MLB owners prove yet again they care more about a buck than baseball

Even as someone who's spent the better part of the last year calling for optimism in MLB and the MLBPA's ability to avoid missing games amid a contentious CBA negotiation ... well, Thursday was the first time I began to think that stance might be a bit foolish. Because if the league's latest proposal is any indication, we remain far, far away from any sort of agreement, and owners are not signaling that they have any interest in seeing the other side here.

MLB announced a new batch of proposals that it claims would allow "greater flexibility to address longstanding player priorities while sharing baseball revenue with the players 50/50."

Really, though, all it does is underline what we've known all along: This is a group of billionaires who are more than happy to drive the sport off a cliff to get what they want, and what they want has nothing to do with the good of the game.

Everything to know about MLB's latest CBA proposal

MLB's latest proposals come in two parts. The first is in the event that players go along with their previously reported salary cap structure, which the league wants the union to think is some sort of magnanimous gesture.

IF MLBPA accepts a salary cap system:

• Increase the minimum salary to $1 million for players with two or more years of service time; $900,000 with potential for $100,000 more for those with 0-1 years
• Eliminate the qualifying offer
• Eliminated deferred salaries
• Leaving the arbitration system unchanged

Granted, that bump in minimum salary — up from approximately $750,000 — merely brings baseball more in line with the NFL, and still leaves it lagging behind the NBA. The qualifying offer does indeed suppress the markets of pending free agents who have it offered to them, but this is a bit like thanking a hostage-taker for no longer holding a gun to your head. And eliminating deferred salaries shouldn't move the needle much at all, given how few players such an arrangement applies to (and the fact that said players are stars being made whole in other ways).

In exchange for all of that fiddling around the margins, the owners want in return wholesale changes that will radically reshape the way free agency works. The system is essentially cribbed from the NBA, a functional hard-cap system with max contracts. Here's the skinny:

• Max contract with a new team: 5 years, $202 million
• Max contract with current team: 6 years, $265 million
• Largest possible contract: 12 years, $500 million

A player cannot be signed with a team at any point for more than 12 years and $500 million, meaning they can agree to such a deal only ahead of their first year of MLB service time. From there, the potential extensions decrease gradually:

11 years and $461 million after one year, 10 years and $421 million after two, nine years and $382 million after three, and so on and so forth until free agency — at which point the six-year, $265 million is the max offer available.

The rhetoric from the league side on Thursday is acting as though this is some grand bargain, a reasonable compromise from a side operating only in the best of faith. But while MLB throws around phrases like "Cornerstone Player provision" and "fixing the payroll disparity" and "earlier access to free agency," this is the equivalent of being offered a hamburger today in exchange for a million dollars tomorrow. All the spin in the world doesn't change what the owners want out of this ordeal, and what they're willing to do to get it; the only question is whether the MLBPA is divided enough to fall for it, or as dumb as the league is hoping.

MLB owners hope their Trojan Horse will fool both players and fans

Union chief Bruce Meyer said as much in his press conference in response to the league's proposal, telling reporters, "The details don't matter in a capped system. It's just moving around dollars."

And really, that's the bottom line, and why the owners are banging the table for a salary cap system so badly. It's not actually about competitive balance; do you really think that the Pirates would offer Paul Skenes that six-year, $265 million max — a deal so far beyond anything they've done before as to be laughable — or that it would make it any likelier that he'd want to stay in Pittsburgh rather than take a nearly equivalent offer from, say, the Los Angeles Dodgers? This is about fixing costs, and ensuring that the money owners are on the hook to give to their players remains under control — so that the values of their franchises can keep ballooning in perpetuity.

It would be one thing if the league was offering significant changes to its business model to compensate. But really, how much is this changing for the MLBPA's rank and file? Players still have to wait six years to hit free agency — longer than the NFL or NBA — and they'll still have their markets artificially deflated while they're in the beginning and middle of their primes in their early and mid-20s. The only difference is that, under this system, they'll have their markets artificially deflated going out of their primes as well. The whole reason why Juan Soto got overpaid for his age-34 through age-37 seasons was because he was being robbed during his age-24 season. Now a player like Soto will have to settle for a capped max deal rather than what the free market would bear for his services.

No matter what language MLB uses, what they want remains clear. And really, there's no reason why a league making so much money can't offer these changes without holding the threat of a salary cap over players' heads. That they're acting as though they have no other choice — that these billionaires are in essence crying poor — tells you what they think of their employees.

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