MLB players would take a collective compensation hit of more than $500 million in 2026 compensation if the owners’ salary cap proposal were in place this year, according to a new analysis by the MLB Players Association.
Union interim executive director Bruce Meyer spoke with reporters Monday afternoon and said the hard cap proposal management offered last week is not only worse than a salary cap sought by owners in 1994, but would represent a significant retreat in player compensation, according to MLBPA analysis.
“Player share [of industry revenue], under their proposal, would go down,” Meyer said. “Your contracts are never really guaranteed.”
Meyer’s comments provide another signal just how far apart players and owners are at the outset of formal labor talks. While it’s not surprising for that to be the case at this early stage, Meyer said he was surprised by how much that’s the case in these negotiations.
“I thought they would try harder to make it look good, and they didn’t even do that,” Meyer said in response to a Front Office Sports question. “They’ve effectively managed to cobble together the worst system for players in any of the major sports, and it’s not even close.”
A key reason for that, Meyer said, is the inclusion of an escrow component in management’s salary cap proposal. That’s also in place in cap structures in other major leagues such as the NBA and NHL, and in those cases, there have been occasional returns of money from players to management. Meyer, however, said the union will resist that at every turn.
“Our union has never been broken. It never will be,” Meyer said. “You can take away a different lesson from our history, but that would be a mistake. Our players have what they have, including being the only sport that doesn’t have this ultimate restriction, the salary cap, because our players have always been the most unified, and that’s going to continue.”
League Response
Not surprisingly, MLB strongly countered Meyer’s assertion that player compensation would go down under the league’s proposal.
“Our salary cap and floor proposal addresses our fans’ concerns by leveling the playing field while sharing baseball revenue with the players 50-50, like the other leagues,” said MLB spokesman Glen Caplin. “Under our proposal, major league players will receive more compensation in year one of the system than in 2026. We are ready to listen if the MLBPA wants to counter our proposal at the bargaining table.”
Padres Fever
Meyer, meanwhile, also addressed the union’s own proposal from last week, which included a sharp increase in the minimum salary and expansions to the existing free agency and arbitration systems. Beyond those particulars, Meyer said the union is trying to encourage more teams to behave like the Padres.
Despite playing in a smaller, geographically isolated media market, the Padres have MLB’s seventh-largest luxury-tax payroll at $258.1 million, and last year had the league’s second-largest attendance, behind the perennially leading Dodgers. A similar result at the turnstiles is projected for this year.
“San Diego is a small-market team. They went out, decided to compete, signed a lot of players, turned around their franchise,” Meyer said. “They’ve grown attendance. They’ve grown interest, and we’ve all seen the exploding in their franchise value. They went under our revenue-sharing system from a revenue-sharing recipient to a revenue-sharing payor because they went out and tried to compete.”
Finding Hope
There are no further formal bargaining sessions currently scheduled, though Meyer expects more talks to happen soon.
Despite the grim state of the current talks, Meyer is attempting to remain hopeful—even as his sentiment isn’t universally shared and there is widespread concern that some, if not all, of the 2027 MLB season will be curtailed by a work stoppage. The memories of 1994 again linger, as the disagreement over the cap helped lead to the cancellation of the World Series that year. The current deal expires Dec. 1, and a management lockout is expected without a deal in place.
“Hopefully, everyone is thinking rationally. At the end of the day, we will make a deal,” Meyer said. “I don’t know when or what it’s going to take. But we have to deal with each other.”
