PHILADELPHIA — It’s just the first inning in this year’s collective-bargaining negotiations for a new basic agreement. The current five-year deal expires on Dec. 1.
But if one listens to the principals at this point, there seems to be little wiggle room on the main contention of the talks — a salary cap. Both sides are immovable. The result will certainly be an owners’ lockout of the players this offseason; the only question is whether games will be missed during the 2027 season if both sides remain locked in their positions.
Bruce Meyer, the new executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, and Rob Manfred, in his waning days as baseball commissioner, said on Tuesday their sides are solidly for or against the cap. Both men elaborated on their positions at an annual meeting of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in the hours before Tuesday’s All-Star Game at Citizens Bank Park won by the American League over the National League, 4-0.
“I have an ownership group that’s more united than any time I’ve been in baseball,” said Manfred, who succeeded Bud Selig in 2015 and has said he will retire at the end of his current term in 2029.
“Salary caps are a bad offense,” said Meyer, who replaced Tony Clark this past spring after eight years as the union’s general counsel and lead negotiator. “Salary caps prevent teams from doing the things they believe are in the interest of making the team better.”
The players have had a long-standing aversion to a cap that goes back decades, and the current alignment under Clark and Meyer has been saying for the past two years that a cap is a non-starter.
Of course, in their first foray at negotiations, the owners proposed a cap of $245.3 million and a floor of $171.2 million. They then added a dismantling of the amateur draft system completely excluding high school players.
“Seventy to 75% of our players are college players now,” Manfred said. “That’s the state of play. Years ago, decades ago nobody had a good word to say about college players. That’s changed dramatically. The college programs are great.”
For the owners, this is all about saving money and consolidating their profits. Add a continued escalation of team valuations, Meyer said.
The players have become even more united every time MLB puts a new proposal on the table.
“They’ve made it easy,” Meyer said.
MLB lags behind other salary-capped leagues in valuations. For instance, the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers were sold last year to Dodgers owner Mark Walter for $10 billion. The NFL’s Seattle Seahawks were just purchased by San Francisco 49ers limited partner Vinod Khosia for $9.6 billion.
The Padres are in the process of being sold to investment firm and European soccer owner Jose E. Feliciano and his wife Kwanza Jones for an MLB record valuation of $3.9 billion. Of course, baseball’s highest valued franchises, the Yankees ($8.2 billion) and Dodgers ($7.8 billion), according to Forbes, are not for sale. The average MLB club is valued at $2.9 billion.
The players are no paupers, either, with an average salary this season of $5.34 million, up 3.4% from 2025.
The owners see a salary cap and cost certainty as a way of getting to where the other higher-valued leagues are now.
“Owners try to maximize their profits at the expense of players in every sport since the dawn of time,” said Meyer, who’s also worked in the player unions in the NBA, NHL and NFL. The players, going back to Marvin Miller, who came from United Steelworkers of America and had no sports background, have never had an executive director with Meyer’s sports labor experience.
Clark was a former player and former union executive director Don Fehr was a lawyer from within the MLBPA system.
“Owners in all of sports have tried to keep as much control over players’ lives and careers as they could and to wrest back any advances,” Meyer added. “Again, that’s what they do. I understand it from their standpoint. But our job is representing players, and players believe they are representing the game and the fans.”
Manfred stipulated on Tuesday that these negotiations are all about competitive balance and MLB is listening to fans, particularly in smaller market cities where there’s a perception their teams have little chance to win.
Manfred said MLB’s process of listening to fans “is very sophisticated.”
“We use professional pollsters,” he said. “We cut our demographics — big market, small market, by age, by ability. We do focus groups to get a more granular view of what people are saying. We pay attention to those things.”
It’ll be a long, hot summer of this kind of posturing, but don’t expect negotiations to get serious until after the Dec. 1 deadline.
Right now, it’s the top of the second inning.