Commentary: Baseball labor talks may look like a battle among millionaires, but it’s really about billionaires vs. peons

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?

Is any labor dispute today caricatured more than the contract negotiations between Major League Baseball owners and their players?

You know the theme: It’s about already-overpaid millionaire ballplayers and their billionaire masters grasping for more. As the rich get richer we, the fans, are going to pay the price.

This idea became more widespread on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers acquired ace lefthander Tarik Skubal to contribute to the team’s quest for a third straight World Series title.

The trade inspired complaints that the team’s wealth was bad for the game, inspiring headlines such as this from the New Yorker: “Did the Dodgers Ruin Baseball?”

The owners’ proposal for a salary cap is the central issue in negotiations just now. It’s said that fans are clamoring for a cap, but the people saying that are the owners, and it’s not like they’ve provided any evidence for the claim.

Anyway, the idea that the fans are clamoring to cancel the 2027 season — an implicit threat by the owners — just for a rule change that would put more money in billionaires’ pockets doesn’t strike me as remotely plausible.

Negotiations between the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. over the renewal of the existing contract, which expires on Dec. 1, are expected to continue through early March, when the impending start of the new season will generate pressure to get a deal done.

The two sides already have started to butt heads over the salary cap. The owners’ proposal, issued in May, is for a cap of $245.3 million per team, paired with a payroll floor of $171.2 million. The players are adamantly opposed to any such thing. That and other changes sought by the owners, including a ban on deferred contract payments, would have barred contracts such as Shohei Ohtani’s and Juan Soto’s, which have huge deferred balances.

The trope that the parties contesting the contract renewal are all millionaires battling over the same pie and sticking the fans with the cost via higher ticket prices, parking fees, beer prices, etc., etc., deserves to be put in context. To the extent it’s heard from fans, it seems to reflect a “plague on both your houses” mentality among people who know they’re being mulcted by the system and don’t know who to blame. So they blame everybody.

But the two sides aren’t equal as a general thing. The minimum major league salary this year is $780,000. That’s a significant advance over 2010, when it was $400,000 (about $616,000 in today’s money) and it sounds like a lot for, say, a 22-year-old kid fresh out of the sticks. But the context is that it applies to those who, having made a team and stayed in the lineup all season, are among the 720 most exceptionally talented athletes in the country and, increasingly, the world.

The MLB owners are in a different stratosphere from even the best-paid ballplayers. Soto’s record contract from the Mets is valued at $765 million over 15 years, but of the owners of the 30 MLB teams, 27 are billionaires, topped by hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of the Mets, who has a net worth of $22 billion. The investment tycoon Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ majority owner (and controlling shareholder of the NBA Lakers, which he is selling), clocks in at third place, with $13.3 billion.

It’s tempting to treat the superstars with contracts at the high nine-figure level — the Juan Sotos, Aaron Judges, Shohei Otanis — as representative of the class. But the average length of a ballplayer’s career is about five years, according to an academic survey published in 2011. That’s probably an overestimate since it applies to those who have made it through a season, not players who reach the show for the proverbial cup of coffee and wash out so quickly they don’t even make it into the database.

The owners’ implicit threat to lock out players if negotiations don’t go their way, which might lead to cancellation of the 2017 season, suggests that they’re out to test the adage often attributed (probably falsely) to Albert Einstein defining “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The last time they tried, it backfired spectacularly.

That was in 1994, when Commissioner Bud Selig canceled the rest of the season in mid-September, including the World Series, after bargaining broke down. The contract was eventually settled and the 1995 season was played on a shortened schedule of 144 games, not the full 162-game slate.

The blogging baseball fan Robert Kopecky points out that at that time the sport’s popularity had soared, with average attendance per game doubling to more than 31,000 from about 15,500 over the previous two decades. The shutdown brought that trajectory to a sudden end; average attendance fell by 20% in 1995, meaning 20 million fans had disappeared. Attendance didn’t return to the 1994 level for 12 years.

The issue then was —whad’ya know? —a salary cap. The owners didn’t get one then, so now they’re trying anew.

For the owners to even contemplate repeating that experience, especially given the heightened competition in the modern world for sports fans’ attention and viewers’ eyeballs, can bespeak only insanity or stupidity, or probably both.

The players association presumably recognizes the most salient fact about the owners’ approach to labor relations, which is their history of of treating the players like peons and lying. A great example comes from 1975 and the reserve clause controversy.

For years, even decades, the owners cited a clause in the player contract stating that, if a player and his club didn’t agree on contract terms by March 1, the club could renew his contract for one year — and the next year and the year after that, on and on into the limitless future. No one challenged that interpretation until Dodger pitcher Andy Messersmith and retired Expo Dave McNally entered arbitration.

On Dec. 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the language meant one year, period. The free-agent era was born.

The owners’ underlying pitch then was that the reserve clause was crucial for the very survival of the game. In ruling for Messersmith and McNally, Seitz said he heard the owners’ claim that doing so “would have dire results … and do serious damage to the sport of baseball.” But he said if the owners sincerely believed that, they were perfectly free to negotiate with the players to get the reserve clause back. But it wasn’t in the contract, he said.

The same pitch is in play today. The owners imply that the very future of baseball depends on a salary cap, so much so that they’re willing to trash a whole season to get it.

The fulcrum of the owners’ position is the principle of “competitive balance,” meaning that every team should have comparable resources for mounting a playoff campaign. That works for the National Football League, where 10 different teams have reached the Super Bowl over the last 10 years — some of them, obviously, more than once. But the NFL has a more robust revenue-sharing system than MLB, and a bigger national TV contract to share.

Given how important this goal is, supposedly, we should ask whether competitive imbalance really is a problem for Major League Baseball. The facts expose that claim as just so much palaver.

Thirteen of MLB’s 30 teams have reached the World Series since 2015. By no means is this an exclusive club of big-market fat cat teams. Among those reaching the series were the Kansas City Royals, who currently rank 18th in payroll (they won in 2015); the Cleveland Guardians, who are 29th in spending; the Tampa Bay Rays (28th); and the Washington Nationals (24th).

Among persistently big-spending teams, the Yankees appeared only once during those years (they lost to the Dodgers in 2024), the Phillies once (a loss to the Houston Astros in 2022), and the Mets once (a loss to Kansas City in 2015).

The roster is skewed by the Dodgers, who appeared in the series five times since 2015, losing in 2017 and 2018, and winning in 2020, 2024 and 2025. But in 2023 the series was contested by the Arizona Diamondbacks (21st in salary) and the Texas Rangers (seventh).

Fans may find it suggestive that the Dodgers, with the league’s top payroll, has won the last two World Series, but real-world evidence undermines the received wisdom that payroll equals success. For how does one explain the New York Mets, second in payroll this year, yet mired in last place in the National League East, 17½ games out of first place and a no-hoper for a wild card slot, 10 games out?

The lesson there isn’t that the size of the bankroll doesn’t matter, but that what really matters is how it’s spent. The Dodgers spend it smarter than anyone else and the Mets, arguably, dumber.

The owners know they can’t legislate smarts into their contract, so they’re trying the next best thing — tying the hands of their own big spenders. But canceling the next season? How smart is that?