MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred Says Owners Could Lose $4 Billion If Season Gets Canceled

TMZ Sports – Rob Manfred says owners could lose $4 BILLION if the MLB is forced to cancel its 2020 season due to coronavirus … claiming the economic fallout would be “devastating.”

“We’re a big business, but we’re a seasonal business and, unfortunately, this crisis began at the low point for us in terms of revenue,” the league commish told CNN on Thursday.

“We hadn’t quite started our season yet and if we don’t play a season, the losses for the owners could approach $4 billion.”

Manfred says he and his staff are working tirelessly to figure out a way to avoid that possibility … revealing to Anderson Cooper that they’ve come up with an 80-page protocol to keep players safe in a return scenario.

Manfred says the league is eyeing “frequent testing,” quarantine plans for those who contract the virus and safety measurements like fan-less games to ensure players’ health is the top priority if a comeback happens.

We’ve heard the takes from Blake Snell and Bryce Harper who seemed to have MLB players union friendly stance of not wanting any reduction in salary despite potentially playing half the number of games. And now we get a look at the owners’ side, and perhaps, a glimpse as to why Snell and Harper have put their aggressive stances out there: The owners might not be able to afford a stoppage of play more than the players.

We’ve already seen MLB teams start to furlough employees and they haven’t been able to notch a dime of revenue this year. Teams won’t see live gates but also won’t see the lucrative regional sports deals they have, many of which prop up teams with low attendance numbers even in normal times. The same applies to advertising deals, merchandise, and a million other ways owners would normally make money. Couple that with the fact that many owners’ other investments in things like live events, restaurants and real estate have also likely cratered. Owners may actually need any revenue they can to keep their portfolios from becoming even more of a bloodbath.

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I still think that the MLB players’ stances we’ve seen publicly are bad looks for a league whose greed has resulted in serious popularity losses for the sport in the past. I think that effect is doubled when we consider the Great Depression rate of unemployment in the country right now. I also think that it’s odd that a more socially distanced and mostly overpaid sport like MLB would gripe while we’ve seen leagues like the NBA and UFC band together in support of restarting play. Especially since we’ve already seen baseball occur around the globe with proper COVID-19 precautions in place.

But a negotiation is a negotiation. Can MLB players actually get the owners to blink in the face of billions of dollars of lost revenue? It’s certainly a standoff to watch, and potentially, one the owners literally cannot afford to lose.