The Economic Impact of Yesterday’s CBA Proposals
After more than a month of silence, talks between the league and the Players Association have finally heated up. Over the past week, the parties have exchanged proposals and counters, a welcome change from the negotiations’ previously slow pace; 42 days elapsed between the owners’ initiation of the lockout and their first proposal to the MLBPA. Yesterday, the two sides reportedly focused their discussion on players who have not yet qualified for salary arbitration, a key sticking point in the negotiations. Let’s go through each of those proposals and see what they would do to change the way young players get paid.
Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that the two sides each recently dropped aspects of past proposals that the other disliked. The league had previously proposed changes to the arbitration system, including the elimination of the Super Two classification that allows some players to reach arbitration a year early, a non-starter with the union. The union had proposed an age-based free agency system that would shorten team control in many instances, which was similarly unpopular with the league. Each side dropped those long-shot ideas in this round of bargaining. Now, on to what was proposed yesterday.
First, both sides proposed instituting new salary minimums. The MLBPA suggested a new minimum salary of $775,000. The league countered with a tiered structure – $615,000 for players with less than one year of service time, $650,000 for players with between one and two years of time, and $700,000 for everyone else on a minimum salary.
“Players on a minimum salary” might not sound like a key part of the structure of baseball, but they absolutely are, as FanGraphs alum Travis Sawchik has covered. These players aren’t a huge part of the money, of course – “minimum” is a helpful word there. In 2021, teams spent roughly $3.842 billion on player salaries, per Spotrac. Minimum salaries accounted for roughly $289 million of that, or 7.5% of the total outlay.
On the other hand, those players accounted for roughly 47% of the service time accrued in 2021. That’s not quite the same as games played – you accrue service time while on the injured list or while on the 26-man roster but not appearing in games – but the player pool skews heavily towards pre-arbitration players no matter how you slice it. 58% of all players to appear on a 26-man roster in 2021 haven’t yet reached arbitration.
When you consider the composition of the major league player pool, these small-sounding changes in pre-arbitration salaries take on increased importance. The union’s proposal would move that outlay for minimum-salary players from roughly $289 million to roughly $386 million, a $97 million increase. That’s small potatoes in the business of baseball, of course – the league reportedly saw $10.7 billion in revenue in 2019, and even if you just compare it to the overall player salary pool, it’s only a 2.5% increase in the total salary pool. The league’s proposal is for an even smaller increase – it would have paid minimum-salary players roughly $319 million in 2021, a 0.7% increase in total player salaries.
While these are small numbers for baseball writ large, it’s a significant change for players making those salaries, particularly players making those salaries who are unlikely to score significant raises in arbitration. More than half the league gets paid the pro-rated minimum. For those players, having their salary keep up with inflation is a greater concern than it would be for, say, Mookie Betts. In 2017, the last time the CBA was re-negotiated, the minimum salary was set to $570,000. Since then, the CPI-U, the most commonly used measure of consumer price inflation in the US, has increased by 14.8%. If the minimum salary kept up with consumer inflation, it would be $654,000 today.
Wage growth has actually increased at a slightly faster clip than that, per the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker. And while it would be strange to expect the baseball economy to track the broader economy, the player cohort receiving the minimum salary seems like a much better proxy. In the 2016 season, 779 players accrued at least one day of service time while ending the season eligible to receive the minimum salary. 51% of those players still haven’t reached arbitration, which means they’re unlikely to – those are essentially players who got a cup of coffee but didn’t have a significant major league career. Of that group of 779, only 112 have reached free agency. Minimum-salary players are the biggest part of the MLBPA – and most of those players will never get the kind of gob-smacking payouts associated with premium players in free agency. In addition, most of them don’t play the full season in the majors, which makes their take-home pay significantly lower than the quoted minimum.
Speaking of premium players, the league reportedly also agreed to accept in principle the creation of a bonus pool that would reward pre-arbitration players for reaching various as-yet-undefined milestones. These have been connected to awards voting and a top-30 WAR finish among pre-arb players, though neither has been fleshed out.
It’s safe to assume that the players receiving these bonuses will mostly be of the group that eventually gains the most in arbitration and free agency, which will make this bonus pool function like an extra arbitration system that kicks in sooner. I like the concept of that quite a bit, though it’s actually a very difficult system to enforce in practice. How are the award votes taken into account? Which version of WAR would be used? What happens if park factors, or defensive valuation systems, or even positional adjustments change? What if the 30th and 31st most valuable players by WAR are only separated by a fraction of a win? We don’t want to imply that WAR is more precise than it is, but a hard cutoff suggests just that.
It also hasn’t yet been reported how the bonus pool would be split. It would likely be tiered in some way, but at this early stage in the negotiation, there have been no public discussions of how that would work in practice. In addition, it’s unclear how these bonuses would affect competitive balance tax calculations, as the money would be paid from central revenues, not by individual teams. There’s time to work out those finer points, but there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty on the specifics of the proposal.
In the league’s version, that work hardly seems worth it. They proposed to set aside $10 million out of central revenues to pay players who hit those bonuses. That’s, well … not enough. Using the top-30 WAR benchmark and assuming the pool is distributed evenly, that’s $333,333 per player using the league’s numbers, and while that’s nice, it’s just not enough money to move the needle when it comes to rewarding impactful early-career performances. The union proposed a $105 million pool, which feels like it goes too far the other way. The players who would receive these bonuses are likely to get large payouts eventually anyway, and having nearly a quarter of the pre-arb salary pool league-wide payable as bonuses (if both player proposals were applied to the 2021 season, minimum-salary players would make roughly $490 million in salary plus bonus) strikes me as a poor way to allocate money to minimum-salary players.
Both of these bargaining points focus on what I consider to be the most important part of the negotiation: salary structure for pre-arbitration players. The current structure has let salaries at the top rise – though perhaps not as fast or as high as the union would like – while minimum-salary players have mostly stayed the same, even as they’ve become a bigger part of teams’ plans.
Whatever form the final deal on minimum salaries and the pre-arb bonus pool takes, don’t think of this as a one-for-one increase in the players’ share of the pie. The competitive balance tax continues to act like a de facto salary cap at the top of the league – if a team near the tax adds money on minimum-salary players, they’re unlikely to simply accept it and push through the tax thresholds. Instead, they’ll probably cut costs elsewhere, which means this will trickle down into spending in arbitration and free agency.
Still, it will definitely act as an overall increase. At the moment, we project the Pirates for the lowest salary in baseball in 2022, at $39 million. They have seven players on their roster who are either free agents or qualify for arbitration. That leaves 19 pre-arb players. Under the union’s proposal, that’s an additional $3.8 million in payroll; under the league’s proposal, it’s closer to $1 million. Either would be a meaningful increase for Pittsburgh compared to their current payroll – and still leave the Pirates with the lowest salary in baseball, even if the minimum-salary change only affected them. The change won’t be earthshaking, is the point I’m trying to make here, even as it means a lot to individual players. Instead, it will be an incremental change, as those players get paid more without suddenly becoming better, which might actually make better players with higher salaries relatively more attractive.
While the specifics of the numbers being discussed remain far apart, I believe that the proposals exchanged yesterday demonstrate significant common ground. The league has room to give here, because minimum salaries have become relatively cheap to them as revenues and overall inflation have risen. The players want a minimum salary increase as well, because it helps a huge swath of the union. Meanwhile, owners can convince themselves – and they may even be right – that making concessions here won’t cost them all that much in actual dollar outlay, and certainly less than 100% of the sticker price they’re conceding, as teams bumping up against the luxury tax, for example, will reduce costs elsewhere to offset increased minimum salaries. At the same time, veteran players can convince themselves that they’re getting something for the younger generation without explicitly sacrificing anything for themselves – even though owners might penny pinch elsewhere to make room for higher minimums, it’s not as though the union is trading those salaries for a hard salary cap or anything of that nature, and it obviously wouldn’t affect existing contracts.
What will the final structure of pre-arb player compensation look like? I’m not sure, and yesterday’s proposals didn’t suggest an obvious end state. The bonus pool concept might reach a happy medium, or it might stay at the league’s ornamental level while the union exerts more pressure on increasing minimum salaries. The owners’ proposed $615,000 minimum strikes me as the most egregious number exchanged yesterday, but the players’ proposed $105 million bonus pool looks unrealistic to me as well.
But now that the two sides have common ground on how they’ll address this part of compensation, a solution strikes me as likely. This part of the argument is over how much more money pre-arb players should get — and the disagreement is roughly $150 million, or a bit over 1% of league revenues. That sounds like a bridgeable gap. It’s not totally bridged yet, not by a long shot. Some parties in the discussions questioned how much movement the league made, and Jeff Passan described the talks as “contentious” even as the two sides at least agreed on the broad strokes of what they were bargaining on.
If the sides can reach an agreement here — not a given, but something I’m optimistic about — that’s one item crossed off the list. All that remains is the competitive balance tax, changes to the draft, restrictions on tanking, a new playoff structure, a proposed international draft… well, lots of things remain. But at least a little bit, Tuesday’s meeting moved one thing to the “likely to be resolved” side of the ledger.
Appendix: Minimum Salary Calculations
I thought it would be worthwhile to show my work here, or at least explain it. To work out how many players received pre-arbitration salaries in 2021, I took each player’s service time at the conclusion of 2020 and the conclusion of 2021 and compared them. I considered each player who finished 2020 without being eligible for arbitration (and hadn’t signed a pre-arbitration extension, like Evan White) and accrued service time in 2021 to be a minimum-salary player.
Where salaries were reported (Cot’s Contracts lists opening day salaries), I pro-rated those based on service days accrued in 2021 to work out each player’s yearly salary. If a salary wasn’t available, I assumed they made the minimum. I pro-rated salaries based on a 172-day league year, the minimum number of days to qualify for a year of service time.
To calculate the share of league days that were accrued by players making the league minimum (or near the minimum), I used the same calculations, but for the entire league rather than the cohort of pre-arbitration players. To calculate the proposed economic impact of the changes, I used the same pro-rating calculation, but substituted in either the league’s proposal (a sliding number based on a player’s service time as of the end of 2020) or the union’s proposal (a flat $775,000).
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Many of these guys have toiled for years basically earning nothing in the minors/college to get to this point and will only get 1 or 2 paydays for all this work.
I’m sure there are a few owners who would happily give them the min payrise without blinking. I’d love to know which of them are the mean old men who REALLY push to squeeze every penny out of the Union as they sit on the Scrooge McDuck pile of gold. There has to be a pretty wide scale amongst them…surely, they can’t all be that tight fisted.
nobody makes a billion dollars not being ludicrously tight fisted. were talking about literal sociopaths brother
I don’t believe that. I’m sure there are some that differ in opinion quite vastly, but part of owning a team and joining a club means a United front. You certainly have to be cut throat to get where they are, but can be understanding of the value of your employees.
not really. they have an incredibly uniform ideology. the owners have the public pay for their ballparks, then use the labor of their athletes to make themselves richer without any work of their own. they then work together to make sure the players get as little of that as possible and that fans pay as much as possible. they are literally robber barons
I mean, except that everyone involved is participating in a voluntary exchange transaction…
which is why the union is “volunteering” to halt the exchange, because its absurdly unequal.
As is their right. Are the owners profit focused to the exclusion of anything else? Sure. Are they squeezing every cent out of all their business partners? Sure. Are they robbing anyone? That’s taking the rhetoric too far.
I wouldn’t characterize the relationship between players and owners as “absurdly” unequal. I’d like to see the players get more, but (major league) players aren’t exactly scrounging for change in the couch cushions to make rent.
if they are in a publicly built stadium, they are robbing the people of that town, yes, 100%. If they price out entire communities in order to enrich themselves, yes they are robbing those people of whats essentially the commons, given how engrained it is in our zeitgeist,
how are the minor leaugers not included in your assessment? They are on the same payroll and have the same “owner”. they could with the stroke of the pen fundamentally change the lives of everyone in their system (whos labor they profit of off), with no detriment to their quality of life, and they decide not to.
The owners don’t force cities to build stadiums. You’re being ridiculous. The vast majority of them pass by public referendum. Baseball is not a public resource. I’m done with this debate.
Come on now. That is just absurd.
1. Teams that have publicly funded (or partially funded) ballparks are not robbing anyone. The community made a choice about where to spend their dollars. I also can’t speak for every situation but for the ones that I’m closer to, stadium expenses were shared between the club and the team in a mutually beneficial way. Teams get a subsidized stadium. Cities often revitalize a part of the community that is struggling while also increasing their tax base as new businesses are stood up around this major attraction. If structured properly, both community and teams can win.
2. Your earlier gripe about players making peanuts for years in the minors – true statement but wrong way to look at it. The major league teams are subsidizing a sophisticated and expensive training program for their employees. They invest millions and millions into developing talent. Most of which will not result in any return on their investment. We see similar approaches at investment banks, accounting, and law firms. You get ground up and beaten during training in exchange for a relative pittance of a salary. The firm’s hope is that through the process they can identify the very best talent and promote. Once you are on the partner track you begin to reap the rewards of your sacrifice. Those that don’t make the cut move on and do something else. Any sort of apprenticeship/training program operates on a similar model. The biggest difference is the potential end result that a person may see if they make it to the bigs.
In major investment banks, consultancies and law firms, compensation starts at $100K+. Working for these firms, while exhausting, makes employees incredibly attractive to external employers going forward. The minors nets players ~$20-30K (a barely livable wage) and most of these players leave without a clear path to economic success…not a good comp. We can do better by minor leaguers.
Oh the “profiting off the labor of others” nonsense repeated doesn’t make it true. give it a break … The players have a workers union, that union is negotiating with owners for what they see as fair slice of the pie. It is exactly what socialists want – yet because the owners dont go and randomly say – here have all my money, they are somehow evil. Go profess your nonsense somewhere else.
As for minor leaguers- the system is called an opportunity based model. Typical minor leaguers take low pay because they have the opportunity for a big payday down the road. If there was a market for minor league baseball which made money the players would have leverage, they dont. They are replaceable because they arent good enough to be in majors, those who are likely to be there get a signing bonus which makes many multi- millionaires, and long term minor leaguers on free agency make six figure income. the only ones getting hosed are the players which only are allowed to play ball to create a competitive system for the top 100-200 prospects and the non major leaguers on the 40 man roster.
This is a major factor to me. The MLBPA is supposed to represent everyone on the 40-man roster. The 40-man roster players not in the majors should get 1/3 minimum salary and 1/3 service time.
I just don’t see the relevance of Major Leaguers being paid a lot of money at the moment. Ownership provides very little value to the arrangement and take more than 50% of revenues.
I’m not really one to defend ownership, but they provide the stadium (yes, often in partnership with a city), operate it, negotiate television contracts, market the franchise, build the schedule, develop and manage streaming platforms… they provide some value.
All true. And when revenues and profits go up, and they don’t increase the wages of the people they employ to provide the product they are selling….that’s the problem from the PAs point of view. The owners are reaping the benefits of the increased value of the player’s work, while the player’s salaries overall have gone down.
It’s reductive and misleading to call it “increased value of the player’s work.” When MLB revenues go up, how much does the players’ labor actually make that happen, as opposed to marketing and business development labor for example?
Ha cool story bro-
Negotiating to divvy up the financial pie with a union now makes people sociopaths because they dont say- here take my wallet I have enough.
give me a break with your otherism and working class hero nonsense.
Nice supplication to the ruling class, edgelord
You think HE’s the one being an edgelord here? Seriously? Self-awareness, look into it.
It’s a negotiating tactic to fight small issues like this so they can be offered later in exchange for larger issues.
This is the only group of folks I could give two hoots about in the negotiations, the quad-A baselifers that could earn a million or two in life with some changes to the salary structure, a reward for a life of dedication to the greatest sport of all-time!
I know it wasn’t discussed here, but I found the owner’s suggestion of a $214MM lux tax cap to be insulting. That increase is lower than the rate of inflation!
That increase is something like $4M, isn’t it? That’s hilariously low.
Almost like they aren’t negotiating in good faith. Again.
So the players are allowed to ask for something better, but the owners aren’t? Is that how this works, it’s only “good faith” when the players ask for things?
I get why the players don’t like the luxury tax, but it is pro-competitive. When the threshold goes down or increases slowly, that helps competition and keeps faith with fans of small-market clubs. Larger increases in the luxury tax are anti-competitive and smother small-market clubs.
In the NFL, nearly ALL revenue is shared, and doesn’t everyone think that system is better?
Luxury tax probably costs the players money. It should probably go away.
That would benefit the 3-5 richest teams, hurting everyone else.
It’s wild to me that the players are wasting bargaining capital on something this small. I held some hope that this would be a hard nosed negotiation where the players tried to claw back the concessions they’ve made in previous agreements. Instead I think they’re going to miss the forest through the trees again.
Sadly, the way it will probably play out is the owners will “give” a fair amount on some smallish issue and then play hardball on the larger ones or take them off the table altogether. Probably successfully.
(We got pinball machines for the clubhouses! …our cut of the revenues? Oh that will keep going down. But pinball!)
Even worse, the bonus pool is just an extension of their age-old philosophy of making sure that a few of the best players get as much money as possible while ignoring what is happening to most of them.
I’m just guessing, but I think that comes from the fact that each one of those players believes that they are going to be in that top 30 because they have been the best player on their team (and told so, repeatedly), all their lives. A lot of them never even stop to think that maybe they aren’t as good as Trout, Soto, Sherzer or Ohtani. So when somebody says the top 30 are going to get extra money, about 200 of them think “I’m getting extra money!”
Yes, correct, you are describing the competitive mentality that every elite athlete has to posses in order to reach their potential. You want minor leaguers telling themselves that they’re likely to be shit so they can settle for your redistributive fantasy?
The players have proposed paying every player regardless of value in the top 1% income bracket, and then rewarding those who *earned* more with bonuses relative to the value they provide.
Don’t condescend them for this because you aren’t self-aware enough to understand they may not in fact prescribe to your specific ideology of what is fair.
“Redistributive fantasy”?
The stench of neo-liberalism is strong in this comment thread, but this here is a different pile of manure.
Labor disputes are about the distribution of revenue between labor and capital, never redistribution.
Use of “neo-liberalism” in casual conversation all but ensures I hit the mark with my language choice, thank you.
We are not talking about society at large. We’re talking about a game. One in which even the worst participants are lavishly wealthy relative to nearly everyone else on earth.
Arbitrarily allocating a fixed revenue stream in a manner that is untethered from earned value is inherently redistributive.
You’re free to believe it is somehow “just” for good pre-arb players who are already being taken advantage of by ownership to send some of those scraps to shittier players, but that does not make it correct nor does it make you look any smarter for getting off on moralizing on the internet.
I was unaware that this is a casual conversation.
“Arbitrarily allocating a fixed revenue stream in a manner that is untethered from earned value is inherently redistributive.”
Perhaps I misunderstand, but to my ears it sounds as though you think that a minimum salary increase for MLB players, and maybe any league minimum for MLB players, is inherently redistributive. It is unclear to me whether you believe all minimum salaries are redistributive, or whether your scorn is limited to MLB, where, as you say, even the lowest salary places within the top 1% nationally. Either way, I think your imperious tone and angry anti-moralizing moralizations leave not enough room to acknowledge that some of us do not share your assumptions.
So, while you see a revanchist incursion into the sanctity of an efficient labor market, I see a fairly ordinary labor dispute over the proper distribution between Labor and Capital; a labor dispute in part over the value generated by minimum-salary players. And where you apparently see league minimum salaries as “untethered from earned value”, I find organizational value in the concept of a minimum-salary player, value in streamlined contract negotiations, value in limiting the club’s liability in a way that remains untethered from earned value. On-field performance might vary greatly within the class of players being paid the league minimum, but that reality does not reduce the organizational value of non-stellar players to zero. Both sides sacrifice precision in this salary structure, and, as the players see it, that imbalance accrues mainly to the benefit of Captial. Maybe they are wrong, I honestly don’t know, I do not pay enough attention to the numbers, and I do not have a strong opinion on a “correct” outcome in this dispute. But I recognize it as a legitimate dispute.
So, yeah, maybe I am moralizing a bit. But sometimes a casual bro feels like wagging his finger at aggro bros who shout on the internet about those greedy One Percenter Athletes.
That’s not at all what I’m saying. Go back and read again.
I’m responding to criticism that players “aren’t going far enough” and specifically criticism of how the players are proposing to distribute the Bonus Pool.
Minimum wages are both good and necessary for the exact reasons you mention. There will be a point at which higher wages lead to less opportunity, but that is a matter for the players to work out and not us.
The Bonus Pool concept proposed by the players is intended to supplement those whose wages are being restricted by entry-level contracts the most. The players would obviously love to see those contracts terminated all together, and have subsequently proposed various means of getting their players paid by reducing team control and increasing opportunities through arbitration, which owners have obviously deemed off the table. The bonus pool, then, becomes a means of rewarding those hurt most by lack of access to a market that will pay them commensurate to the value they provide.
Remember, this whole thing began because players aren’t being paid during the years in which they are most valuable. Not because ALL pre-free agent players weren’t making some arbitrary sum of money.
So in that context, yes, I believe MikeS and all those moralizing over “greedy” pre-arb players having the audacity to believe they in fact may be good enough to *earn* their way into that Bonus Pool instead of arbitrarily spreading equal amounts around to everyone can go get a life.
Professional class dudes behind a keyboard cosplaying like they’re battling the goddamn Pinkertons. Nobody is being harmed here to the point that anyone should be forcing a long-term work stoppage, and those at the bottom would inarguably be hurt the most by such a thing. Good thing they got you lookin out for them!
I don’t think so, I think the players largely like the system they have and baseball salaries reflect that. The average salary has steadily increased, they have all guaranteed contracts and the split of revenues has remained about the same. They are negotiating for the areas they see as deficient which is pre arb players needing a pay raise, upping the tax to drive the top end, team tanking.
I think the players didnt really gain anything last time while giving up a fair amount, and this time there is a reasonable framework to get a deal done which benefits players in numerous ways.
“the split of revenues has remained about the same.”
Citation missing and badly needed
“More than half the league gets paid the pro-rated minimum.” That’s something that the most aggressive pro-owners fans ought to be aware of. Most of the time, we aren’t talking about whether a Correa is going to make an AAV of $30M or $31M. The Union has to do something for this group….it’s not that costly to the owners and very meaningful to the players.
Here is my real-world scenario.
Today I delivered compensation news to my team (salary and bonuses). There were so many people that I wish I could have given more money to. Yet, to do that, I would need to take money from someone else. The company gives me $5M for comp. That’s all I get. My job is to figure out how to split the $5M between 30 great people.
Whenever someone explains that they deserve more I simply ask them who should I take from. The pie is $5M. I can’t get more than that. The conversation becomes real when they argue that they deserve an extra $10K but know that in order to get that they are pulling $10K from their friend that sits next to them. It’s really easy to simply want “more”. It’s much harder when you have to make tradeoffs or prioritize who you want to reward.
Frankly, I doubt the owners care a whole lot about how the pie is split. Pay all minor leaguers $150K/year. Sure. Set the league minimum at $3M/year. No problem. All that would be left is for the union to explain how they will endorse structures that limit earnings on veterans to offset that transfer of wealth from vets to the young kids.
It’s easy to “fight” for the little guy when it doesn’t cost you anything. If the union really cared about minor leaguers or the league minimum players they could do something about it. But they don’t. It’s all a show to garner sympathy for the downtrodden while the veterans earning $30M+/year protect their interests. Simply put, the union has prioritized maximizing the ceiling for veterans at the cost of better compensation for everyone else.
The position of the owners, effectively adopted by you, is that, irrespective of profitability, the players must accept the shares of the owners revenues that the owners deem appropriate, and that should preempt the discussions. If that’s your position–take what we offer, period, then why have a CBA in the first place? The union is asking for what unions have eternally asked for…Samuel Gompers’ “more”. That’s their right, and their obligation, not to go back to higher-compensated players and ask them to set aside a couple of million so the MLB minimum player on the 25 man roster can each get an addition $150K.
You’re giving out $167k bonuses to 30 people? Wow, your real world sounds real nice!
“Today, I delivered compensation news to my team (salary and bonuses).”
Yes. That was a shocking revelation to me.
>it’s not that costly to the owners and very meaningful to the players
Which is why it’s a negotiating chit the owners are not quick to give away.
I suspect they’re positioning themselves as hard asses on this point so later they can trade it for something that’s actually valuable to them.
I’m curious about this number. Is “more than half the league” more than half of all players who were on a MLB 26 man roster at any point during 2021, or more than half of players on a 26 man roster at X date in 2021?
i can’t help but think that the union’s asks are not nearly ambitious enough. increasing the minimum is great, but the bonus pool seems like a very odd bargaining chip. It’d be way more impactful to push hard to reduce rookie contracts to 5 years, and focus hard on a team salary floor. They could even play the owners against one another by pointing out the egregious outliers like the pirates and o’s. steinbrenner used to fume about the luxury tax, and using the spending owners against the penny pinchers seems like it would be a better strategy than adding a new strange arbitration type measure (the bonus pool).
They tried to reduce rookie contract length in the earlier offers. The league wasn’t having it.
i’m unfamiliar with how labor bargaining works, but I don’t see why the union wouldn’t make a huge fuss about that and make that the line in the sand. It would solve tons of these issues
And also almost certainly lead to the cancellation of the season.
Is that worth it to you?
The union has to get a salary floor, even if it means agreeing to a hard cap
The union already has a de facto salary floor. It’s the major league minimum.
The union has rejected a meaningful floor every time it has been brought up by owners.
Because there is a long history using a structure that protects players to 6 years. Players and owners have done quite well under this system . Just saying why don’t they do xxxx ignores that owners have redline too that is why the union ditched the proposal already. No one wants a strike or a lockout- and the latest exchange look like a deal will be fairly quickly resolved. When you are only arguing about money and where to draw the line of revenue split, when both parties have an interest in a deal being done, it will almost always get completed.
The thing that I keep coming back to is why the union is spending so much effort digging in on reducing revenue sharing payouts. Whoever is doing in house analysis over there is either very wrong or nobody is listening to them, because reducing revenue sharing payouts is going to reduce a whole lot of team’s expenditures on players.
I hope they get earlier arbitration and higher minimum player salaries but if they think cutting revenue sharing is going to induce the Yankees to blow past the luxury tax again–and do it in a way that offsets the Brewers, Reds, D-Backs, Padres, etc. out of the free agent market and not bidding on free agents anymore–they’re seriously wrong.
Am I wrong that the union’s assumption is the opposite of yours? The theory, I believe, is that revenue sharing props up terrible teams and keeps them profitable regardless of whether they put a decent product on the field. Basically, the owners of the teams receiving revenue sharing are just pocketing it, rather than reinvesting it in player salaries. Therefore, the idea would be that if teams have to earn their revenue on their own merit, they would be more likely to spend to put a worthwhile product on the field. I think I accept the first part of the premise and I could be convinced either way on the second part.
Their theory is very explicitly that teams would have to spend in order to make money. The problem is that their theory is wrong. Do they not remember what salaries were like in 1993? Barry Bonds signed with the Giants for about $44M in 1993. That was by far the largest contract ever handed out at that time. Teams didn’t spend money at all back then…the smaller market teams didn’t spend, and because they weren’t spending, larger market teams didn’t have to spend either to keep up.
Right now, there are a number of teams that receive revenue sharing that either have spent in the past, are spending in the present, or will spend in the future (Tigers, Rockies, Padres, Brewers, D-Backs, Twins, Orioles, and Reds). Those teams will just reduce their budgets. If they take that money and give it back to the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Giants, and Cubs (who are responsible for almost all of the payments into the system) they’d be ecstatic because not only would they get that money back but they would have to compete with somewhere in between 5 and 8 fewer teams for players. There are certainly teams that have abused this system (the Marlins and Pirates being a prime example) but this won’t compel them to spend more, it won’t compel the big spenders to spend more, and it will lead to a bunch of teams spending less.
tl;dr, the union is wrong wrong wrong about this and if they succeeded in dramatically reducing revenue sharing they would regret it.
You’re wrong wrong wrong about this, and about the history in the 1990s.
The labor share of MLB revenue kept going up through the 1990s until the 2003 CBA, when the union first accepted revenue sharing. It went from 35% of revenue all the way to around 57% by 2003. Since then it has declined into the low 40s.
Revenue sharing reduces revenue returns to winning.
Increasing revenue returns to winning incentivizes spending on player salaries.
The problem with revenue sharing isn’t that the money is spread around. It’s that teams aren’t SPENDING it. And what the luxury tax does is deter teams WITH revenue from spending MORE. How many teams have dropped below the tax threshold to reset penalties?
You’re ignoring the reality in which it is inarguably true that percentage of revenue to players has dropped along the same timeline as revenue sharing has increased. *You* are the one theorizing here, not confronting reality of what has actually happened.
Revenue sharing is what big markets use to pacify small markets in a manner that ensures everyone makes a shit ton of money without actually competing.
It’s a pipe dream to believe the owners will ever make any real concessions as long as they are united, and you’re never going to get division amongst them as long as everyone is making money.
The players are smart enough to understand this. You aren’t.
Look at the NFL’s economic model. All TV money, 40% of ticket sales, merchandise, and league sponsorships/licensing are shared. The only things that aren’t are the other 60% of tickets, concessions and parking, and team sponsorships.
As a result, the NFL has teams in tiny markets that can easily compete with juggernauts. We just watched a divisional series featuring Green Bay, Buffalo, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Tennessee (Nashville). And it’s not like NYC is doing the Jets or Giants any favors.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that amidst the money-grubbing, sports owners (including MLB) absolutely want to win games and will spend money to do that. For the most part, they’re wealthy as sin regardless of whether the team is profitable or by how much, and when everyone has a billion dollars then a ring is a nice one-up. Not to mention they realize winning is also good for business.
In the CBA talks it’s owners vs. players, so the owners are trying to keep spending down. Increased revenue sharing means owners vs. owners on equal footing when it comes to trying to win, and that is great for players. Not just in the short term, either; right now the Pirates and Rays have zero interest in advocating for or being amenable to luxury tax increases because that can only hurt them. Put them in a position where spending near the tax is a realistic possibility, and the PA’s argument to increase it suddenly gets a whole lot more convincing.
Yes, well the NFL’s economic model is based on media rights deals that are entirely (or at least nearly) national. An NFL franchise in a smaller market might sag on ticket sales or merchandising , but they bring in more than enough from the television rights to run a payroll right up to the cap.
MLB doesn’t work that way, and probably never will.
If the union believes teams like the Pirates, O’s, etc… will spend more with less revenue sharing, then they are fooling themselves. Teams will spend more when the incremental wins will drive more revenue than the cost. Obviously this is a probabilistic exercise that is inexact. Say your the Pirates and finished last by 30 games in 2021, is signing Correa really going to make you a playoff team (probably not)… Ok what about signing 3-4 medium starting pitchers, again probably not. So you have added $30-$40 million in payroll for an additional maybe 100,000 at the gate so maybe another $10mm in revenue at most?
The problem is not necessarily too much revenue sharing, but not enough. If NYY can block the Pirates from becoming the New Jersey Pirates, then Pirates should get more revenue sharing. Why can NYY broadcast games against say Orioles without paying O’s (I know there is some payments, but those payments are not variable by series, game or team), the game requires both teams so they should split the revenue from that game a little more equally.
I don’t get why an inverse of the luxury tax system can’t be instituted or hasn’t been suggested.
Rev share revenue is reduced on a formula based on how far a team is from the penalty floor threshold, repeat offenders, etc. It seems this leaves teams to reduce spending as they see fit to reset their competitive situation, but doesn’t force the other clubs to completely finance them while doing so. then redistribute the withheld shares up the ladder with most if not all going to the teams that are just clear of the spending floor and upward in a declining scale.
This to me would encourage teams to add those lower $ FAs that might make their team a bit less feeble on the field, and maybe a trade deadline lotto ticket or 2, and maybe give that slice of the players that really take it on the chin in FA a bit more demand for their services. If you’re close to the payroll penalty threshold, adding another guy or 2 becomes more desirable.
I think the main reason the MLBPA hasn’t suggested it is because they feel they got burned on the luxury tax, and they’re worried about unexpected consequences here too. But I like this idea. Not as much as starting arbitration a year earlier (or even better, two years earlier) but I like it.
by my count, there are 10 players on rookie contracts in the top 30 in WAR. And of pre-arb players , i think there were like 3? Doesn’t really seem like that’ll help out the folks that they need it to. Am i misunderstanding this? Thats a terrible proposal.
If I am misunderstanding, and its the top 30 of ALL PRE ARB PLAYERS, thats actually pretty solid… if its 100 m distributed between them.
Excellent article. One thing I disagree with is your belief that the pre-arb merit pool would be difficult to administer. I think it would be very simple and there are pretty easy answers to the questions you raise.
How are the award votes taken into account? It doesn’t seem like they are taken into account at all.
Which version of WAR would be used? Doesn’t matter. Whichever one they agree on. Could be fWAR, could be bWAR, could be a unique version whose inputs they agree upon.
What happens if park factors, or defensive valuation systems, or even positional adjustments change? That shouldn’t be an issue. If they agree to use someone else’s formula, you just abide by the outputs regardless of whether they tweak the formula along the way. If they use their own, they can have a committee that administers the formula, maybe independent, maybe made up of individuals appointed by both sides, and everyone lives with what they do.
What if the 30th and 31st most valuable players by WAR are only separated by a fraction of a win? Then 31 doesn’t get anything. Gotta cut it off somewhere. Arbitrary? Sure, but easy to administer.
“We don’t want to imply that WAR is more precise than it is, but a hard cutoff suggests just that.” I don’t think anyone thinks WAR is that precise, it’s just a reasonably good way to measure production, and again, ya gotta cut it off somewhere even if that’s arbitrary.
You are vastly oversimplifying this problem. Let’s say they agree to use Fangraphs WAR for example. That’s suddenly a lot of power to David Appelman that he didn’t sign up for. Sean Forman of bbref has a very good Twitter thread on his discomfort with this.
There are a lot of minor changes that happen to WAR behind the scenes every year and suddenly these changes are multi-million dollar decisions. What if Fangraphs has a small bug in their code? That’s suddenly a huge mistake. Not to mention the fundamental differences on the pitching side of using a FIP-based WAR versus an RA9-based WAR. At that point, you are favoring a specific type of pitcher. Similarly, how confident are you in the accuracy of positional adjustments? If say first base is overly punished you have now chosen a system which devalues first basemen versus say shortstops. WAR is by no means a perfect formula. It has all sorts of assumptions baked in which is why there are so many different versions out there. By picking one, you are implicitly saying “this is how we want baseball to be played” regardless of whether or not that’s actually the best way.
And all of this is assuming whichever site they choose is able to remain truly independent and not worry about any potential for corruption which is a whole other can of worms.
I don’t think any of those are really problems as much as they are just parts of the system that everyone could live with.
First, as to the system selection, I think the third way, creating a unique WAR calculation for this purpose, is a very simple solution. It’s also the one I would have preferred, anyway, to avoid a problem if (heaven forbid) Fangraphs or BRef stopped operating.
Second, who cares about the small changes every year? If everyone can agree upon one metric and one independent entity to manage the metric, then you live with whatever changes they make year over year.
Third, as to the FIP vs RA9 comparison, of course there will be winners and losers based on whatever metric you pick. Nothing about that is new. They’ve been doing arb based on statistics for decades. And those statistics have favored certain players, i.e. power hitters who rack up RBI on good teams and relievers who get saves. That system means good defensive/high obp hitters do worse, and relievers who are fantastic and don’t happen to accrue saves do worse. Is that fair? No. But it’s an easily administered system. 100 rbi > 70 rbi.
If they go to WAR for pre-arb, it’s basically the same process, just changing the stat. To a better, if imperfect, stat.
Nothing is going to be perfect and I don’t think anyone has ever argued WAR perfectly encapsulates every ounce of what happens on a field. But there’s no reason to let perfect be the enemy of the good. Pick one, stick to it, and the resultant issues are less problematic than the issues you fixed by implementing that system.
The people making the decisions behind the small changes every year and the players affected by them presumably care a lot. If the rates are determined on November 1 and Fangraphs fixes a bug on November 2 which would’ve flipped the #30 and #31 overall player, that’s suddenly a lot of negative attention to changes that otherwise you’re right nobody would care about.
I agree instead creating a unique formula is a much better option but that certainly comes with all sorts of issues of its own. It starts to remind me of the old Type A/Type B free agency system which was not great. But my thoughts again are who is creating this formula? Agreed upon or not, there start to become a lot of corruption issues which again I’m pushing to the side for the time being even though arguably those are a much bigger deal.
I do appreciate what you’re saying with the arb comparison but there’s a PR element to this as well. People already don’t trust the fancy math. Arbitration is a panel of humans which explicitly encourages negotiation between player and team so as much as we hate it there’s some semblance of transparency in the process. Think about every year when the projections are released and some slighted team makes a huge fuss about how the computers don’t know what they’re talking about. Now imagine that except the slighted players actually lose millions of dollars. You’re bringing a lot of negative attention to the sport and to our niche community of nerds that I don’t think is good for baseball.
Russell Carleton has had a couple good articles about his issues with this over at BP including one earlier today. I would love to see an article here from the people behind the math and their feelings on this proposal. Maybe you’re right and I’m making too big a deal out of tiny issues but I think there’s a lot of problems that are just being shoved to the side in this proposal which will just cause even more fighting in the future.
Bugs are really a different issue than intentional changes to the formula. If there was truly a “bug” that changed outcomes, that should presumably be corrected retroactively.
If there are small changes in the formula, I don’t think it ultimately much matters for the players. You’re still generally pushing for a measure of player doing valuable things offensively and defensively and it won’t change much if you make slight alterations in the off-season.
First of all, it would be shocking for either the owners or the players to agree to let any part of salaries be administered by the fine folks at FG or BRef. Ha ha. That’s hilarious.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the new CBA were to incorporate fWAR somewhere. Ok great! But what they would actually be doing is incorporating a particular formulation of fWAR as it existed at the conclusion of the negotiations. From that point forward, it would be m(lb)WAR, and mWAR would by like a code fork having an ancestor in common with fWAR.
If Lord Appleman wants to change something in fWAR, that would have no effect on mWAR at all. If the Lords of Baseball want to change something in mWAR, that would change nothing about fWAR.
mWAR itself would be an open book. At least to the Owners and the MLBPA. Both sides would, presumably, employ their own obsession of nerds tasked with understanding the formula and providing support for future modifications of the same.
I really like your thoughts here.
Just going back to something I said earlier – I doubt the owners care how it is distributed so long as it has some rational basis. Agree to an amount to fund (say $50M) and the number of players that participate (say 30) and then let the Union write the checks. They can fight with their players about the distribution. If the players don’t like the approach one year, they can change it the next year. It’s their fund, let them handle it.
Simplifies negotiations greatly as 90% of the conversation can focus on the pool size of the award and players. Agree to that and then move on to the stickier topics.
The easiest standard would be playing time (or appearances for relievers). By definition a player has to have value to the team if the team keeps using him, irrespective of how third parties view him.
Perhaps, but that’s also the easiest one for ownership to manipulate if they want to keep a particular player’s price low.
They could, but they will have to directly give up value to their own teams. The possibility of manipulation hasn’t stopped playing time contract clauses from being a thing.
Plus, the discussion so far has been about grading on a curve, say, top 10% or top 30 players, in which case manipulation is meaningless from a labor perspective – you’re just taking from one player and giving it to another.
It’s also naive to think that a system based on WAR (or similar metric) would be any harder to manipulate. Preventing someone from reaching 5 WAR is exactly as easy as preventing someone from reaching 500 plate appearances, and the latter is much easier to call out.
Thanks! this is cool.
I feel like there are three kinds of ideas floated in these negotiations. First, there are pie-expanding ideas, that grow the value of baseball as a whole. Second are redistributive ideas, that shift money between actors, but that don’t affect the size of the pie; subsets of this category include ideas that shift money between players, those that shift money between owners and players and those that shift money between owners. And then there are ideas that shrink the pie.
Some are obvious: hard caps on bonuses shrink the pie by reducing the number of dollars going to players; this has knock-on effects in terms of driving talent out of the sport and by making free agents less valuable as a substitute to amateur signings. Ending service time manipulation makes the pie bigger by increasing the number of total days the best players are in the league; this creates value compared to having the best talent sit in the minors.
I think what’s tricky is that some proposals appear to be one thing but have effects on a different category. Revenue sharing appears to be redistributive, but affects incentives to spend and thus decreases the pie. Raising the minimum salary has distributive effects between the owners and players and also between veterans and rookies; I assume it has some effect on the size of the pie (econ 101 says that price floors are associated with market distortions, right?)
Anyhow, this is how I’m thinking of these proposals; which ones grow the value of baseball, shrink the value of baseball, or move money within its ecosystem without affecting its size.
Love this post.
The trick is that no one actually knows what grows the pie.
Consider that the pie isn’t the money going to the players, of course, that’s just redistribution.
The pie isn’t even total revenues from all sources. That’s just a moment in time.
The biggest piece of the pie is probably the appreciative value of the franchises themselves, to include related assets like stadiums, real estate, Regional Sports Networks and whatever else ownership is making money off of in the long-term that doesn’t even enter the CBA negotiations at all.
Thanks for thinking this stuff through, Ben.
I think the consumer price index isn’t really a relevant device to use / argument in the context of player salaries over time… Choose a longer timeframe and players are definitely beating inflation… Look at any CBA that is locked in and doesn’t specifically have an index clause and it is out of whack with CPI a month after signing it …
Inflation is mostly only impactful for the lowest paid players… And I definitely would like them to get more of the pie … But the issue isn’t inflation, its distribution…and I think owners and players should fund the increase (but not my ticket price please).
Perhaps it’s because CPI is a bunk measure of actual inflation?
[citation needed]
$10 million total and $333,333 per player are drops in the bucket compared to the overall system, but for a player making $650,000, a $333,333 bonus is more than a 50% increase in salary. If it is a $100 million pool, that’s more than $3 million per player and a player would get a bonus worth almost 5 times his salary based on being 30th vs. 31st in WAR. Which could be determined by, as Ben said, a change in park effects, positional adjustment, or even by a rainout that didn’t get made up. (Though I would assume the bonus would be greater for #1 in WAR vs. #30, so the difference between #30 and #31 probably would not be $3 million.)
Great article. Lockouts should be illegal in all industries.
Raising the base players salary is going to somewhat fix many of the problems in baseball, because it makes it more expensive to tank. But, 700 something K seems a bit low. If it was $1 million per player then tanking would mostly disappear.
Why?
One of your readers recently offered a fascinating recommendation. Could Fangraphs try to monetize each of the options? For example, lengthening the years toward arbitration by one year would net owners $x and cost players $y. $x would not necessarily = $y due to many factors such as the increase of gate revenues, time value of money, etc. Such an analysis could help guide future negotiations. I love the bonus pool for pre-arbitration performance. Any move toward meritocracy will be better for the game in the long run. Love this stuff.
That was me! I think…
What the players seem to fail to understand is that as long as the owners have a vast pool of relatively inexpensive talent, payrolls will remain suppressed. Neither a small increase in the minimum salary nor a little extra for start pre-arb players is not going to change this. In the bargaining sessions over the last few decades, the union has consistently sacrificed every group of pre-free agent players (arb, pre-arb, minor leaguers, int’l free agents and draft prospects) in order to maximize salaries for free agents. And if you listen to players like Max Scherzer, the problem is that free agents still aren’t getting paid enough.
In 1990, the highest paid player, Robin Yount, made 32x the league minimum. Last year, Trevor Bauer made over 70x the minimum. In the past few years, average and median salaries have gone down and its not because free agents aren’t cashing in. As the article states, more pre-arb players are on rosters. Until MLBPA members, the majority of whom never reach free agency, tell their negotiators to focus more on pre-free agent salaries, very little will change.
/rant
You’re just regurgitating old talking points you learned from the media that are meant to create division amongst the players and sour public favor.
If you read the article above and come away with a belief that the big greedy stars are just looking out for themselves, you’re being willfully ignorant.
No, I read the article, including the line “58% of all players to appear on a 26-man roster in 2021 haven’t yet reached arbitration.” and “[minimum salary] players accounted for roughly 47% of the service time accrued in 2021”. If you bother to study the history of CBA negotiations you will see the MLBPA making many concessions that have significantly impact pre-free agent players.
Or just take it from MLBPA executive committee member Max Scherzer: “When you look back at the history of our union, we made a deal called the grand bargain. The grand bargain is that you make less money early in your career so that you can make more money later in your career.” The problem is that the owners have a near endless supply of pre-free agent players and there are relatively fewer impact players that make it to free agency.
That’s exactly where the grand bargain Max Scherzer is talking about has broken down. The majority of major league players do not have careers longer than three years. Most players never reach arbitration, let along free agency. The grand bargain was that if you did last long enough as a major leaguer to get to arbitration, you would begin to get rewarded, and if you reached free agency, you would be rewarded. Maybe not with a huge contract, but the average major league free agent contract used to be over $4 million/year. Last year, the average dipped below $4 million/year.
What’s happened is that teams no longer pay for veterans like they used to. If they have a cheaper minor leaguer or pre-arbitration player, they will do that and not spend on the veteran instead. This isn’t because the MLBPA hasn’t been looking after its members. It’s because analysis has identified overpaying for veterans as an inefficiency that management can avoid.
Management has broken the grand bargain. And since the bargain has been broken, the MLBPA will look for other ways to ensure that its members get paid properly.
The issue is that these statistics are wildly misleading.
What is missing from the reporting is the average service time accrued by those pre-arb players.
As written, these numbers tell us nothing other than that a pre-arb player was simply rostered at some point during the season. That could be a cup of coffee, at which point salary means very little.
What we’re looking at here is almost certainly just an effect of tanking.
Up to a third of the league at any given time isn’t fielding a team with the explicit intent of winning as many baseball games as they can. Take a look at the end-of-year rosters for these clubs. Dozens and dozens and dozens of guys who get cycled through to fill roster spots.
What exactly is “proper pay” for a guy who can’t even hold down a roster spot? Those are probably the majority of cases we’re currently talking about.
And what proportion of prospects do you think would actually want a marginally higher minimum salary, if the impact of that decision is pushing teams to re-invest in veterans instead of providing pre-arb players the opportunity?
I wonder what the pre-arb percentage is if you exclude relief pitchers? It’s pretty clear what a lot of teams do with relievers. They move the back end of the bullpen guys up and down enough that they really stretch out their pre-arb service and since they are markedly better than the next guy, they mostly just move on once they hit arbitration or soon after.
It’s pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to see something that helps these guys out a little more. I guess the minimum salary bump does a little. Honestly if they got to arbitration sooner, they’d probably just be pricing themselves out of a job sooner, too.
Wait, why do the owners care about minimum salaries?
It’s not like this forces an increase in their payroll budget. If the minimum goes up by $100k and they’re on the hook for an extra $2M for salaries for minimum players, just sign a $3M scrapheap reliever instead of a $5M one.
That point was made.
raising minimum salaries raises the payroll floor which, by default, would be the cost of running out 25 salary-minimum guys for 162 games.
but yes, the reality of the situation is that raising the cost of the low end players would just squeeze some juice out of a higher position on the scale. for the NYYs and LADs, it’s not going to affect their roster math a whole lot, but for most of the league that operates well below the Luxury Cap it will affect how they put their rosters together
The NFL has performance-based bonus pools for low-salary players who earn significant playing time. For example, JC Jackson (CB- Patriots) was an undrafted free agent in 2018. In 2019, he made about $500k. He also became a starter that year. The pool earned him an additional $375k. That’s HUGE for JC, and not that big an expense for the league.
I don’t see why MLB could not implement something similar.
I was very encouraged that MLB negotiations seem to be focusing on minimums and bonus pools for pre-arb players. In my reading of the situation, MLB has no interest in changing the years to FA, so this route is one that both sides can live with. The art of the possible and all.
I think the MLBPA are not thinking long term. It almost feels that the Scott Boras’s of the world are the voice of the PA. Teams don’t tank, trade higher cost veterans because they want a higher draft pick (the MLB draft is such a crap shoot, and most of the time it takes years before a prospect makes it to the MLB). Teams understand windows of contention and the relative value of players because GM’s and all the front offices have become very in tune with SABR principles, and as such will not foolishly hand out large contracts, retain high priced veterans. The PA cannot complain that the Rays and A’s are anti-competitive with their practices because their model works for them (they have not won anything yet, but they have been steadfast competitive for the last decade).
How much more is Joey Gallow (age matched) worth than Ender Inciarte? Most small market teams would jump on an Inciarte type player as he would have been a phenomenal bang for buck, whilst Gallow is likely to be over payed significantly. That does not mean small market teams are circumventing the system.
I also don’t understand the desire to stop wealth redistribution. The owners are likely all die hard capitalist, and if they think salary floor/salary cap is good for the league they know better than the PA. Historically, parity usually is healthier for leagues and long-term growth. Sure, perhaps playoffs are not as interesting if NY/LA are not in it, but with a 162-game schedule, the playoffs are a small chunk of revenue. With salary caps and floors, there will automatically be better redistribution of wealth, within the players, and teams will focus more on depth, and not on isolated stars and most players in the league will benefit from it.
What the MLBPA really need to do is focus on percentage of revenue, that goes to salaries. It does carry risk, because if there is an economic downturn (like in 2020), then the floor and cap will change downward, but net, over years, usually there will be growth.
The PA should concede on Salary cap/floor, and demand reduction in player control from 6 to 5 years, and maintain 3 years arbitration.