Major League Baseball wants to cut eight games from its season and install a salary cap. Pitched this to the players union. Expected them to say yes.
The owners looked at 162 games of revenue and thought, you know what this needs? Less revenue. Fewer ticket sales. Shorter broadcast windows. A smaller pie to fight over while simultaneously telling millionaire players they need to accept a hard ceiling on what they can earn from that smaller pie.
This is the negotiating equivalent of walking into a car dealership and offering below sticker price while also setting your own trade-in on fire in the parking lot.
The players union has spent fifty years making sure baseball remains the only major American sport without a salary cap. Watched the NFL turn into a socialist collective where Kansas City and Green Bay get the same cut as New York. Saw the NBA install a soft cap so complicated it requires three accountants and a Ouija board to explain. Said no thanks, we'll take our chances with the Yankees writing blank checks.
Now the owners want to shorten the season and cap salaries in the same proposal. Like combining a root canal with a colonoscopy and calling it a wellness package.
The math works if you're huffing stadium nacho cheese. Eight fewer games means eight fewer chances to sell beer at eleven dollars a cup. Means fewer national broadcasts. Smaller local TV deals. Then you cap what you can pay your best players from that diminished pool of money and somehow expect them to smile about it.
The players will reject this faster than you can say luxury tax threshold. The owners will act wounded. Both sides will miss spring training games. Fans will threaten to stop watching and then watch anyway because they have nothing better to do in April.
Baseball just proposed paying its employees less money to work fewer days and thought that sounded like a win-win.
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
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