MLB’s Rob Manfred is pushing for salary cap, and players are skeptical, union official says

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Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred recently outlined his plans to convince players to make big changes to the sport’s economics. Tuesday, Bruce Meyer, the second-in-command at the Major League Baseball Players Association, said Manfred is trying to push for a salary cap, and players in turn bear “the right amount of skepticism.”

This is the third straight year Manfred has held meetings with each team.

“It’s kind of continuation of a pattern which has gone on for decades, which is, the other side … tries to go directly to players, tries to create divisions between players,” said Meyer, the MLBPA’s deputy director, on the television show “Foul Territory.” “The league and some of the individual owners have made no secret that they would like to see a system that they tried to get for 50 years, which is a salary-cap system.”

MLB’s labor deal expires in December 2026. Baseball is the only major North American sport that does not have a salary cap, and the owners’ push for one was central to the 1994-95 strike, which led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. The owners have proposed a cap or something similar at least five times going back to the 1970s, Meyer said, and another such proposal appears likely when bargaining begins this round.

Manfred has said the owners have not yet chosen a course of action, but the arguments he makes to players seem tailored to a cap.

“The pitch is like, ‘Hey, this is really good for the players,’” Meyer said. “One of the things players immediately seize on is, ‘Well, if this is so good for us, then why are they pushing it so hard? Why do they want it so desperately? Why did the other leagues lock out players to get it?’

“Guys immediately understand that the reason they want that system is not because they want to pay players more.”

Manfred has continually expressed concern over the way fans perceive the difference in revenues in the sport. The Los Angeles Dodgers have a payroll that will cost them a projected $408 million in 2025, per Cot’s Contracts, an all-time high for the game. On the low end this season, the Miami Marlins come in at $86 million.

“I think the whole premise is wrong,” Meyer said on “Foul Territory.” “Baseball hasn’t had a repeat winner in 26 years. To fans in small markets, I would say, look, competition is crucial for us, crucial for players. Our market system that we have, it’s not perfect by any means, but it relies on competition.

“To the extent we have teams that are unwilling to compete, it’s not because the Dodgers went out and signed some players. That doesn’t explain why the Pittsburgh Pirates, for example, don’t go out and spend money.”

By market size, no bottom-15 team has won a World Series since the Kansas City Royals in 2015. Baseball’s playoff system is something of a crapshoot, however, making World Series victories an incomplete gauge.

“There are things you can do to incentivize teams to spend,” Meyer said. “Last time in bargaining, we proposed numerous changes to the revenue-sharing system. We said, ‘Look, it doesn’t make sense right now. You’re giving all this money to certain teams, and they’re not spending it, and they’re basically putting the money away.’ And what we heard from the league was, ‘We don’t disagree on some of these things, but we can’t change it. We won’t change it.’”

Players want a salary floor, but owners are not going to give up a floor without a cap, which is “really the opposite of competition,” Meyer said.

“It really is a form of collusion, he continued. “Nobody can compete to put the best team on the field on any given day.”

One of Manfred’s four points to players is that other major sports have a signing deadline, and therefore, more exciting free-agency periods. But cap systems would also likely bring less obvious changes that would be harmful to players, Meyer said. Baseball players have individual guaranteed contracts.

“You really can’t have them in the cap systems the way our players have them,” he said. “In football, this is most obvious. Every free-agent period is like a bloodbath. They’re cutting players, players at all levels — Pro Bowl players, middle-class players — to try and squeeze in a salary for a quarterback. Even the quarterbacks, they go to continuously and say, ‘Well, would you take less so we could sign this guy?’”

Meyer said escrow in basketball and hockey is significant because it also means pay in those sports is not guaranteed.

The union has been holding its own set of meetings with players. Meyer and the rest of the union leadership regularly visit every team during spring training, and during this season, they are holding lunches at which they discuss collective bargaining.

Meyer suggested there’s an irony to Manfred’s meetings with players.

“I’ve run into owners at games and things, and when I introduce myself, they literally say, ‘We’re not allowed to talk to you,’ Meyer said. “I think they get fined. … They’re apparently afraid of their owners talking to us individually.”

Though the players’ union does not operate its own television station the way the commissioner’s office does MLB Network, the MLBPA has had a financial relationship with the network on which Meyer appeared. “Foul Territory” is part of Make Plays Media, a company the MLBPA paid $207,500 to in 2024 for what’s listed as “media services,” per the union’s annual financial filing.

Since the 1994-95 strike ended, baseball had not entered a work stoppage until owners locked out the players in 2021. Spring training was delayed in 2022, but a new deal was reached that March without any games being missed.

Manfred has said multiple times that offseason lockouts are a norm in professional sports, a point the union has taken to mean a lockout in baseball is a foregone conclusion come December 2026.

“What are we doing then for the months before that, when we’re supposedly bargaining in good faith, if a lockout is a sure thing? Meyer asked on the program.

If there is another lockout, the key question will be the same as last time: Are any games missed?

“I think we got reasonable people on both sides, hopefully,” Meyer said. “I don’t think it’s in the economic interest of the owners, or the game, to shut down the game. They’re making lots of money.”

(Photo of Bruce Meyer: Richard Drew / Associated Press)

This news was originally published on this post .

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