Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said he is in favor of an MLB Free Agency deadline, especially with how slow things seem to be moving this offseason. Players can (and some do) sign well into spring training or even after the season starts. With big names such as Alex Bregman and Bo Bichette still not inked to a deal for 2026, Manfred feels it’s in the owners’ best interest, I mean the game’s best interest, that free agency has an end date.
The MLBPA naturally feels this is a terrible idea, with Athletics outfielder and DH Brent Rooker calling the proposal “..pretty close to the most anti-player idea you could possibly have.”
Rooker is 100% correct. If there were a deadline for MLB free agents to sign contracts, teams could just hold off negotiating until the last minute, thereby pressuring players into taking what they are offering or not playing that season. It’s a pro-owner stance, and typically anything that is pro-owner is anti-player. Leagues like the NFL, NBA, and NHL don’t have free agency deadlines, so how come players typically sign early in the process?
All three of those leagues have a salary cap. Since the formation of the MLBPA, the term salary cap has been construed as one of the dirtiest things anyone can say. The misguided belief is that a salary cap would mean less money for the players, but that’s simply not true. In the same way that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist, the best trick that MLB owners ever pulled is that a salary cap would be bad for the players.
It would actually be bad for the owners. A salary cap always comes with a salary floor, and the floor is what scares the hell out of cheapskates like John Fisher (owner of the Athletics), Bruce Sherman (Marlins), and Patrick Zalupski (Rays). These owners head franchises that routinely pay half or less than half of baseball’s average payroll, and rake in the money from the league’s $10 billion TV deal. If a salary cap and floor were instituted, they’d need something that scares the richest owners. Revenue sharing.
The National Football League (NFL) is easily the most popular and valuable league in the United States. They have a hard cap and a hard floor. Teams are required to spend 90% of the cap over a rolling three-year period. Teams can’t nickel and dime the players and collect huge revenue shares. To help the small market teams reach the floor and help maintain parity, the teams use revenue sharing. In the most capitalistic country in the world, its most popular sport thrives on communism.
Imagine the difficulty of telling the Yankees and Dodgers that they need to give money they brought in to the league to the A’s and Rays. It simply wouldn’t happen and it’s not because the players are greedy; it’s because the owners are.
A 2024 report showed that the annual revenue for all MLB teams combined was $12.2 Billion and that payroll spent was $6.070 billion. This would be comparable to the other leagues that have a 50% split in revenue between owners and players. Dividing the payroll evenly between all 30 teams would give an average payroll of $202 million per team. If that is made to be the salary cap number, than the salary floor (90% of the cap) would be $180 milion. That same study showed that 15 teams would be under the floor, led by the Marlines who brought in $317 million and paid out just $86 million.
The owners argument that players would get less is based on the fact that a team like the Dodgers, who spent $549 million on payroll wouldn’t be able to keep all it’s high priced players under a cap like this, so many of them would have to take significant pay cuts. That is a false narrative, because they would only have to take pay cuts to stay with the Dodgers. They could get their $40-50 million per year from the Twins or the White Sox.
The reason players would theoretically make more is because teams would be forced to spend to the floor. Instead of four or five teams signing the biggest free agents every yera, there would be 30 vying for their services. And like the other leagues, since so many teams would have payoroll they needed to fill before the season started, there would be no lag in free agency. Most players would sign right away.
Manfred has had quite a few dumb ideas as the commissioner, and even talking about a deadline makes him look asinine. If he really wants to change the game for the better, propose a salary cap and a salary floor, and the game whose average fan age is 68 might actually attract some new young viewers. This couldn’t happen, of course, because if he did propose it, the owners would fire him the very same day.
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