Baseball bosses push salary cap — players fight back

For the first time since 1994, the Major League Baseball (MLB) billionaire capitalist owners have proposed a salary cap for all 30 professional baseball teams. The baseball world and the MLB players union have expected this move for some time. However, the proposed cap is still a brazen attack on MLB labor rights, just as it was in 1994.

MLB teams have never had limits on what they could spend on player salaries. This has been a thorn in the side of the billionaire MLB owners for years, who feel that player payroll has unduly cut into their massive profits. Under the owners’ proposal, all teams would be capped at $245.3 million for player salaries. Meanwhile, the average value of an MLB team is almost $3 billion. The owners would have us believe they are all struggling to get food on the table because of the greedy players. 

The MLBPA, the players’ union, is strongly opposed to any policy that would limit the earning ability of the players, without whom there would be no MLB. Steve Cohen (net worth $23 billion), Rogers Communications (net worth $19 billion), and Mark Walter (net worth $7.3 billion) don’t suit up and take the field. No one takes their family to a ballgame because they love billionaire owners and $10 hot dogs. People pay for the games because they want to see the players. 

The MLB would not exist without the labor of the players, who create all the value the owners pocket. While many of the players are relatively highly paid, they are still workers who deserve to reap the value that their labor creates. 

Billionaire owners dictating the earning capacity of the players who actually play the game is the peak of absurdity and capitalist arrogance. It is for this exact reason that the players went on strike in 1994, when the owners last proposed a salary cap. 

All workers and progressive people should stand in solidarity with the MLBPA as they fight to defeat this salary cap. This is not merely a tiff between “millionaires” and “billionaires” but another front in the ongoing broad societal attack on organized labor. The players need a contract that reflects what they’re worth — and every worker has a stake in whether they win it.