Count San Diego Padres catcher Austin Hedges among the many players who are itching to get back on the diamond.
Hedges, who is also the Padres' union representative, participated in a Major League Baseball Players Association conference call on Monday to discuss the league's proposal for an 82-game season, according to Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He came away from that meeting feeling optimistic that players will soon come together and work out a plan that allows all parties to benefit during a weird season of baseball.
"What it sounds like to me (is that) at least the majority of guys really want to get this going," Hedges told Acee. "There are the handful of guys, you see it in the headlines, guys that are less for it. Most of those guys are speaking from a personal position - how it would affect them personally.
"The way we have to look at it is everybody is hurting. None of this is personal for one guy or a small group of guys. We're trying to make something happen for everyone."
Players already rejected the owners' earlier proposal of a 50-50 revenue split, saying that such a plan amounts to instituting a salary cap. The owners' reasoning was that they would suffer severe losses due to empty stadiums in a shortened 2020 season and therefore would be unable to pay players their prorated salaries.
If the 50-50 plan had been accepted, players would have been paid a total amount of approximately $1.5 billion in 2020, league sources told Acee. That would have been a significant loss for the players as a whole; $1.5 billion, when split evenly between all players, would constitute about one-third of their combined original salaries.
Owners have since hinted that there is room for negotiations, and Hedges said Monday that players are thinking the same thing.
"Without any sacrifices on salary, I don't think the league is going to sign off," he said. "At the same time, as players we want to get as close to the original contract as possible. … Regardless, it's still a significant pay cut we're going to have to take."
