MLB Owners Want A Salary Cap Because They Want To Cash Out

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.