#Scott Boras calls MLB’s billion-dollar TV deal ‘the rectal thermometer’

As Major League Baseball and the Players Association continue their prolonged battle over finances, agent Scott Boras said the news that the league and Turner Sports had struck a billion deal to broadcast postseason games — as first reported by The Post’s Andrew Marchand — served as an eye-opener.

“The TBS contract was the rectal thermometer,” Boras told Sports Illustrated. “It illustrated the truth to all the fans, and that is the content of this game has such value even in the heart of a pandemic that you get a record contract for your rights. When I say rectal thermometer, I say it as the truest form of the temperature of the game.”

And it fed the Players Association’s belief that owners’ cries of poverty aren’t to be trusted while the two sides look to reach an agreement that would allow the 2020 season to be played in some form.

Boras told the outlet that owners told him during the spring that if no games were played at all, each team would lose $80 million to $100 million.

There is also the possibility that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred could impose a 48-54 game schedule, with players receiving the full amount of their salary per games played.

Boras called that “the stall tactic to get to August 1.”

After Manfred guaranteed a season last week, he backtracked this week and said he could no longer say he was fully confident one would be played.

“He’s being the pancake commissioner, where ‘I’ll flip anywhere I want to,’” Boras said. “When you negotiate publicly, once you say it, if you go down a different road you lose credibility. When he said on draft day ‘100 percent we’re going to have baseball,’ the commissioner said there’s a chicken in every pot.”

Manfred and union head Tony Clark met face to face Tuesday in an attempt to save the season, and there seems to be hope a deal could be reached.

With the current Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire after the 2021 season, this current fight — which began after the season was initially suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic, but has now turned into a labor dispute over finances — could be a preview into an ugly back and forth over a year from now.

Boras said he’s hoping there can still be an 80-game schedule, with players getting their full rate of salary per game to go along with extended playoffs.

“Sounds good to me,’’ Boras said.

“We’re giving you an eight-team [per league] playoff as a given,” Boras said. “They get this right and this is an inroad to what they want down the road. The eight-team playoff is the inroad to a 32-team league.”

That schedule, though, would force regular season games be played past Sept. 27, something the owners want to avoid due to concerns over a second wave of coronavirus.

“We have to be good partners to all sports,” Boras said. “We should not be stepping on the NBA playoffs. The NBA can have their time and we can have our own. We could do it at the end of October. From July 15 to October 15, you have 100 days to get the games in.”