Report: MLB to Discuss Proposal for 80-Game Season With Owners on Monday

Major League Baseball will discuss their plans for the 2020 regular season with its club owners on Monday, according to a report by The Athletic. If the owners approve, the league will present the proposal to the MLB Players Association on Tuesday.

Nothing in the plans are official or finalized and would be subject to change, according to The Athletic. If ownership approves, the players union also has to approve it, not to mention the unpredictability of the spread of the novel coronavirus could force any of the details of this plan to change. Any plan to get the season underway would also be subject to approval by government and public health officials.

According to The Athletic's report, a few of the details in the proposal to be discussed include:

A regular season beginning in early July and consisting of approximately 80 games – a number that is not ironclad. 78 or 82 games are also possibilities.
In similar fashion to the report by USA Today Sports, the schedule would be regionalized. Unlike USA Today's report, MLB would keep the leagues and divisions intact. To minimize travel, teams would face only the opponents in their own division and all of the teams in the geographic location in the opposite league. For the Texas Rangers, they would only play AL West and NL West teams.
Teams would play in their home ballparks if at all possible. Teams unable to open the season in their own cities would temporarily relocate to either their spring training facilities or another major league ballpark elsewhere in the country.
Playoffs would be expanded from five to seven teams per league. The best record from each league would get a bye and automatically advance to the Division series while the other six teams played in three best-of-three series as an expanded Wildcard round. The standard playoff format would follow.
Due to a shortened season and games being played without fans – at least initially – the players would be asked to accept a further reduction in pay. Most likely, the league would ask the players to agree to some form of a revenue share for only the 2020 season.

The final point will likely be the most difficult point for both sides to agree upon. MLB and the players union already agreed to a deal in March where the league gave $170 million in salary advances and the players agreed to prorated salaries in the case of a shortened season. However over recent days, the players have been adamant so far that they don't want to see any pay reductions as part of any contingency plan for kickstarting the regular season.

Owners will seek less than prorated pay for players, and in fact are adamant they will not pay prorated $, saying losses would be too steep. One possible proposal: a 50/50 revenue split. Players side’s been adamant about prorated $ (half pay for 81 games). Something has to give.
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) May 10, 2020

According to The Athletic's report, league officials say they would spend more on player salaries than they would earn in revenue for every incremental regular season game played without fans in attendance. In 2019, over 38 percent of MLB's $10.7 billion in revenue came from gate receipts and other stadium revenue.

Other details including expanded rosters and medical protocols are also likely to be part of the discussions between MLB and its club owners on Monday. Expanded rosters could see as many as 45 to 50 players. The league would have to have some sort of protocol in place regarding player safety and if any players become infected throughout the season.

The timing of these discussions is not a coincidence. The recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) that urged large mass gatherings of 50 or more people to be canceled or postponed for eight weeks expired on May 10. MLB and other professional sports leagues suspended operations rapidly after the CDC issued that recommendation. As stated before, these plans to salvage the baseball season are at the mercy of the CDC and other public health officials.

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