MLB collective bargaining agreement negotiations are officially underway. President Donald Trump knows which side he’s taking.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, the president was asked about the MLB owners’ push for a salary cap. His immediate response: “They sort of have one, don’t they?” That likely refers to MLB’s “Cohen tax,” which forces the league’s highest spenders to pay 110% of their overage from a certain threshold.
After having the system explained to him, Trump went all-in on the idea of a salary cap before pivoting to his efforts to reform college sports:
“If you don’t have a salary cap you don’t have a sport, because they can’t help themselves. In sports, they can’t help themselves. Football has a salary cap.
“They should have done it a long time ago. I know so much about sports. They should have done it a long time ago. We’re trying to help save college sports because they got some rulings that essentially destroyed college sports. We’re working with [New York Yankees president] Randy Levine and [former Alabama head coach] Nick Saban and some great people who are trying to save it because it’s so horrible.”
MLB is indeed the only major professional sports league that doesn’t have a salary cap of some kind. It has used the luxury tax system for decades now, with top spenders also now docked draft pick position in addition to free agent compensation.
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For example, the last season saw the Los Angeles Dodgers pay a tax of $169 million for their World Series champion team, giving the roster a total price of $586.7 million between payroll and tax. They will also have to wait until the 40th pick to draft their first player due to that spending, with a diminished bonus pool as well.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred earlier this week that system has failed, despite four of six current division leaders being in the bottom half of payroll spending. The Dodgers are the lone team in the top 5 currently in first place.
President Trump wants a big change in baseball.
(Pool via Getty Images)
A salary cap has been a non-starter for the MLB Players Association since players were released from the reserve clause. MLB owners are now making their biggest push for one since 1994, reportedly proposing a $245.3 million salary cap, $171.2 million salary floor and 50-50 revenue split with the players. Per Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus, nine teams are currently above that cap, while 12 teams are below the floor, with the required salary adjustments favoring the league by $18.7 million.
The MLBPA predictably rejected the proposal, with interim executive director Bruce Meyer claiming it would have cost the players more than $500 million if instituted for the 2026 season.
Trump, who has a longstanding friendship with the leadership of the New York Yankees, still thinks a salary cap is a long time coming:
“Major League Baseball, it’s shocking, frankly, that they didn’t put a cap on many years ago. They had a chance to do a cap and they blew it.”
That “chance” would be the 1994 labor fight, in which MLB players elected to strike during the 1994 season in response to franchise owners proposing a salary cap for the next CBA, the failure of a Senate bill that would have revoked MLB’s antitrust exemption and the owners’ withholding of $8 million from their pension plan.
The strike led to the cancellation of the 1994 MLB postseason and would have seen MLB use replacement players had future Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor not issued an injunction against the league on the players’ behalf. The ruling led to a shortened 1995 season being played under the terms of the expired CBA.
It was a historically ugly fight that saw baseball’s popularity diminish until the 1998 home run race (which wound up having its own issues). Manfred said earlier this week he was afraid of a repeat.
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