After months of negotiations between Major League Baseball players and owners, the MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, is expressing doubt about a season being played.

MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred is expressing doubt about a season being played.

After months of negotiations between Major League Baseball players and owners, MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred is expressing doubt about a season being played.

Manfred told ESPN on Monday he's, "not confident there will be a 2020 baseball season" and as long as there is no dialogue with the MLB Players Association the "real risk is going to continue."

This comes just a week after Manfred said on national television, "unequivocally we are going to play Major League Baseball this year," but now he's not certain.

Kaitlin O'Toole is joined by Yankees team reporter Max Goodman for more on this.

Read Full Transcript Below:

Kaitlin O'Toole: After months of negotiations between Major League Baseball players and owners, the MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, is expressing doubt about a season being played. Manfred told ESPN on Monday he's, quote, not confident there will be a 2020 baseball season. And as long as there is no dialog with MLB Players Association, the real risk is going to continue. Joining me now is Yankees team reporter Max Goodman. Max, last week, Manford said unequivocally, we are going to play Major League Baseball this year. Now, he's not too certain. What was your initial take on this Max?

Max Goodman: Kaitlin, I was surprised and confused on Wednesday of last week, Manfred said on national television that he was 100 percent certain that this season will be played. And coming from him when he uses the term a hundred percent, I was pretty confident. I was even telling friends of mine that I was going to start to plan for the season to be played later this summer. But now he's done a complete 180 and it's it's it's hard to understand. So I'm going to try to, as unbiased as I can, write some context and then get everyone back to speed. These negotiations for the last couple of months, like you said, they've been effectively two parallel lines. They haven't been getting closer at all. Each side supposedly wants to get games back in for the season to be played. But the league doesn't want to take too many pay cuts. And they believe that millions upon potentially billions of dollars will be lost with everything that's played. While the players want to honor the agreements from back in March where they were going to get a completely pro-rated salary. And for those who've been following these proposals, a percent of money that the league has proposed going back to the players has stayed the exact same, and the amount of games has slowly gone down. So since Wednesday when Manfred made those comments. The players association, the consensus from the players is effectively. Look, we're not going to negotiate anymore. We're not going to accept your most recent offer. And we want to get these games in. We want to play and we're ready. You look on social media, so many players in this posting that they want to get back on the field. And now all of a sudden, Manfred is saying. Actually, we don't want to. We're not too confident this is actually going to happen. And one added wrinkle to this is that supposedly, according to a report that came out on Monday as well, the league told the players association that they're not going to have a season so long as the players don't file any grievances. So one added wrinkle to this, like I said, is that the players are supposedly going to to file a grievance because they don't believe that these negotiations have happened in good faith. Like I said, he doesn't want to play too many games because they believe they're going to take a lot of cuts. So we'll see what happens. I know that's a lot of information coming at you Kaitlin. But the bottom line here is that the league is worrying about the billions of dollars from this summer and this season. But this could potentially become an issue for years to come. That's tens, essentially hundreds of billions of dollars moving forward if these sides can't come to an agreement.

Kaitlin O'Toole: Max, really appreciate you breaking this down for us and your insight. Thank you so much.