Major League Baseball’s New Salary Cap Proposal Is As Shady As Its Old One

In the lead-up to an inevitable springtime lockout, Major League Baseball has revised the salary cap-and-floor plan it first proposed back in July. The significance of these details is different from sports leagues that already have salary caps, where the numbers are the point. In MLB the fight concerns whether a salary cap will exist at all, with ownership offering up version after version of what a cap could resemble, and players ostensibly declining, baseball bat in hand, until the basic yes-or-no question has been answered.

The latest version, proposed by MLB on Nov. 3, would delay the implementation of a cap from 2027 to ’28. This is less a concession to players than it is to teams, giving them a full offseason to prepare rather than launching into a cap system immediately after a lockout. The new numbers offered by MLB are projections, contingent on league revenue, which presumably will change dramatically in ’27 depending on the duration of the lockout.

To simplify, the proposed, projected cap would sit at $258.2 million, and the floor at $180.2 million, or at about 70 percent of the cap. This would, in theory, work out to players receiving a 50-50 percent split of league revenue. But like all cap systems, the finer details are contingent on how revenue is collected and how spending is defined.