Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred on Tuesday prior to the All-Star Game spoke to members of the press about an array of issues, including the ongoing negotiations with the players’ union on a new collective bargaining agreement.
There are many pain points in those negotiations, but the central issue is the owners’ push for a salary cap. MLB is the only non-capped major professional sports league in North America, and owners want to change that. A salary cap could decrease player salaries and increase franchise values. Publicly, though, the league is framing a cap as being a means to improve competitive balance within the sport. Manfred on Tuesday notably reiterated calls for a cap and repeated those same talking points.
The curiosity is that Manfred’s push for a cap comes as the sport is enjoying a bit of a boom. Attendance is up (on pace for the league’s highest tallies since 2017), television ratings are strong, a, and league revenues figure to grow again this year as MLB heads toward a new — and presumably more lucrative — suite of national-broadcast contracts in 2028. Many of Manfred’s on-field changes, such as the pitch clock and the new ABS challenge system, have proved popular and yielded the desired results. Pushing for a cap, though, requires the league to highlight problems that may not even exist in reality.
That means, in a throwback to the Bud Selig-era “anti-marketing” campaigns of the early 1990s, talking about how flawed the product you’re trying to sell is. That, in turn, means hammering competitive-balance issues that, to the extent they actually exist, would likely be far better addressed by changes to the local-revenue sharing system in place (which, to be fair, is also under negotiation with the MLBPA).
“Momentum in the game is a great thing,” Manfred told reporters on Tuesday, addressing this seeming disconnect. “We got that momentum by listening to fans. …The best way to lose momentum is to stand still.”
The “listening to fans” part is key, as Manfred and others on the league side have repeatedly in recent weeks suggested that fans — the paying customers – want a cap on team payrolls. Lacking, however, are any details about how MLB measured such a consensus — whether via formal fan poll or some other means. CBS Sports reached out to the league to ask what such claims are based on, but MLB has not yet responded.
The challenge for Manfred is wrenching such a major and unprecedented concession from the union, but before that became the leading objective, he had to build a consensus within an ownership group that has so often fractured along market-size fault lines. At present, Manfred says he has united owners when it comes to proposing equalized sharing of local revenues — an achievement, considering teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets, among others, figure to take significant revenue hits under such a new system — but that unity may depend upon getting a cap.
For now, though, it’s intact, at least to hear Manfred tell it. “I think that I have an ownership group that is more united than any group in my entire time of baseball,” Manfred on Tuesday. “They are a group that believes in what I am arguing for. “
He’s surely right, as owners, who are Manfred’s collective boss, tell him what to argue for.
On the other side, MLBPA interim head Bruce Meyer also met with the press ahead of the All-Star Game. “The supposed stewards of the game have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince those same fans that they don’t have hope or they shouldn’t have hope or that the product that they’re paying to consume in record numbers is somehow broken,” Meyer , capturing the contentious tenor of CBA talks to date. “I think it’s perverse.”
In their public comments, the two sides remain entrenched. Public comments are, of course, exercises in calculation and not always reflective of realities at the bargaining table. The safe assumption, though, is that the two sides remain far apart on tentpole issues, and that brings us to the widespread and firm expectation that Manfred and the owners who give him his orders will lock out the players when the current CBA expires on Dec. 1. At that point, a labor stoppage will begin, and that puts the 2027 season in some degree of peril.
During the negotiations on the 2022-26 CBA, owners locked out the players for 99 days, which pushed back and abbreviated spring training and compressed the regular-season calendar. In other words, games that mattered were very nearly lost. MLB hasn’t lost games to labor strife since the lacerating stoppage of 1994-95, when, not coincidentally, owners last made a vigorous push for a cap. As such, there is real risk that games will be lost this time. There’s another, lesser risk to be noted at the same time — that Manfred, in his final term as the figurehead atop the spot (he will step down in January 2029), will tarnish his legacy by presiding over an incomplete or even lost season in 2027.
That matters to him, and for all the progress the game has seen on his watch when it comes to on-field innovations and changes, much of that will be forgotten, or at least dismissed, if he squanders 30-plus years of what’s been less peace than an absence of outright war.
The Midsummer Classic will be celebrated on Tuesday night as it is every year, and then the second half of the season will begin with the trade deadline and stretch drive not far behind. Then comes the postseason and another hoisted trophy. Then, though, comes the winter and with it the most dangerous weeks and months the game has faced in decades. Much is at risk, and no stakeholder stands to gain or lose as much as Manfred does.
