Four franchise owners voted against the last proposal Major League Baseball submitted to the MLB Players Association on Tuesday, according to SNY’s Andy Martino. When the union unanimously rejected the league’s proposal, commissioner Rob Manfred made good on a preexisting threat by canceling the first two series of the season, thereby ensuring the owner-imposed lockout would leak into a third month.
Per Martino’s sources, even more owners would have joined the “nay” side if the league’s proposal offered a Competitive Balance Tax threshold higher than $220 million. As Martino noted, that could prove to be an issue heading forward, given that it takes only eight “no” votes to derail the ratification of a new CBA.
The CBT has become a hot-button topic in negotiations for reasons that CBS Sports explained elsewhere. The short version is that the CBT was originally introduced as a luxury tax, but owners have since bent it into a salary cap. While there’s no evidence that either improves parity, both are proven to be effective tools of wage suppression. Few teams have shown a willingness to exceed the CBT, and even fewer have dared to cross the threshold on a consistent basis. By any honest analysis, the hardliners are treating breakaway spending as an existential threat when it is not.
The league’s proposal would have set the lowest tax threshold at $220 million and then increased it to $230 million by the end of the CBA. The union, conversely, proposed setting it at $238 million and eventually topping out at $263 million.
If, as Martino reported, four owners were against raising the CBT higher than $220 million, then the league could have trouble securing enough votes to pass a new CBA if they so much as meet in the middle and agree to set next year’s number around $230 million.
Of course, that’s a problem for Manfred, the league, and the other owners to figure out — not the players. A new CBA could include an expanded postseason and the introduction of advertisements on helmets and uniforms, a combination that could generate more than $200 million in additional revenue. The league could then create an even greater windfall by making deals in the streaming and broadcast arenas.
In other words, there’s plenty of money waiting to be made in a new CBA — provided, that is, Manfred and the rest of the owners can convince four-plus parties they’re seeing ghosts.
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