Report: Phillies to keep full-time employees through fiscal year

The plan for the 2020 Major League Baseball season amid the COVID-19 pandemic has yet to be decided on, but for full-time Phillies employees, the decision made on the season will have no impact on their employment.

According to NBC Sports Philadelphia‘s Jim Salisbury, Phillies owner John Middleton informed full-time employees that their jobs were safe through the end of MLB’s fiscal year.

According to source, Phillies full-time employees were told today that there would be no furloughs or layoffs due to the coronavirus shutdown through the end of the fiscal year (end of Oct). Hope is still that BB returns in coming weeks.

— Jim Salisbury (@JSalisburyNBCS) May 8, 2020

This comes just a few weeks after the Phillies, along with a majority of other MLB teams, ensured that they would keep all full-time employees through the end of May. Taking this to the end of October, of course, is a much bigger step for Middleton and the Phillies. It does seem to imply that they have faith that the MLB season will come underway at some point in the not-so-distant future.

There does seem to be a lot of buzz that baseball may be heading that direction. On Thursday, ESPN‘s Jeff Passan reported that MLB was likely to agree to a proposal within a week, giving the dates June 10 for a potential resumption of spring training and July 1 for a potential start of the season.

Salisbury noted that Middleton echoed this optimism in the letter to employees: “Playing in empty ballparks will test the financial viability of our franchise and the other 29 teams, but our industry is determined to make it work, and I am confident that we will find a way.”

There are obviously still several roadblocks standing in the way of MLB resuming operations in the midst of the pandemic. But the Phillies commitment to keeping full-time employees is certainly a welcome move, and it will be interesting to see if the rest of the league follows suit.

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