Baseball labor talks may look like a battle among millionaires, but it’s really about billionaires vs. peons
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- In their labor talks, baseball owners want to get richer and players want to hold on to their gains.
Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?
You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.
This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.
The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”
The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.
Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?
— The New Yorker, looking for a reason to hate L.A.
Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.
Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.
The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.
The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.
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But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.
The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.
It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Ohtanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.
The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2027 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.
That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.
The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.
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The issue then was — whad’ya know? — a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.
For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.
The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.
For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.
On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.
The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results ... and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.
The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.
The billionaire owner of the Oakland A’s ripped off his home-team fans and is staging a ripoff of Las Vegas, showing that civic leaders never learn that stadium subsidies never pay off.
The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.
Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.
Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).
Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).
The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).
Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?
The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.
The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that portraying the labor dispute as “millionaires versus billionaires” obscures the reality that billionaire owners hold far more economic power than players, who are often treated like “peons,” while frustrated fans adopt a “plague on both your houses” attitude toward rising prices and threats to the season.
The article contends that owners’ push for a hard salary cap and payroll floor is primarily about redirecting more money to billionaires, not protecting fans, and notes that claims of fan “clamor” for a cap or for canceling the 2027 season to achieve it are unsupported by evidence, echoing union leaders who describe the cap fight as an owner-driven money grab rather than a response to genuine fan demand[4][5][12][14].
The article emphasizes the economic gulf between the sides, highlighting that although the minimum major league salary of $780,000 sounds high, most players have short careers and limited earning windows, while nearly all team owners are multibillionaires whose personal fortunes dwarf even record player contracts; this framing aligns with outside analyses that stress how proposed cap systems would still preserve extremely high franchise values and owner profits even as players face tighter limits[4][11][14].
The article invokes baseball’s labor history, especially the 1975 reserve clause arbitration that opened the free‑agency era, to argue that owners have a pattern of overstating existential threats to the sport whenever their control is challenged, a dynamic mirrored in current union criticism that cap proposals are justified with dire rhetoric but are fundamentally about restraining player pay and weakening guarantees[5][9][14].
The article warns that owners’ implied willingness to lock out players and potentially cancel the 2027 season repeats the self‑destructive approach of the 1994 shutdown, which severely damaged attendance and fan loyalty, and suggests that risking another lost season in an era of intense competition for viewers’ attention would be “insanity or stupidity”; this skepticism tracks with reporting that a lockout is again looming as owners push a cap over the union’s long‑standing opposition[4][5][13].
The article challenges the owners’ “competitive balance” rationale by noting that since 2015 a wide mix of teams, including several with modest payrolls, have reached the World Series, while high‑spending clubs like the Mets have struggled, concluding that smart roster construction matters more than total payroll; similar arguments from union proposals focus on enforcing revenue‑sharing rules and penalizing low‑spending teams rather than imposing an overall cap[11][12].
The article suggests that the true objective of the proposed cap is to tie the hands of big‑spending franchises and lock in higher franchise values, not to ensure fairness or protect the health of the game, and it points to the owners’ readiness to risk a lockout as evidence of how far management is willing to go to reshape the economic system in its favor, paralleling outside commentary that sees the cap drive as an effort to boost valuations and consolidate owner leverage over labor[4][5][11].
Different views on the topic
In contrast, league officials and many owners argue that a hard salary cap paired with a payroll floor would “level the playing field” and address what they describe as serious competitive‑balance problems, presenting the proposal as a way to ensure that fans in smaller markets can expect their teams to contend more regularly[2][3][7][9][11][14].
Opposing perspectives stress that Major League Baseball remains the only major U.S. men’s team sport without a salary cap, and point to the NFL, NBA and NHL—where caps and formal revenue splits are standard—as examples of systems that have produced broad parity and sustained national interest, suggesting that baseball risks falling behind if it does not adopt similar economic structures[1][3][8][9][10].
League spokespeople promote the current offer of a 50‑50 split of baseball‑related revenue between players and clubs, coupled with a cap around $245 million and a floor near $171 million, arguing that this framework would allow players to share equally in future revenue growth while providing owners with predictable costs and a more stable business environment[2][3][6][11][12][14].
MLB has cited polling to bolster its case, pointing to an independent Morning Consult survey indicating that large majorities of “avid” and “casual” fans support the adoption of a salary cap, and using those findings to claim that the proposed system reflects fan priorities rather than merely ownership preferences[2].
Some owners and analysts argue that the current luxury‑tax setup is “broken” and that widening payroll disparities undermine the integrity of competition, with wealthy clubs spending far more than rivals; they contend that only a true cap‑and‑floor system can curb what they see as runaway spending, protect smaller‑revenue franchises, and keep the league’s economic ecosystem from tilting too far toward a handful of dominant teams[1][4][7][11].
Management figures have signaled a willingness to risk a lockout if necessary to secure structural change, asserting that short‑term disruption is justified by the long‑term benefits of a cap, and warning that failing to act now will leave underlying inequalities to worsen in ways that could ultimately harm both the sport’s finances and its credibility with fans[4][5][7][13][15].
Public communications from MLB emphasize that the proposal includes a significant increase in the minimum salary—rising from $780,000 to about $1 million for many players—as well as a payroll floor that would force low‑spending clubs to invest more in their rosters, and argue that these elements would particularly benefit rank‑and‑file players and improve overall competitive intensity even if the very highest salaries face new constraints[4][11][12][14].
