It didn't take very long for the people who sell baseball to us to sour the vibe of a season that is barely a third of the way along. What promises to be an excruciating negotiation (and occasionally a refusal to negotiate at all) over Major League Baseball's next collective bargaining agreement opened with the MLB Players Association making an initial proposal, and owners responding with a gobbledygook-intensive counter built around a salary cap. It was a sufficiently inauspicious beginning that five entire months of baseball will be played this year in the shadow of a likely lockout. This is earlier than we thought they'd be-turd the punchbowl, to be honest, but it's happening not because the owners want to get a jump on the process but so they can define the rest of your year with their bullshit; the rest of this baseball season would, after all, be much more interesting to people who care about baseball than it is to people that own it.
Before we go too much further here, transparency demands that we tell you up front that the owners must lose this fight, and not just because they've lost all the others. They must lose because they are playing a longer and more dismal game, as outlined by The Athletic's Evan Drellich in a long but indisputably thorough look at what the owners actually want—which, if you don't mind the spoiler, is to jack up the sales prices of their franchises for when they get out entirely.
Roster cost certainty, which is code for "we can't trust our own impulses, so we'll make the players do it for us," is cited as one of the primary reasons MLB owners think that franchise valuations—the big numbers assigned by Forbes, Sportico, and the like—have risen more rapidly in the salary-capped NFL and NBA than in their league. And while the values of teams in those other leagues really have appreciated in value more than MLB teams over the last decades, that has less to do with salary caps than it does with those leagues rich and growing media deals, all of which far outpace MLB's, as well as some other, even more elusive factors—new arenas funded by desperate cities with sweetheart deals attached, multiple players who qualify as must-see attractions, and in the case of the Golden State Warriors, who have gone from $450 million to $10.8 billion in 15 years, all of the above. Most MLB franchises are not a CBA tweak away from replicating any of that.
Valuations can also help collateralize loans, but for owners looking to disappear fully into Yacht World, those big numbers matter most when you're looking to sell; the Dallas Cowboys jump 20 percent every year and are now slotted into the $13 billion spot, but there is no indication that Jerry Jones is going to do anything re: estate planning beyond leaving the team to his son Stephen The Slackjawed. It is important to remember that the people that own MLB franchises are less savvy businessmen than garden-variety landlords in search of that sweet, sweet passive income. There is no broader plan or greater good to find, here, which is why your search begins in West Sacramento and goes all the way to Miami, and which in turn leads us to these three condensed paragraphs in the Drellich piece:
The average baseball team is worth $2.9 billion, more than double MLB’s $1.3 billion average from a decade ago, per Forbes. What’s perhaps most irksome to baseball owners, however, is that they keep getting trounced by owners in other leagues. The average National Basketball Association team is worth $5.4 billion, and the average National Football League team $7.1 billion, per Forbes. Two of 30 baseball teams appear to have doubled in value since 2021. Meanwhile, across the NBA and NFL combined, 61 of 62 teams have doubled, per Forbes.
Now you may think, "Well, who gives a triple-F about those guys?" And you would be wrong to spend much time on it, because you surely already know that nobody does. In a perfect world, the owners would all die in an erupting volcano and their assets returned to the cities they bilked, with their dying shrieks put on Spotify under the genre heading "chill dance vibes." Even the less greed-powered MLB owners would justifiably earn that treatment for allowing John Fisher among their midst; hey, you are judged by who you choose as your partners. We don't make up the rules (which is to say that we did), we just enforce them (which is to say that we don't).
But since most owners meetings are not held at Popocatepetl, more's the pity, the idea of this nightmarish cohort being swallowed by boiling lava seems, well, farfetched. Appealing, sure, but sadly highly unlikely.
More to the point, these teams' resale values should never be anyone else's concern. Shohei Ohtani's $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers has already paid for itself through the rise in the Dodgers' valuation—that figure is up to $8 billion from $6.8 billion a year ago—but also passes the more basic eye test; Ohtani alone has surely provided more than fifty percent of the cumulative viewing joy of the Miami Marlins (valuation: $1.4 billion). And the San Diego Padres being sold for $3.9 billion to the power couple of Jose E. Feliciano and Kwanza Jones is a sign that valuable teams are only getting more valuable, even though the San Diego market is, as it always has been, bracketed to the north by the Dodgers and Angels, the south by the Mexican border, and the east by the Mojave Desert, population 12, not including multiple versions of iguanae.
In the end, MLB owners want a salary cap just because everyone else in their micro-class has one, and because they think that having one will make their lives easier. That it probably would is no reason for anyone who does not already own a MLB team to care; to this date nobody in history has ever spent money on a ticket to see the owner hanging around the ticket kiosks. If watching a well-lawyered swindler alphabetize the hundreds is your idea of a good time, you should never be allowed to remove the ankle chain attaching you to your cubicle. But we digress. The owner's job is to hire smart people and empower them to pay other people who are good at baseball, and then to leave both those groups alone to do their jobs while making sure the bills get paid on time. Oh, and to stay the hell out of sight and mind. Period.
It is nice, though, that Drellich offered us a new reason for the owners' (very old) position, which is "We want more pretend money than we already have, and we can't get more pretend money without physically stomping on the reason we have any of this money at all." Put another way, the West Sacto Athletics' value ostensibly rose by $200 million simply for doing nothing, and there is now some hope there (misplaced, but hope is sometimes worth it on its own) that Actual Sacramento might be considered for MLB expansion. To try to make sense of this mentality is to do it a great favor; the name of the game is the pursuit of more pretend money, and it isn't any more dignified or reasonable than it sounds.
What hope we can cling to, here, is that first offers are typically not worth the fossilized poop to which they are nailgunned. Squint at it hard enough and the owners' cap proposal is just slapdash and unserious enough that it somehow comes around to being promising—as responses to supposedly existential threats go, this one is notably low-effort. But it's tough to sustain much optimism, there, given that rich folks have never been more emboldened to act like rich people. They might be throwing out something stupid just to test-market it, or they might have convinced themselves that getting everything they want really will be just as simple as demanding it. Maybe this all ends up as noise to drown out the prospect of an Arizona-Tampa Bay World Series, or to diminish the effect of the likely rash of layoffs brought by the new Padres owners as part of their own ownership rite of passage. Mark Walter, the head Monopoly token who owns the Dodgers and just the Lakers, just celebrated by laying off a bunch of the Lakers' longtime staff, Dundon-style, because that's what the cool oligarchs do these days.
Anyway, we now return you to the Rockies-Angels series, beginning tonight. May the peril into which you place your souls be fully actualized.
