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By Jon Paul Hoornstra
Contributing Sports Writer
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Major League Baseball and the MLB Players' Association have begun collective bargaining talks.
A lockout is expected to go into effect when the current CBA expires on Dec. 1. In the meantime, the league isn't just taking its talking points to the union — it's taking its message to fans.
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A hard cap on players' salaries isn't necessarily the most interesting thing MLB has proposed. But it's the central thesis behind its "Level the playing field" campaign — the title of a website the league launched last week, in the middle of the regular season.
MLB's advertising campaign isn't merely getting ahead of counterarguments coming from the players. It's taking advantage of wide-reaching social media accounts to drill a central thesis into fans' heads by brute-force association: a salary cap is needed to achieve parity.
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"Fans overwhelmingly support a salary cap and floor, like all the other major American professional sports have long used, because they don't believe a $446 million spending gap from top to bottom is a fair fight," the league's website states. "Our salary cap and floor proposal levels the playing field while sharing baseball revenue with the players 50/50 as we grow the game together. Further, by sharing media revenue equally as part of our proposal, we can address another top fan concern of local TV blackouts."
There's a lot to unpack there. The merit of this argument depends on several easily disputable claims:
• The league can't end local TV blackouts without putting a salary cap in place
• A hard salary cap and floor are the only way to narrow the spending gap between the top and bottom spenders
• The league's definition of "baseball revenue" — likely excluding commercial and residential real-estate projects marketed in connection with stadium and stadium-adjacent land — will be fair to the MLBPA
• Spending money on players, and success on the field, enjoy a lockstep relationship
Even setting aside those details, MLB's campaign sends a troubling signal to fans. The same social media accounts that promoted the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the World Series only last November are now using the same imagery to say something negative about the game it's promoting.
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The effect is a marketing campaign that essentially demands fans of high-spending teams embrace a contradiction: your team's success is bad for the sport.
It also demands glossing over some definitions of the word "spending." Teams spend money on front-office personnel, coaches, scouts, trainers, and all the support staff — sales, marketing, human resources personnel — typical of any large corporation.
Their salaries aren't public, however. Only player salaries are. MLB's ad campaign is not taking aim at teams that employ more than one mascot, or incur large expenses by buying up vast amounts of real estate — even though technically these expenses all fall under the definition of "spending."
More news: A Former General Manager Just Destroyed MLB’s Pro-Salary Cap Argument
On the same week MLB encouraged fans to vote for their favorite All-Stars, its same social media accounts encouraged fans to strongly consider the spiraling cost of labor. That should trouble fans deeply. It's the most concrete sign yet that the league is willing to center owners' interests at the exact time when fans are focused on players' on-field performance.
The message is clear: don’t celebrate the Dodgers or Yankees without considering the negative impact their success has on the game. Don’t consider the World Series as a celebration of on-field merit; consider what it says about the economics of the sport. Don’t think about “spending” in any context beside player salaries, which are widely reported.
All of this sets the stage for an extended work stoppage in 2027. Even though television viewership and in-person attendance are on the rise, MLB is positioning the salary cap as a hill it's willing to die on — and fans should be, too.
For more MLB news, visit Newsweek Sports.
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