I always know, oh dear, you can't say less stuff to me, I know, dear, I'm going back to Tennessee, and it's no, oh dear, you can't say less stuff to me, I know, dear, I'm going back to Tennessee.

Hello and welcome to episode 1547 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangras presented by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello Sam.

I'm going to do some emails. You know, I've been monitoring the news as we all have waiting to hear whether there will be a season and right now we're kind of in a holding pattern as the players association decides whether to reject or counter the owner's offer, which was presented on Tuesday.

The players position is that the owners already agreed to pay them their pro-rated salaries for this season. The owners say, well, that was just if we were playing games in front of fans, and now because we wouldn't be, you have to take more pay cuts on a sliding scale that would disproportionately affect the players who make more money.

The players understandably disagree and say, no, you're trying to back out of the deal we already made, but what sort of striking is the little other bits of news that have been coming out about furloughs and salary reductions for front office people and also pay for minor leakers.

And it's sort of strange how little uniformity there is like I would almost think that there would be some collusion in this area, I mean legal collusion, I guess there's nothing against owners talking to each other and saying, hey, are you going to underpay minor leakers or not pay them at all.

And yet they don't seem to have done that there doesn't seem to be great consistency. And so one team will say, yeah, we're going to keep paying minor leakers, they're stipend and another team will say, we're going to extend the stipend through this month and then another team will say, nope, we're cutting them off.

So the A's this week, for instance, are suspending minor leak pay after May and yet the Marlins are extending it at least through August, which would basically be the end of the minor leak regular season.

And so it doesn't really seem to follow a predictable pattern, it's not like the big market teams, the teams that spend a lot on free agents or have high payrolls are really taking care of their minor leakers are their front office people and then the small market teams that tend to be cheap in other ways are also cheap in this way, it just seems like it's kind of all over the board.

And so the A's you might figure yeah, okay, that's sort of an A's move, you know, like the money ball, the A's players have to pay for snacks and the vending machine type thing, you might expect them to be the ones to send the letter as their GM team and forced did to say, well, we care about you and we wish you the best, but we're just not paying you and by the way, you can't play for anyone else or anything in the meantime.

And because you're technically still employed, you are eligible for traditional unemployment although maybe you can get pandemic unemployment assistance and yet you might think well, the Marlins would be in that camp too, because they've had low payrolls there along with the A's one of the teams that tends to get protests from the players association about not spending their revenue sharing money.

So I don't know why there's so much kind of across the board response here and especially if you're like the lone team that's not going to pay your minor leakers for right now, it makes you look even worse if the Marlins are coming out and saying, we'll keep paying you and you're the team that's saying, no, we won't.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I don't have much, I don't have any insight into why that would be it is it is very odd.

Yeah, because it's not that much money. I mean, it's, you know, it's a small item is Jeff Passan and others have pointed out like paying minor leakers $400 a week, even if you add it up for all the players in your system, it's just not that much money for a few months.

And so you think almost, you know, even if you weren't motivated by other reasons, you just wouldn't want to take the PR hit because, you know, teams owned by billionaires, the A's are owned by a billionaire. And so everyone obviously says, oh, the billionaire can't pay the minor leakers $400 a week. And meanwhile, if the Marlins like the, you know, go to franchise that's bad for baseball and non competitive, if they are on the opposite end of the scale.

And it's the same thing with front office employees, too, like you had the raise for instance, who furloughed a lot of front office people early and you figure, okay, it's the raise and then other teams like the Cardinals and the twins and the Padres, they've been kind of on the other end with guaranteeing their employees their full salary for a certain amount of time.

But again, it doesn't seem to break down very predictably along the lines that you might expect based on big lead payrolls.

Yeah, I'm just some flummoxed.

Yeah, you would think that I mean, one of the stories that comes up throughout, you know, baseball history of teams working together is that even when it is not collusion, you know, in the legal definition, the league office tends to have a lot of sway over teams that the league offices is able to, you know, to sort of with a phone call, get teams to do things that are not necessarily what you would think would be in their place.

So what you would think would be in their best interests or that, you know, they're able to kind of rally owners to present a unified front, I guess, is sort of part of it.

So for instance, I think I remember this, but see like always used to really value the idea of every decision had to be unanimous.

...