that would coincide with a shortened 82-game season, the players are reluctant to take additional pay cuts in a vastly reduced schedule.

Basics of the New Proposal

The newest proposal calls for a 76-game season with hopes of starting the season in early July. Because of that hope, the league and players are on a time crunch because once an agreement is reached, there will need to be time for teams to regroup for a mini-Spring Training to get back to game shape before the year starts.

One of the biggest bullet points of the new proposal from the MLB is an expanded playoff setup for 2020 which would see the postseason jump from an already expanded 14-team plan to a 16-team setup. Each league would have an eight team bracket with the first round consisting of three game series. A knock on this format is that it creates a higher possibility for a top seed to be knocked out early in the playoffs because of the shorter first round series.

Compensation has been the major sticking point between the two sides and looks to be contentious once again. In the newest proposal, Jeff Passan of ESPN reports that their is a possibility of players receiving 75% of their prorated salaries for a 76-game season. Players would be guaranteed 50% of their prorated salaries in the current offer.

Additional notes in the offer are changes to free agent structure for the 2020-21 offseason which includes qualifying offers being removed for one season. Instead of the QO format, teams who lose a player in free agency to a multi-year contract worth $35 million or more or a one-year deal worth over $17 million would receive draft compensation. Teams signing these qualifying players would not lose out on draft capital. Players who have been deemed high risk for COVID-19 are also allowed to opt out of the 2020 season and still hold on to their service time and salary compensation.

Will a Deal Get Done?

When this deal was initially published the general sentiment among writers was that this offer would be rejected by the MLB Players’ Association. Evan Drellich of The Athletic tweeted out Monday morning that the MLBPA “regards today’s offer from MLB to be worse that the league’s last…” It seems unlikely that this proposal will be accepted by the Players’ Association however there is more belief that an agreement will be reached at some point. For the Texas Rangers, the loss in revenue from the season delay is going to have a noticeable impact as they look to pay off the newly built stadium.