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Let’s pick up where we left off with last week’s flurry of news, shall we?
If Manfred can’t convince the MLBPA of a salary cap, he’ll convince the players
A salary cap is a non-starter for the Major League Baseball Players Association. The league’s owners can bring up their desire for one as often as they’d like — and for some of them, that’s turning out to be more often than it used to be — but the PA has a standing “never going to happen don’t even ask about it” policy when it comes to salary caps.
So, what’s a league commissioner to do when his bosses keep chanting “salary cap!” while the union on the other side of the table says “no”? Talk directly to the players, of course. Or at least that’s what Manfred has settled on, per the Sports Business Journal.
“The strategy is to get directly to the players,” Manfred said at [Atlanta Braves] Investor Day. “I don’t think the leadership of this union is anxious to lead the way to change. So we need to energize the workforce in order to get them familiar with or supportive of the idea that maybe changing the system could be good for everybody.”
Manfred said he makes four main points while talking with players:
* “Over the last 20 years, the slowest growing salaries among the four major professional sports: baseball. And when I make that point, what I usually say to the players is it’s a failure on our part. How it can be that our salaries are growing slower than other sports is a failure on our part.”
* “10% of our players earn 72% of the money. So I usually try to avoid the high earning guy at this point, and find a younger player and say if you’re one of the 10%, it’s a great deal. But if you’re the other 90, it ain’t so good.”
* “And then I talk about our free agency and compare it to other sports. Other sports, they have free agency, it’s about a month. There’s lots of bidders. It’s a great marketing opportunity for the sport. Players have their choice of where to go. All positive. Our free agency is like the Bataan Death March. It starts the day after the World Series and in February really, really good players are still wandering around the landscape.”
Not to do the “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this meme,” but “in February, really, really good players are still wandering around the landscape” is on the team side, in their quest to reduce player leverage as much as possible to make them desperate to sign. Having a salary cap wouldn’t change that, it would just alter the shape of that desperation — once all the holes have filled up in a hurry because there’s less money to go around and the same number of jobs, a player would be forced to sign a deal they’re not going to be happy about, just like before, only sooner. Is that a big victory?
All of this is on the team side, really — including the last point, which Manfred says is that the percentage of revenue going to players has dropped from 63 percent in 2002 to 47 percent in the present. The idea, for years, was to erode player gains and get them into a position where a salary cap seemed like the only way out. This was the trajectory that things were for one for years and years as the PA fought a little less strongly for the things they should have been, a tendency that began after the 1994 strike ended and the players had a harder time mustering the militancy needed to maintain the strength of the union, since life was going pretty good for them and all. Bargaining over the shape of compensation in 2020, and the 2021-2022 negotiations for a new CBA amid a lockout, reversed this course, and kept the brute force of the league from working to finally crush the union as they’d hoped it would. Hence this newer strategy from Manfred.
It’s worth pointing out, too, that it’s not a bad strategy at all. I’d be a little nervous if I were union leadership, actually — not in the sense that Manfred and the league will convince all the players of the truth of things here, just more that if the PA doesn’t step in to correct what’s wrong here, then a whole bunch of players are going to get the wrong impression of things. Manfred’s issue for much of his time as commissioner has been that his asks are very obviously absurd and anti-player, like tying a damsel in distress to railroad tracks level of obvious. These are a bit more insidious, since they sound pretty reasonable on the surface. And it doesn’t help that MLB actually does have an issue where the vast, vast majority of the money goes to a small percentage of players — this is something that I’ve written about in the past as something that needs fixing, which is also why I was in favor of a much higher minimum salary than even the significant bump the union won in the 2022 CBA gave them.
This is a legitimate in, is the thing, and if you make enough players paranoid about how they’re actually worse off for not having a salary cap… well, it could make for, if not a problem, at least some dissent within the union’s ranks come bargaining time, which is not what you want. “There’s no way the players would ever be tricked en masse like this,” you might say, but remember: the NFL, NBA, NHL, WNBA, MLS, and NWLS all have salary caps in place. Players agreed to these salary caps — unions agreed to these caps. MLB doesn’t have one yet, but the right (or wrong) series of conversations could change that, and it’s better to be vigilant, even overly cautious, to keep that from happening.
The Rays might sell; what would that mean for a stadium?
The important thing to know out of the gate here is that we don’t actually know anything about the Rays’ potential sale. There might not even be a sale, for one — a letter of intent is merely that, and it’s not the first one that Stuart Sternberg has received in his life — so anything beyond that is guesswork. Here’s what’s floating out there, however.
While Pinellas County Commissioner Chris Latvala seems willing to reopen the deal for a St. Petersburg stadium — a deal that the Rays turned down earlier this spring after working forever to get the thing agreed to, as they realized at the last minute that no team should want to open a stadium next to the existing one — he apparently believes that the potential ownership group interested in the Rays would move the club to Tampa proper.
“This is certainly welcoming news for Rays fans in Tampa Bay,” Latvala told WDAE. “I think the likelihood of them staying in Tampa Bay has gone up tremendously.”
Latvala noted Zalupski is “good friends” with Governor Ron DeSantis. Hagan said he also recently met with DeSantis, who would support state funding subsidizing stadium infrastructure.
“Those dollars would go to our side of the ledger if you will,” [Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken ]Hagan added. “So, I think there’s some additional funding sources.”
So, you’ve got the county commissioner for the county, Hillsborough, that Tampa is located within, speaking with local media to agree that new ownership is probably looking at and suited for moving the team there rather than going back to St. Petersburgh. Like said, nothing is known, but a lot of pieces are potentially moving into place here. Which makes sense, as I said back in March when the previous deal fell through:
Sternberg’s counter to MLB for not taking the St. Petersburg deal was basically that it wouldn’t help the Rays escape their reliance on revenue-sharing, and it would be taking a bad deal for the next 30 years just to have a deal. Which is correct, to be fair — we’ve been over why the St. Pete deal was an expensive (for taxpayers) non-upgrade over the current Tropicana situation before, but it took a hurricane and some time checking out the Tampa-based spring training facility the Rays will spend their 2025 season in for their owner to notice as much. We can’t all be blessed with common sense or the ability to look at a map, I guess.
…
Now, if a Tampa-based buyer wants to pick up the team and keep it in the region — a preference for Manfred, given Tampa is a whole other beast than St. Petersburg — then the team can finally end up in the place it should have been from the start. The St. Petersburg location was convenient, in that a stadium already existed there, but it’s difficult to access, it isn’t central to the region, and it takes forever to end up at the Trop even if you’re just in next-door Tampa. Consider how much less likely folks from Orlando are to make the trip to St. Petersburg, given that. It’s not just Orlando, of course, but even Tampa’s suburbs.
So, here we are. A potential ownership group that a pair of relevant county commissioners believe signals a move to Tampa, with potential connections for state funding to help with the more expensive stadium that would result from a move. Nothing is a given, especially not when it comes to the Rays and literally anything about a stadium, but this appears to be the current shape of things.
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