Evan Drellich of The Athletic is reporting on the CBA negotiations between the league and the players association, and gave us this tidbit from MLB’s salary cap proposal:
This is a far more aggressive push by MLB than I thought they would have made, and here is why:
You may remember that graphic from a previous piece I wrote for Crawfish
Boxes: https://www.crawfishboxes.com/mlb-news/71785/mlbpa-should-call-mlb-owners-bluff-push-for-cap-heres-why
I wrote that January 18.
We didn’t have 2025 data at that point, but now we do. Here is the updated version of that chart:
As you can see, the percentage of revenues being spent on players vs. MLB revenues took a sharp jump upwards, mainly due to teams like the Dodgers and Mets being willing to spend astronomical amounts of money.
Baseball has always been a league of haves and have nots, where the have nots have figured out that they can get very rich not spending money by pocketing all their revenue sharing money. MLB has never had a rule requiring them to spend it.
This latest proposal by the league hits on the very tenet of things I have said the MLBPA should go after for years: 50/50 revenue split and cap floor. The NHL does this the best, where they have a true 50/50 split, they have a ceiling and a floor, and if the revenue distribution is off, it gets rectified at the end of the season between the league and the players association.
In the current MLB model, there would be a true 50/50 split, which would increase the amount of money that players make overall. Full stop. That is a win for players, they will make more money despite their talking points being that they won’t.
It’s plainly evident to understand 50% is greater than 46%.
The plan has a cap at $245.3M for 2027, a number that right now only 6 teams in MLB are exceeding (The Astros are at $240M, and are the closest to $245 without going over.)
The $171.2M cap floor is the real win for the Union. Currently, 15 teams are underneath the proposed floor.
If every team in MLB spent the floor only, that would equate to $5.136B in payroll spending, just slightly below last season’s record expenditure of $5.28B.
If every team spent to the cap, that would equate to $7.36B, which currently would well exceed 50% revenues (it would be 65% of last season’s record $11.32B in revenues.)
The escrow system would balance out the revenues at the end of the season, so if at the end of the year players only earned 47% of revenues, MLB would need to write a check to the MLBPA for the difference, where it would be dispersed among membership.
This is probably as best a scenario for MLBPA in a cap offer as it could hope for, as it follows existing models of the other 3 major sports and follows the NHL system the closest (which is good because the NHL system is actually the best among the three).
The key here for the Union is not to fight the structure, but to obtain something they have never been able to obtain before: Getting the owners to open their books.
You can’t have a salary cap without being true partners, which means transparency in all revenues. The owners will have to open the books for the first time.
No union in any CBA negotiation can agree to a split of revenues with the revenues being solely determined by one side and the other side having to take their word for it.
MLBPA has always wanted to a true partnership and to see the real books. This is the first time they could legitimately get that chance.
If this is the first offer from MLB, then they have a real base to start from, and real hope not to lose games next season.
There have been previous reports of the MLBPA wanting to raise the minimum salary to $1.5M and for some players to be able to reach free agency after 5 years. This becomes much easier for owners to digest with a cap system in place, because the individual player salaries won’t be how they look at the numbers, they will look at it from an overall cap figure.
To the owners, more money to the rank and file means less money to the top 1%. For the Union, that SHOULD be the goal, but never seems to be. They always seem to want to protect the elite earners when their focus should be the entirety of the rank and file.
Public perception plays a big part in how these negotiations proceed, because both sides want the fans to be on their side.
While owners may not truly give a rip about what fans want, they are playing that card in their hand to the max right now.
Going to a 50/50 revenue split takes just about all the bite out of the Union’s bark on a cap system.
While some Union leaders have discussed the idea that a cap will start at 50/50 but in future negotiations the league will try to trim the players side down, that hasn’t been the case in any league except the NFL, where owners famously locked players out and clawed back 10% of the revenue pie from them in that negotiation (it has since moved up to a 49.5-50% split).
Should MLB attempt to do so, at that point players would have all support of fans, but it seems unlikely. Sports revenues continue to grow at record rates and with streaming services now getting involved, it is only driving revenues up higher.
This is the most realistic cap proposal the league has ever given the players. As long as they are willing to truly open the books and be transparent, it should be the basis for starting the 2026 season on time.
You can read the whole story by Drellich here: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7315605/2026/05/28/mlb-hard-salary-cap-union-lockout/
