McAdam: Why a 50-game MLB season would only make things worse

We all miss baseball.

OK, strike that. Reading some comments from BSJ subscribers and many others on social media, many of you have had it up to here with baseball -- the ugly bickering, the petty squabbles, the sheer inability to get a deal done the way other sports have.

But work with me here. We all miss baseball ... at least to some extent.

Many of us would welcome it back, in almost any form. With more than two months having passed since the original Opening Day and a forecast of a second wave of COVID-19 set for the late fall, however, it's been obvious for a while now that anything close to a 162-game season is simply untenable. There are too many games to make up and too little time to reschedule them.

For a while, the working number was 82 games, or, not accidentally, one more game than exactly half the "normal'' season. The hope was that an early July start would allow the season to get played in a little more than three months, with the postseason getting underway sometime in October and carrying into November.

Fine. Not perfect, but workable under these circumstances.

Then, in an effort to recoup more of their regular season pay (remember: players don't technically get paid in the postseason, though they do qualify for a portion of the gate receipts via playoff shares), the Major League Baseball Players Association proposed a 114-game schedule, a bit more than two-thirds (108) of the 162-game schedule. The caveat was that the players would still be paid on a pro-rata basis.

Unsurprisingly, owners officially rejected that proposal. If the owners had signaled an unwillingness to pay pro-rated salaries for half the year, they surely weren't going to go for the same formula over two-thirds, since, to paraphrase the Jon Lovitz character in A League of Their Own: That would be more, wouldn't it?

At that point, owners began talking about a 50-game season, one sufficiently short enough for them to meet the union's demand of pro-rata pay. Put another way: Owners are treating the regular season like it's merely an appetizer ... before they gorge themselves on dessert, skipping the entree altogether.

That may have been the next logical step in the back-and-forth that characterize these negotiations. Don't like this offer? Fine, here's one you really won't like.

The trouble here is that, according to some interpretation, commissioner Rob Manfred may be able to implement a 50-game schedule, and essentially dare the players not to play. You can almost hear Manfred's public appeal: "The players insisted on being paid their salaries pro-rata, and we made a determination that we could only afford to do that with a more consolidated season, since with every game played under those economic conditions, we would be losing money. But when we did meet their demands, they chose to have no season at all.''

In a sense, the PA would only have itself to blame should it face this eventuality, since the union agreed to language allowing Manfred to unilaterally decide on the length of the season so long as the league upholds the concept of pro-rata pay.

Casting aside more sophisticated interpretation of labor law, this would also, I believe, come under the heading: throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Yes, a 2020 season would be played.

No, not a soul would take it seriously.

A 50-game season would represent less than a third of the standard 162-game season. For some perspective, think of it this way: Most people in the game are fond of saying that, for the purposes of evaluating your team's strengths and weaknesses, the season doesn't really begin until Memorial Day. But under this plan, with the typical late March-early April start, a 50-game season would be ending on Memorial Day.

You'd have home run leaders for the "season'' finishing with 15-18 homers. You'd have a much better chance of a batting champ finally finishing a "season'' at .400 or better for the first time in almost 80 years, since the sample size would be so small.

On and on the statistical aberrations would pile up. And it's not limited to individual performances. Last year's World Series champions, the Washington Nationals, wouldn't have qualified for the postseason under such a schedule -- even under the expanded format in place for 2020.

Leagues have played reduced schedules before because of labor disputes. The NHL, which has the worst labor history of the Big 4, lost one season entirely and played three others shortened in the span of about 20 years. But the NHL has never played fewer than 48 games, or, roughly 59 percent of its typical 82 games.

The NBA has had two shortened seasons and never played fewer than 50 games, or about 61 percent of its typical 82-game slate.

The closest the NFL came to a shortened season was 1987, when, with the, um, help of replacement players, a 15-game schedule was played.

Until now, MLB has never played less than two-thirds (108 of 162 in 1981) of its intended schedule.

But suddenly, less than a third would be satisfactory? As if baseball didn't have enough credibility issues, it's proposing playing less than two months before moving on to an expanded playoff format because the owners know that the postseason is where they make their big (TV) money.

The champions emerging from such a scheme wouldn't be saddled with an asterisk  -- they'd be accompanied by a laugh track.

No baseball is bad enough.

Just enough baseball to protect the owners from any liability would be far, far worse.