Monday Bantering: Players make an offer to start season, and other bits of new

Happy Monday.

The Blue Jays put out a statement. I do like the line “We’ve been searching for the right words and struggled to find them.” I think we can relate to that. There really aren’t words. But there are good moments: Police marching with protesters, police ‘taking a knee’. Things like that give me hope. That hope gets tested when you see police driving cars into protesters, but I have hope that the future can get better.

The Players Association has submitted their plan for getting the season going. They want a 114-game season and no additional pay cuts from what has already been negotiated. I do like this two points:

• It also asked for players who qualified as “high risk’’ to opt out and still be paid and receive major-league service.
• The players would also receive a salary advance during spring training camp worth $100 million for expenses.

I imagine there might be some players who would like to opt out. The players suggest expanded playoffs for the next two seasons. I’m not a big fan of that, once they add playoffs they will never subtract them again.

And they allow that the league can defer salary if the playoffs don’t happen.

Good to know the owners are considering this in good faith:

Rogers Centre is being used as a warehouse for storing and sorting food for Food Banks Canada.

Already there are 1,000 food pallets, each with 1,000-4,000 items, at the dome, mostly stored in the outfield. The plan is to reach 6,000 pallets with 10 million pounds of food, which hundreds of volunteers from Rogers will then pack into individual hampers containing a week’s worth of meals.

I’m putting this into the good news file, but that there is that much need out there is sad.

You know you’ve messed up your life when a judge says your reputation is so bad it’s legally impossible to libel you.

From the court’s opinion:

Based on the papers submitted on this motion, prior to the publication of the book, Dykstra was infamous for being, among other things, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay, as well as a sexual predator, a drug-abuser, a thief, and an embezzler. Further, Dykstra had a reputation—largely due to his autobiography—of being willing to do anything to benefit himself and his team, including using steroids and blackmailing umpires . . . Considering this information, which was presumably known to the average reader of the book, this Court finds that, as a matter of law, the reference in the book has not exposed Dykstra to any further “public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace,” or “evil opinion of him in the minds of right-thinking persons,” or “deprivation of friendly intercourse in society.”

Owners want us to take their side and then they do things like this: