MLB owners want some sort of salary cap.
The Commissioner of Major League Baseball’s legal team has not yet engaged in serious collective bargaining negotiations with the Major League Baseball Players Association as the present CBA ending in December 2026. The rest of the 2025 season and the 2026 season will not be impacted by labor strife but there is something unusual going on with the owners side. Owners are speaking out about the need for some mechanism to control players’ salaries. In past negotiations the owners generally said nothing leaving it up to the commissioner’s legal team to do the bargaining and make statements. The owner of the Houston Astros franchise, Jim Crane, is the latest owner to discuss the upcoming CBA talks and while he is not pushing for a salary cap, Crane thinks something needs to be done. Crane said he does not “think a salary cap happens” even though there is “glaring need for MLB to change its economic structure to fit more in line with that of the NFL, NHL or NBA.”
Crane’s comments follow those of the owner of the Colorado Rockies’ franchise Dick Monfort who joined the chorus led by Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein and New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner that want something done. And they want something done by the beginning of the 2027 season. There seems to be a concentrated effort from Major League Baseball’s ownership side that the business must rein in spending by the Los Angeles Dodgers ownership. There seems to be three camps here in what has become the first volleys fired in negotiations between the owners and players. The owners are annoyed at the Dodgers ownership, so there is not a united ownership message, it’s the Dodgers owners against the other 29 owners and then the owners versus the players. MLB owners may be laying the ground for a lockout.
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