Can owners, players agree on parameters of 2020 season?

Major League Baseball owners reportedly agreed Monday to a proposal for a 2020 season, one that would include an abbreviated second round of spring training in June, then a regular season of roughly 80 games that would run from July through September, then an expanded postseason that includes two more wild card teams in each league but could still be wrapped up around Halloween.

Sounds great, right? Our long national nightmare is almost over!

The only thing the league needs now is approval of the players, and ... oh wait, that's not nearly as simple as it sounds.

If you thought labor negotiations between MLB and the MLB Players Association were tough during normal times, wait until you see how this negotiation plays out.

Actually, we already got a hint Monday via MLBPA executive director Tony Clark, who told The Athletic this new proposal from MLB - which asks players to split all 2020 revenue in half with owners - won't be approved by the players because they'll view it as the equivalent of a salary cap.

We can debate the details of that logic, and we can speculate how society at large will view players and owners squabbling over money right now, but there's a larger point here. This is a really complicated situation, and the reality of a 2020 MLB season isn't as simple as everybody just saying they're ready to hold the season.

Everyone involved has particular interests at stake. Owners (understandably) want to hold as much of a season as is safely possible and recoup at least some of the $10 billion in revenue they stands to lose if there's no baseball at all in 2020. Players (understandably) want to hold as much of a season as is safely possible and recoup and be paid accordingly for risking their own health, not to mention their families' health.

If that dynamic wasn't complicated enough, keep something else in mind. We tend to think of the players as one entity. They're not. They're 1,200 individual people who have a vast range of priorities given their personal career and family situations.

A 32-year-old veteran with a wife and two kids and $50 million in career earnings may feel very different about risking play this season than a 24-year-old rookie who earns the league minimum and has no immediate family.

Guys who are one year away from free agency have a certain motivation to play this season. Guys who are entering the first year of multi-year extensions have different motivations. Guys who don't even know if they're going to make the opening day roster have entirely different motivations from everyone else.

There is a money aspect to all this, of course. But it goes beyond that. It's about the health and well-being of anyone who participates in a 2020 season.

Sean Doolittle articulated that point exceptionally well Monday via a string of tweets that touched on all kinds of issues that matter to him (and, ostensibly, other players as well).

"Bear with me," Doolittle wrote, "but it feels like we've zoomed past the most important aspect of any MLB restart plan: Health protections for players, families, staff, stadium workers and the workforce it would require to resume a season."

Among the issues he raised: long-term health effects of COVID-19, the dangers of spreading the virus in a confined clubhouse atmosphere, the need for potentially daily testing of everybody who comes to the ballpark, not to mention the people who will transport and feed players during a season, and what happens if and when someone tests positive.

These are all extremely important points, and MLB must explain in detail how it intends to deal with all of them.

Suffice it to say, there is a laundry list of issues that have to be resolved before any baseball season takes place. And there are a lot of people that are going to have to sign off on whatever final proposal is put forward to make it happen.

All of this might leave you pessimistic about the chances for baseball in 2020. But keep one other thing in mind, too: They've still got time to sort this out. Spring training 2.0 wouldn't start for another month, with the regular season starting another three weeks after that.

The owners and players may appear to be miles apart right now, and there may appear to be too many complicating factors to get this done. But by starting the process now, they've given themselves time and opportunity to negotiate and find consensus.

In the end, we can only hope everyone recognizes there is no perfect solution and nobody's going to get exactly what they want. But as long as they can prioritize safety over profits, there's still reason to believe there will be baseball this year, in one form or another.