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Originally Posted by Mecca
So some pretty serious stuff on twitter right now that the MLBPA is going to go apeshit in the next labor negotiation.
In that you see things like Cohen is going to buy the Wilpon met share for 2.6 billion dollars...that would make the total team value 3.25 billion, in 2002 the Wilpons paid 135 million for it. That means the teams value increased 170 million per year.
The Angels are using baseball money to spend 325 million dollars to own their new stadium and the area around it.
The Indians last Forbes value piece, had $282M in revenue and were worth $1.2B. They have quadrupled in value in the last 19 years. They certainly can afford Lindor, but they certainly have suckered into thinking they can’t.
Lots of this stuff everywhere that all of these teams are worth a crap ton of money and they're turning huge profits while crying poor. That they're spending big money on non baseball shit and players are getting pissed, mid level vets can't seem to get paid anymore so it appears the union is going to try to go to war over a lot of this stuff.
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The problem in hammering the 'worth' equation is that there's not a good way to differentiate between legacy teams and teams that have new ownership.
What a franchise is 'worth' doesn't help Cohen when he's trying to cover that debt service, for instance. Now if you're the Yankees and you're owned free and clear and could be sold for probably $5+ billion, yeah - that's a different story.
But then you're talking about vastly uneven playing fields. MLB's goal ISN'T to extract every thin red dime from every owner, it's to put the richest owner in a position that's not so substantially better than the poorest owner so as to maintain competitive balance as best they can.
MLB doesn't care that the Yankees could spend $600 million/yr on player salaries for the next 50 years and never got broke. They care that the Pirates can't do anything approaching that and they'd prefer not end up back where they were in the late 90s when 4 teams could buy up everything.
Look, the MLBPA can piss and moan about this all they want, but the bottom line is that ALL of this comes from a refusal to consider a salary cap. And the amount of negotiating leverage they would get if they would do so is IMMENSE. They could then start talking about a floor. They could then start talking about a direct ratio between Leaguewide revenue and leaguewide spending. They could look into a system that gets guys into FA sooner.
But they've been so antagonistic and so dogmatic when it comes to discussing a cap that they don't have a willing participant in the negotiation on the other side of the aisle. All they've been willing to do for years is take their ball and go home - they're not offering any concessions in return for all the things they're going to 'demand' from MLB. In an era where they're ALL wealthy, some just more wealthy than others. The closest thing they've done is the drug testing policy and even THAT was pulling teeth.
They mostly just say "You'll do this or we won't play" without putting anything on the table apart from that. If they're going to make these demands, they're going to have to start discussing a cap.