MLBPA Exec Rips Owners' Salary Cap Proposal, Says Players Would Lose $500M in New System

The war of words between MLB's ownership and the MLBPA is heating up ahead of what is expected to be a contentious round of collective bargaining agreements, and a potential work stoppage in 2027.

Major League Baseball is seeking to add a salary cap and salary floor to the sport, while the players have consistently maintained that they would never accept a cap.

"Player share [of industry revenue], under their proposal, would go down," Union interim executive director Bruce Meyer told Eric Fisher of Front Office Sports after MLB proposed a hard cap of $245.3 million and hard floor of $171.2 million. "Your contracts are never really guaranteed."

Meyer estimated that the players would be looking at a loss of $500 million of compensation under such a system if it were in place for the 2026 season.

"I thought they would try harder to make it look good, and they didn't even do that," he added. "They've effectively managed to cobble together the worst system for players in any of the major sports, and it's not even close."

Baseball's owners are yet again pushing for a salary cap, contending that it is needed for competitive balance given the enormous disparity in spending between the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers of the world and the bottom spenders, with six clubs failing to reach a payroll of $100 million.

"Our salary cap and floor proposal addresses our fans' concerns by leveling the playing field while sharing baseball revenue with the players 50-50, like the other leagues," MLB spokesman Glen Caplin said. "Under our proposal, Major League players will receive more compensation in year one of the system than in 2026. We are ready to listen if the MLBPA wants to counter our proposal at the bargaining table."

But Meyer contended that small-market teams are perfectly capable of competing in the current system if they actually want to contend, and the MLBPA in general has argued that MLB owners are simply trying to inflate franchise values.

"San Diego is a small-market team. They went out, decided to compete, signed a lot of players, turned around their franchise," he noted. "They've grown attendance. They've grown interest, and we've all seen the exploding in their franchise value. They went under our revenue-sharing system from a revenue-sharing recipient to a revenue-sharing payor because they went out and tried to compete."

The MLBPA's initial proposal, made last week, made no mention of a salary cap. Rather, ESPN's Jorge Castillo reported that it called for "sharing more local television revenue than the current CBA stipulates, a 'competitive-integrity tax' for low-spending teams that mirrors the competitive balance tax for top-spending clubs, a raise of the base competitive balance tax threshold from $244 million to $300 million and nearly doubling minimum salaries."

Both sides are going to start negotiations with best-case outcomes in mind. Generally, concessions are made by both parties and a resolution is eventually reached. But the differences between the two initial proposals are so fundamentally different that a work stoppage, in this case, simply feels inevitable.