All The Owners Are So Bad In Multiple Ways - Work Stoppage 2027 Style

[macarthur31]

I'm of the mind that the way the Competitive Balance Tax is currently structured, the owners have the salary cap that they can live with.  Yes, the Dodgers are "abusing" it the system, as stated earlier, but if MLB really wanted to "level the playing field" they could re-arrange their own revenue sharing rules to mitigate that (which are how they divvy up the national media contracts and 48% local revenues), and those don't require the MLBPA.

Do they want to have a hard cap?  Of course!  That would increase cost certainty (which would allow them to accurately appraise their franchise value) and also prevent future owners from hurting themselves (akin to how the NBA prohibits back to back first round draft picks to be thrown into deals).  But, they don't want to install the floor that all the other major leagues have done.  That would require them to open the books.  They don't want that oversight.

However, the salary cap and the notion of "competitive balance" is a winning issue in this campaign - November '25 Morning Consult poll cited that a super majority of avid and casual fans wanted cap-and-floor.  They've done the ground work with building up a social media brigade of advocates and aligned an ad campaign to hammer this mental model home.  Why waste it?   I intuit that the owners will not get a true "hard cap", but they will likely use it to win in other ways like contracting the draft  (also slashing bonuses to draft picks as well as prohibiting prep players from being selected), or perhaps even capping contract lengths.  

Maybe Manfred will go hard in this round of negotiations - the owners' getting a better deal will tee them up for even wealthier national media contracts, and expansion moolah when they add 2 more teams.  However, I do think that canceling games is his third rail, and they'll sort it out sometime in February.

 

[Rcal10]

1 hour ago, CubinNY said:

Would the argument hold water if the Pages dropped the ball last year? 

A cap solves what problem? Spending!

A cap does not solve any other problem. If a person is against spending, ok. But that's not the argument. The Mets are the #1 spender in baseball. What have they won? 

If the argument is that teams can't compete, ok. The owners can share amongst themselves (and do to an extent). But that's not the argument either, B/c it's then, it's show me the data time, for inexplicable reasons. 

You can't start with a conclusion and then find the evidence. I mean, you can, but it would not be a productive pastime. 

We would be having this discussion even if the Blue Jays won the WS. As was mentioned earlier, spending doesn’t mean that team automatically wins the WS. But it does give them a far greater chance. I’m not really for a salary cap, but let’s not act like major spending teams don’t have an advantage every year. It would suck to be in the NL West and know every year you have to compete with a team who will outspend the competition by hundreds of millions of dollars. And let’s not also try to say everyone can spend like the Dodgers. Their revenues give them a huge advantage over most of baseball. I agree teams can and should spend a lot more, but even if they did the Dodgers would just spend more. They have an unfair advantage, but I don’t see a realistic salary cap with a floor and ceiling fixing it. Mainly because I don’t think the owners would really want a realistic floor and ceiling. Complete revenue sharing would never pass the large market teams. Full transparency of finances and revenues wouldn’t pass any teams vote, and a floor of 80% of the ceiling would never pass low revenue teams. Which is why even before players would vote on this, I don’t see owners agreeing to it. This is all a bs issue brought up by the owners. Like what has been said before, if they really wanted to share revenues they could have done it already. 

[CubinNY]

15 minutes ago, Rcal10 said:

We would be having this discussion even if the Blue Jays won the WS. As was mentioned earlier, spending doesn’t mean that team automatically wins the WS. But it does give them a far greater chance. I’m not really for a salary cap, but let’s not act like major spending teams don’t have an advantage every year. 

That's not the argument. The argument is "The Dodgers are buying championships."

[Stratos]

7 hours ago, Bertz said:

Yeah, Socialists hate when corporations pay workers too much.  You definitely understand how all this stuff works.

You understand that a floor raises payroll and player salaries on those affected teams right?  You understand that e.g. a floor of 200m and a cap of 300m would make the players a lot more money, right?

[Rcal10]

3 hours ago, CubinNY said:

That's not the argument. The argument is "The Dodgers are buying championships."

That isn’t my argument. Mine is there does need to be more balanced spending. One team shouldn’t spend $500M and another $50M. How they go about evening it a bit is up to them. But IMO revenue sharing has to be part of it. Not fake sharing. Real sharing but then no advantages to teams who still don’t spend a lot. No more extra picks. No more bigger rewards for losing a FA. No more extra IFA money. Everyone plays with the same rules, period.

[Bertz]

36 minutes ago, Stratos said:

You understand that a floor raises payroll and player salaries on those affected teams right?  You understand that e.g. a floor of 200m and a cap of 300m would make the players a lot more money, right?

This has nothing to do with what I wrote or what I responded to

[javy knows my name]

1 hour ago, Bertz said:

This has nothing to do with what I wrote or what I responded to

[Jason Ross]

Jim out here carrying a lot of water for owners this morning:

He forgot to check that the MLB has had six winners over the last eight years. Whoopsies. 

[Derwood]

44 minutes ago, Jason Ross said:

Jim out here carrying a lot of water for owners this morning:

He forgot to check that the MLB has had six winners over the last eight years. Whoopsies. 

And Toronto really should have won last year

[macarthur31]

I've been of the mind that for the Owners, the salary cap would be a huge win, but perhaps not enough to derail a whole season.  However, they could use it to push for other wins in the CBA.

However, included in MLB's original proposal is to pool all the local broadcast rights together to create an uber-package for a streamer, which is only viable if cap/floor is achieved.  Currently its just 48% of local revenue (which local TV deals are included) is pooled, and that gets redistributed at about $110M per team. 

Currently, the Dodgers make $334M per year in just their local TV deal - which means they still get to keep $173M of local tv money to themselves.  The other big local TV deals (and what stays home): 

• Yankees $217M ($113M stays);
• Angels $172M ($89M stays);
• Our Cubbies $132M ($68M stays);
• Mets $128M ($67M stays)
• Red Sox $110M ($57M stays)

Tom Ricketts may be quoted as "We love our independence," but consider that in the status quo, the Cubs get $90M share from the current national TV package.  While they may "lose" out on keeping $68M for themselves, the Cubs could potentially gain way more in a new super national TV package sold to Netflix or Amazon, and erase the disparity between the Cubs and the Dodgers ($173M-$68M in local tv deal that isn't currently pooled), AND get the salary cap (Ricketts/Cubs already cover "the floor", so that won't be deal breaker for them).  Another potential benefit for Ricketts is he gets to shutter Marquee ,or at least doesn't have to cover the costs of running local TV broadcasts (or a network).

Evan Drellich (The Athletic) affirms that without cap/floor, then there's no reason for the big markets to join in a national package, as the Dodgers would likely be content to keep cashing those checks in their deal which runs through 2038.

Again, as a fan, we don't really benefit as much as the owners will from a more centralized media package that the MLB can sell.  The NFL has national broadcasts for all regular season and playoffs, and fans still have to navigate through the different platforms (FOX, NFL, CBS, Amazon, Netflix, etc), and that will likely persist for MLB.  However, this may be a key driver in the Owners really committing to getting the cap/floor included - and as a result, I'm moving it over from Defcon 3 to Defcon 2.