Salary Cap Isn't The Most Interesting Detail in MLB's First Labor Proposal
As part of MLB‘s first collective bargaining proposal to the MLB Players Association, all local media revenues in the sport would be pooled and distributed equally among the 30 teams. Commissioner Rob Manfred has spokenopenly about his vision for the future of teams’ media rights, but this marks the first time the league has put such a proposal in writing.
Why is it such a critical detail?
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The big-market teams with the largest local television contracts - namely, the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers - would share their TV money with smaller-market teams. A sudden ratings loss for one team would be less of a shock to its revenue. A ratings increase for one team could help the other teams, at least marginally.
This is a sea change from the previous economic structure of the game, in which revenues from a team’s regional sports network might be the difference between being able to sign a free agent or not. According to Evan Drellich of The Athletic, owners probably would never be willing to make this change “outside of a [salary] cap system.”
The league has proposed instituting a salary cap before. That led to the longest work stoppage in the history of the game, and forced the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
Centralizing media revenue is novel. It represents something different, but no less important, in the history of baseball labor relations: a reconciliation between big-market owners and their small-market brethren, and a sign of how MLB understands itself in the broader sports landscape.
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Typically, CBA talks are portrayed as an owner vs. player struggle. Getting the two parties on either side of the bargaining table to agree is the focal point of negotiations, but obscures the player vs. player and owner vs. owner fissions within each party.
Within those factions, no rift is greater than that between the owners of the teams in a sport’s largest media markets, and those in the smallest. By pooling teams’ television rights into a centralized coffer, it eliminates a great source of disparity between the have and have-nots.
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The proposal copies the model (in spirit, if not to the letter) already in place in the NFL, where media rights are overwhelmingly national. Teams do not negotiate separate local regular-season TV deals. National broadcast revenue is shared equally among all 32 clubs.
But while baseball has long claimed to be the “national pastime,” it’s also more an amalgamation of 30 regional fan bases than the NFL - where gambling, fantasy football, and other factors foster rooting interests less dependent on geography than in MLB.
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Could an NFL-style package of national media rights for every team work in conjunction with pooled revenues? It would be interesting to find out. That, more than a salary cap, makes the fate of MLB’s proposal compelling.
While a salary cap is a competitive-balance measure that addresses a disparity in expenses, pooling media rights addresses a disparity in revenues by boosting the bottom line of small-market teams - a competitive balance measure in and of itself. It also sends a message about how MLB views itself on the national stage.
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This story was originally published May 31, 2026 at 10:54 AM.