Baseball labor stories are filled with as many dollar signs as baseball stories told from the dugout are laced with expletives.
The numbers are numbing, too complicated to make any sense of, too big to relate to, and they lead the reader to turn the page to more riveting topics, such as tire advertisements.
Here’s an effort to interpret some of the numbers and explain what’s happening in readable fashion:
The players have set Friday as a strike date, which means if there is no agreement in place by then, they will not take the field for Friday’s games. They have been instructed by the union to travel with their teams to cities on Thursday, the last day they will be paid.
Players are sent paychecks twice a month and each check reflects either a 15-day or 16-day work period. The checks they receive the last day of the month will include pay for every day worked through tomorrow.
The baseball season lasts 182 days. To determine how much a player is paid on a daily basis, take his annual salary and divide it by 182.
For example, Derek Jeter’s salary this season is $13 million. If the players strike Friday he will be paid through Thursday. For every day the players stay out, Jeter will lose $71,428.57. By his 15th day on strike, Jeter would have lost more than $1 million.
On the topic of losses, the city will lose $2 million a day for every regular-season game canceled and anywhere from $9 million to $20 million a game in the postseason.
If there is a settlement, everyone will try to assess who wins and who loses. Regardless of whether the settlement comes closer to what the players or owners want, the Yankees must be considered losers.
The Yankees will share roughly $30 million of their revenues with the other clubs this season. Under the owners’ current proposal, the Yankees would have to share $80 million, based on revenue sharing and luxury-tax dollars. Under the players’ current proposal, they would have to share about $50 million.