Major League Baseball (MLB) players and their minor league counterparts are represented by the Major League Baseball Players’ Association (MLBPA), established in 1966. Over the past six decades, the MLBPA has become arguably the strongest union in professional sports, securing major league player minimum salaries of $780,000 and a pension plan that kicks in after just 43 days of service. With the 2022 addition of minor league players, the union has grown to 6,700 members.
Despite rumors of decline, MLB continues to become even more popular around the globe. Television ratings are up 44% so far this season, a 10-year high mark. MLB franchises are more valuable than ever, too. In April, the San Diego Padres franchise sold for $3.9 billion, nearly five times the $800 million it sold for in 2012. The sale marked the third straight season an MLB franchise was sold for over a billion dollars.
The current MLB-MLBPA collective bargaining agreement expires on December 1, 2026. In late May, the two sides traded initial proposals. The exchange revealed huge disparities. Players want more organizations to spend their money to field competitive teams. Owners want a salary cap to curb skyrocketing player salaries. With less than six months to go, the gap threatens a 2027 MLB season.
The Labor Press spoke with MLBPA’s interim executive director Bruce Meyer about the negotiations.
CONOR KELLEY: Major League Baseball players are some of the most visible union members in the world. How do you see their role in the union movement as a representative of organized workers?
BRUCE MEYER: Great question. As you say, our union has always been one of the most high-profile unions in the world because of the industry we’re involved in, and we’ve always very keenly felt our responsibility to the broader labor movement. We’ve made efforts over the years to become active in the AFL-CIO. We’ve always highly valued our role in the broader labor movement, and I think our players pride themselves on the fact that we have been an example of success in the labor movement. Through collective action and through solidarity, we’ve been able to make gains over the years and fend off attempts by our employers to make conditions worse, by maintaining that solidarity, which is what it’s all about.
Sometimes we say phrases over and over and kind of forget their meaning. Can you explain from your perspective, the value of a player, a worker, a person having “free agency”?
We used to have what they called the ‘reserve clause,’ which meant that the club could keep you forever [at the same salary], if they wanted to. Players who had great years would be asked by teams to take a pay cut, and it was ‘take it or leave it.’ The player had no recourse and no leverage because they could just renew your contract in perpetuity. Having free agency gave players the ability to realize their value in a free market, and that resulted in all kinds of gains for players over the years. But the owners have tried many different times to cut back on those rights and to limit players’ salaries, limit players’ freedom of movement, and they’re doing it again now. It’s an ongoing fight.
What’s the average player’s experience like getting the free agency that every other worker experiences, to shop their services around to any employer in their industry?
The way our system has evolved, it takes a long time for players to be able to get close to their true market value, even though the players are the ones producing all this value for an over $12 billion industry. In our system, players have to go through the minor leagues, and a lot of players [when they reach the Major Leagues] make the minimum salary, which we collectively bargain and has gone up to record levels. Then they have the ability to go to salary arbitration, which was something that was heavily bargained over, and that gives them something approaching more of a market value. Then true free agency.
The argument from owners in favor of a salary cap appears to be that smaller market teams can’t afford these huge Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto type contracts (Ohtani signed a 10-year $700 million contract and Soto signed for 15 years at $765 million). So they argue that we need to cap those, but that this cap wouldn’t hurt any other players. Is that true?
I’ve been on the record a lot recently on this. It’s nonsense. They want a salary cap system because they want to cap their costs while they increase the values of their franchises, none of which gets shared with players. In a salary cap system, their notion is the top guys will get less, but it’ll be really good for the middle class. That’s actually not true. We see from the other sports is actually the opposite. The middle-class players get screwed worse than anybody in those systems, because once you make it a zero-sum game, you know they’ll take care of the stars, and everyone else gets what’s left over.
But the smaller market teams are always saying they don’t have the money to be able to compete with these bigger market franchises to field winning teams.
The billionaires who own these teams don’t disclose their finances to the fans. Fans know how much the players make, but they don’t know how much profit a small market team makes. Some of these teams that are complaining the loudest are among the most profitable teams. Also, in baseball, it’s simply not true that those [small market] teams can’t compete. Just last year the Milwaukee Brewers, the smallest-market team in baseball, 30th out of 30, had the best record. The Cincinnati Reds beat out the New York Mets for the playoffs. So it’s a fallacy used by the owners for decades to justify restrictions on player freedom and compensation. When they were fighting against free agency, they made all the same arguments.
Can you speak to anything specific in the first MLBPA proposal that might be able to help fans believe that if they’re — for instance — a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, they will be compelled by this new CBA to actually spend the money to try and make another run at the World Series?
Our [proposed] system would allow more revenue sharing than currently exists, but our proposals also have heightened requirements for the clubs that get that support to spend it. In our view, revenue sharing can be a good thing. It’s designed to give clubs more resources to use to compete, but if they’re not doing that and they’re just putting it in their pockets in the way of profits, that doesn’t benefit fans.
The Atlanta Braves’ financial information is publicly available, and some people use that to gain a sense of how a typical MLB organization is doing financially from year to year. Would you say that’s accurate?
We are required by the league to keep that confidential. We wish we could share that with fans and the media, but all I can say is these baseball franchise values are increasing astronomically. The industry is doing great. We have great momentum. There’s no shortage of people like private equity and such who want to invest in these teams, so any cries of poverty are extremely unfounded and are really just for collective bargaining purposes to try and impose more restrictions on player compensation.
Speaking of private equity, do you think that with more and more outside money flowing into these organizations, it presents an affordability problem for the average fan? There is a concern that Major League Baseball, much like we’ve seen with the NBA and NHL over recent years, is becoming more of a premium experience, and not a cheap way to spend the day at the ballpark with your family. Can you speak to those concerns?
Owners set ticket prices, not players, and owners set ticket prices as high as they think they can get away with, to maximize their revenues. Any economist will tell you that they set ticket prices based on how much they think they can get. When there are teams that don’t spend to win and have terrible records, you don’t see them lowering their ticket prices. But the notion is that player salaries are somehow forcing them to raise ticket prices. That’s not how it works. They are profit maximizers, and they will charge as much as they think the market can bear. At the end of the day, that’s the owner’s decision. Our players are extremely conscious of fan sentiment. We were all fans. Players all grew up as fans. Nobody wants to see the average fan priced out, and at the end of the day, that’s a decision made by the owners over which we have no direct control.
So you’re saying players getting their market value in free agency doesn’t affect the price of my hot dog.
A lot of people find that hard to believe, but again, if you talk to any economist about this, ticket prices really aren’t driven by player salaries. It’s driven by what the owners think. They will charge what they think the amount is that will maximize their profits. At the end of the day, the owners aren’t going to pass any cost savings on to the fans. They’ve never done that, and they never will.
Anything that you’d like to say to the fans about an impending lockout or a delay to the season next year? People are concerned that these opening proposals from your union and MLB seem pretty far away from an agreement.
First of all, a lockout is something the owners do, not something the players do. We’re all expecting the league is going to do a lockout in December, and that’s going to be their decision. But nothing requires them to do a lockout. We can keep negotiating without it. We will be negotiating in good faith, as always. We will be prepared to meet wherever and whenever the league is willing to meet. If there’s a way to avoid a lockout or missing games, we are 100% interested in doing that. To the fans: We will do our job as we’ve always done to represent our members, and to make sure that they get rewarded for their value, like any employee wants to be rewarded for the value they bring. At the end of the day, the fans are what keeps the entire sport going, and we’re cognizant of that. And we’re not going to allow the owners to push an unfair deal on us, or one that gives up gains that generations of players have fought and sacrificed for.
