By Sam Bush
The Phils signed Bryce Harper in March 2019 to a free agent contract worth $330 million over 13 years.
He is due to get $10 million of that in 2020.
But the proposal made by the owners for a shortened season would pay him only $2.95 million instead of the $5M he would get on a fair prorated formula for an 80-game season.
Months after the coronavirus pandemic first forced shutterings of retail and restaurants, cancellations of concerts and conferences, and the total nosedive of the economy, the financial hits keep coming. Across the country and across industries, workers are facing unemployment, furloughs, or reduced salaries. It’s a second Great Depression that’s sparing few below the billionaire threshold.
By this logic, the proposal Major League Baseball delivered to the union on Tuesday looks reasonable, or at least humane. Rather than a rumored revenue sharing measure, the league is asking for economic concessions from players in the form of a sliding scale of pay cuts. Players due the most money (like Mike Trout at $37.7 million this year) will lose a greater percentage of their salary, players who make the minimum ($563,500) will forgo a much smaller percentage of their smaller salaries.
Potential salary cuts in MLB plan, sources tell @JesseRogersESPN and me:
Full-year Proposal
$563.5K $262K
$1M $434K
$2M $736K
$5M $1.64M
$10M $2.95M
$15M $4.05M
$20M $5.15M
$25M $6.05M
$30M $6.95M
$35M $7.84M— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 26, 2020
