Marty’s musings: rules for a game that may not be played

Welcome to ‘Marty’s Musings’, my weekly column of numbers summarizing the happenings in the baseball world. I am your guide for taking an analytic look at the news and notes throughout the game, and highlighting this week’s key pitching matchups.

Good news for NL teams with slow sluggers, bad news for draftees who are owned nice bonuses. All takes a backseat to the question of whether or not MLB will play in 2020, and what the mechanisms of doing so would look like.

News & Notes

30 - Teams that will play with the designated hitter in the newest iterations of the 2020 rules. Should a season happen it’s expected that the entire league will use a DH, something the players have been in favor of for quite some time.

10,000… - Weekly tests that may be required as part of a reopening per the leaked health and safety manual that ended up in the hands of both Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal. Agreeing on a testing strategy could potentially be the easiest part (even if tests aren’t available, at least there’s a principled agreement) it’s the rest of the details that make reopening MLB far more complicated.

8,415,300 - The slotted bonus for the 2020 number one pick. The last pick in the extremely shortened-draft is slotted at $324,100. Of course, teams will only pay draftees a max of $100,000 in 2020, with 50 percent owed next July and 50 percent owed in July 2022.

50/50 - Revenue split propped by the owners as part of a renegotiation to what the MLBPA already agreed to a couple months ago. The curious part of this of course, is the fact that the owners never open their books to the players, so something has got to give here.

74 - Year old former Yankees’ General Manager Bob Watson, who passed away last week. Watson served as MLB’s first African American GM to win a World Championship, a position he held in New York from 1995 to 1997.

??? - Days until Opening Day.