Earlier this week I posted this article saying that MLB players should propose a salary cap/floor system to owners.
In the poll attached to the article, 78 percent of you agreed with that idea, though with some caveats that owners would never open their books to players.
Late Tuesday, Evan Drellich posted this article at The Athletic that had a word you rarely see in headlines:
MLB owners enraged by Kyle Tucker-Dodgers deal, will push for salary cap ‘no matter what’
“Enraged.” That’s not something you
usually hear publicly regarding MLB team owners, even if they might be thinking that privately.
Drellich wrote:
Major League Baseball owners are “raging” in the wake of Kyle Tucker’s free agency agreement with the Los Angeles Dodgers and it is now “a 100 percent certainty” that the owners will push for a salary cap, one person briefed on ownership conversations who was not authorized to speak publicly told The Athletic.
“These guys are going to go for a cap no matter what it takes,” the source said.
Well. I think we all knew that owners were going to propose some sort of salary cap to players. After all, owners have been trying to impose such a cap pretty much the entire time there have been labor negotiations in baseball, going back more than half a century. Other major team sports have caps, but all have some sort of floor and also have a much larger percentage of league revenues going to players than MLB does, as I noted in the article here earlier this week.
“No matter what it takes” is an interesting position. Will owners be willing to torch part or all of the 2027 season to get such a cap? What form would this system take? Drellich writes:
Owners still have to determine what salary floor and ceiling they’re comfortable proposing, a discussion that’s expected to be a topic at next month’s regularly scheduled owners meeting. The floor, in particular, could be a contentious issue for smaller-market teams, some of which might stand to make more money on an operational basis in the current system. The value of all 30 franchises would instantly rise if a cap is introduced, however.
It would take at least eight owners of 30 to effectively hold up a labor deal, but when it comes to a cap, internal politics will not be the owners’ biggest hurdle. Players have historically been willing to miss many games to avoid a cap system.
The last sentence is why we lost the last third of the 1994 season, the entire postseason that year, and had the 1995 season begin late and shortened to 144 games. Owners were pushing hard for a cap and players just as strongly were resisting, as I noted in this 2022 article here summing up the history of baseball labor disputes:
Arbitration, salaries and free agency were once again at the forefront. In June, owners made this proposal to players, which would have eliminated salary arbitration, given players free agency two years earlier (but with restrictions) and institute a salary cap.
You can imagine how far this went with players.
It’s worth reading the New York Times article I linked in that quote, which lays out details of what MLB owners were proposing at the time. Owners have never backed down from wanting a salary cap (again, check out my 2022 article for the history), and apparently for many team owners now, the Tucker/Dodgers deal is the proverbial “last straw.”
Drellich’s article concludes:
The biggest question seems to be not whether a cap proposal will be made, but which side caves on the matter first: do owners hold steady on such a proposal into a work stoppage that costs regular-season games in 2027? Do players cave? And how long does the staredown last?
Both sides will project strength, but little is likely to be decipherable until crunchtime. During the 2021-22 lockout, a deal was reached in March ’22, just in time to preserve a full 162-game slate.
Those are indeed the key questions. I think many don’t remember just how close we came to losing part or all of the 2022 season. MLB had “cancelled” nearly two weeks’ worth of games, intending for them not to be made up even if there was a settlement. Then all of a sudden the sides agreed on a 162-game schedule, with the “cancelled” games squished into off days or made up as doubleheaders (the Cubs, for example, played six doubleheaders in 2022 and the season was extended a week into October).
There is absolutely no question that MLB owners will lock out players when the CBA expires on Dec. 1. The only question that remains: How long will that lockout last? As always, we await developments.
