MIAMI — Baseball is headed to an abyss, a likely owner-initiated lockout due to labor discord. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires after this season, with little likelihood a new one will be waiting to take its place. The entire 2027 MLB season is at risk. And the sport — players in uniform and executives in suits alike — all march toward the cliff in shackles of their own design, seemingly helpless to find a compromise.
The crux issue at the center of the infighting is clear, and a reminder of it came this week at the MLB trade deadline, when the huge-spending, back-to-back reigning World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers struck a deal for the grand prize in dealing for Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the back-to-back AL Cy Young winner.
Watching the Dodgers of all teams land Skubal was like finding out the winner of last night’s Powerball lottery was Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. Who said life (or baseball) was fair?
L.A. is now an even bigger betting favorite to be first team to win three straight World Series since the Yankees from 1998 to 2000. It is because the Dodgers literally are the best team money can buy.
Baseball leads all sports in the rich-getting-richer because “America’s Pastime” is the wild, wild West — lawless of the one rule that limits unlimited spending: a salary cap to help level the playing field.
MLB and its owners are pushing for a hard salary cap that very notably also would include a minimal-payroll floor. The players and their union are flatly against that — especially the salary cap on payroll spending — and call the issue a non-starter. There is no evidence of either side budging.
MLB and its owners are right on this.
The players are wrong.
The game and players will benefit more from forcing cheapskate teams to spend than it will suffer from putting a limit on the top spenders. MLB’s proposal is not revolutionary; it’s simply baseball trying to play catch-up.
The NFL has a strict, hard salary cap and is somehow America’s most popular sport because of it or despite it depending on your view. The NHL also has a hard cap and does quite well for itself. The NBA has a softer cap system that allows teams to exceed the threshold for certain roster exceptions, but dishes out harsh luxury-tax penalties when spending goes beyond threshold-limits.
In baseball anything goes. No ceiling, no floor. Haves and have-nots. Teams like the Dodgers, the two New York teams and the Phillies seemingly know no limits. Other teams — like the Miami Marlins, just to use a totally random example — squeeze a nickel hard enough to make Thomas Jefferson cry.
But the NFL, NBA and NHL also all have minimum spending requirements, or salary floors, while MLB egregiously and shamefully does not.
Hey, baseball, feel free to dip a toe in the 21st Century. Managers no longer wear suits in the dugout like Connie Mack. Pitchers no longer throw 400 innings a year. Might be time to try a more modern business model, as well.
Right now, the range in the 30 teams’ player payrolls is from a high of $371.1 million to a low of $78.1 million, per Spotrac.
MLB’s proposal is a hard cap of $243.5 million per team, and a mandatory minimum payroll of $171.2 million. This would shrink the overall disparity from a current $293 million to a proposed $72.3 million — cutting the haves/have-nots factor and leveling the playing field by about 75%.
Sounds good to me. And it should sound good to players.
If that proposed ceiling and floor were in play this season, the eight clubs over the ceiling would have to cut payroll by a combined $578 million, while the 12 teams under the floor would have to raise payrolls by a combined $617 million. That alone demonstrates a net overall gain of $39 million for players.
MLB’s new proposal also includes a roughly 50-50 split of total revenue with players, akin to what is used in the NFL, NBA and NHL.
Natural, MLB’s salary-cap proposal isn’t popular with agents, especially those whose top-tier free agent players will no longer enjoy a limitless bidding war by the richest team.
But the vast majority of players not on that top tier, the proletariat, will benefit from the MLB proposal and its spend-at-least this much payroll floor. That includes the half of teams (15 of 30) whose current payrolls are below the proposed new minimum.
The Marlins of course notoriously are among baseball’s cheapest teams, led by penurious owner Bruce Sherman. Miami’s current payroll of $80.2 million (per Spotrac) ranks 20th of 30 teams. It’s less than half of the proposed minimum.
Marlins fans tired of the budget-ball should be rooting for MLB’s labor proposal to pass if only because it would require Sherman and other unwilling cheapskate owners to finally spend to competitive. As it is, three of the Marlins’ NL East rivals alone spend in the top 10 (Mets first, Phillies fourth, Braves sixth).
No team on the bottom end of that disparity can hope to make up such a spending difference, not even teams (like the Marlins) who think they can make up being cheap by being smarter than everybody else with analytics, growing a farm system and so forth. Guess what, cheap teams? The big spenders — they’re smart, too. The Dodgers have a great farm system. They use analytics. And they buy great, proven players while the misers are left hoping the 13th- and 24th-ranked players in their farm system maybe start panning out.
The Marlins stood 58-56 on Wednesday and two games back in the NL wild-card chase. They might have spent at the trade deadline to acquire, say, a big right-handed bat. Instead, they made four small trades, mostly for minor-league prospects.
The Marlins, self-dubbed the ”Fightin’ Fish” to convey a fun team, a bunch of underdogs playing hard, continue working toward a future that never seems to arrive, begging patience of their fans. President of baseball operations Peter Bendix is doing a great job for a man in handcuffs. MLB’s labor proposal would help remove those handcuffs by forcing Sherman to start spending like a serious owner who wants to win now, not just kick the can down the road by doing the minimum.
“We believe that the best is yet to come for the Marlins, and we are still building towards what we are trying to accomplish,” said Bendix on Tuesday.
It is working to a degree, if gradually. Miami has the skeleton of a promising team, with good players such as young starter Eury Perez and all-star shortstop Otto Lopez, whom they were smart to keep at the deadline despite overtures from Boston and other clubs. But imagine how it might be with more than a 100% increase in spending as the new labor proposal would assure?
When I say the status quo isn’t enough, I mean this is a sports market that needs more than a try-hard team plugging along at around .500 to celebrate. That’s why the “Fightin’ Fish” rank 29th of 30 teams in home attendance just as they do in player payroll … almost as if that were a coincidence?
The owner Sherman has demonstrated he won’t spend to a competitive level of his own volition just because he should.
He and other cheap owners will do it only if forced to, which MLB’s labor proposal would at long last require.