Nationals’ Ryan Zimmerman Indicates Players May Still Be VERY Unhappy With Owners Despite Accepted Deal

Washington Nationals infielder Ryan Zimmerman has done a diary series for the Associated Press throughout the pandemic. In his latest entry, he discusses why he’s still not sure if he’ll play despite the agreement officially reached last week. Zimmerman has some unique circumstancess with a new baby and other issues that he outlined:

I’m still deciding whether to play.

When it comes down to it, it’s a decision not just for me, but for my family as well. I have a 3-week-old baby. My mother has multiple sclerosis and is super high-risk; if I end up playing, I can pretty much throw out the idea of seeing her until weeks after the season is over.

I don’t want to be a pessimist about this. I hope that, whatever I decide, the season goes off well, nothing happens, nobody gets seriously sick.

Once games begin in the NBA and NHL, they’re not going to travel from city to city. Once they’re in their places, they’re there.

And I’ll tell you this about baseball: The owners aren’t going to be traveling with us. I’m pretty sure they’re going to be hanging out at their houses, watching baseball on TV.

We’re going to be the ones out there, if we decide to play. We’re the ones taking all the risk.

Zimmerman is a 15-year veteran wth a lot of other factors. He’s also earned almost $140 million over that career so there isn’t likely much of a need to play for the pro-rated $2 million he’d make this season.

But I think that line about the owners says almost as much about the players’ perspective as the financials do. These MLB players really seem to hate their owners after that protracted labor dispute. For a guy like Ryan Zimmerman, who also just won a World Series, there may not be a lot of reason to lace up the spikes. If he loved his team’s owner, or if the relationships were better, maybe it’d balance out his other legitimate real-life concerns.

Instead, they’d be out in the wild risking their own health for owners and bosses that they seem to have real acrimony with. The owners will be at home cashing the checks of the players’ labor while they’re out there traveling across a country that has yet to flatten the curve of COVID in any meaningful way.

It’s been a weird year in general and for baseball in specific. If Ryan Zimmerman speaks for a lot of other players out there, things may not get less weird even with the agreement owners and players have in place.

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