The Cincinnati Reds are the 6th team in Major League Baseball that has committed to paying their baseball operations employees through May 31st according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
The Cincinnati Reds have joined the teams committed to paying baseball operations employees through May 31, sources tell ESPN. Among the teams known to have made similar commitments: the Braves, Phillies, Giants, White Sox and Marlins. More are expected to do so in coming days.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 20, 2020
While typing up this article the Boston Red Sox also announced that they will continue to pay their baseball operations employees through May 31st.
This is a good move by the organization. And this is on top of the $1,000,000 fund that is in place for the ballpark employees that was pledged by each team and the MLBPA a month ago. Yesterday, Rob Manfred announced that he was suspending the Uniform Employee Contracts as of May 1st, which would allow anyone who is not a player (and a few front office employees) that would give teams the right to furlough or reduce pay of employees. It allows teams to do some unpopular things, but it seems that several teams are at least committing to not doing that for the short term with the hopes that things change and we can get some baseball going on and teams can have a little more idea of whether or not they’re going to be getting that TV money for 2020 or not.
Many of the lower-income employees would likely make more per week, drawing Ohio unemployment plus the federal $600/week, than by staying on payroll. I don’t know what the health insurance situation is, but some employers are letting employees go on unemployment, but continuing to pay the health insurance.
Economist Herb Stein, the father of Ferris Bueller’s teacher Ben Stein, is famous for Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This is a good example of it, because people can’t go without working forever, or in this case, even for a few more weeks.
You are correct. It will not go on forever, but when it returns it will not be in front of crowds and operations will be downsized. People will lose jobs, and revenue will continue to be lost. Small markets will be squeezed even harder. Mr. Castellini made the comment that fans must turn out for the team to continue to spend this way. What happens when there are NO fans in the stands? It could change the game forever.
man I hope we can get antibody testing for everybody. I know it is a long shot but I am hoping a lot of people have already had the virus and have immunity.
then you could have immunity based seating in the ball park to separate patrons that have not had it yet. I know it would be a challenge to coordinate but baseball with out fans sounds less and less appealing the more I think of it
There’s no way your plan would work. You can’t have situations like that where mass groups of “never had it” will be allowed until we have a treatment. We know that you can test negative while actually having it if it’s in the very early stages, and when you put thousands of people together in that scenario, it’s bad, bad news for the spread.
@biged my understanding is while furloughed you still qualify for benefits (or at least my company did that)
As a former beer vendor, I feel bad for those folks as I kind of doubt any of this money ends up going to them.
This money, no. The money from the $1M fund, yes.