As the owner lockout drags on and negotiations on baseball’s new collective bargaining agreement do the same, you’ve probably become familiar with the finer points of the dispute.
Most of it is readily understandable enough – MLB players want to claw back the share of revenues that they’ve lost over the years thanks to owner behavior, and MLB owners want to prevent them from doing so.
Let’s take a brief explainer of MLB’s revenue-sharing construct. When we talk about revenue sharing in baseball, we’re talking about the sharing of local revenues (i.e revenues from local television contracts and gameday revenues from each team’s home contest). MLB’s constituent teams have shared those revenues at ever-increasing rates since the 1990s. During the span of the recently expired CBA, teams shared 48 percent of those local revenues save for the 2020 season, when the sharing of local revenues was paused because of the global pandemic.
After the explanation, time for the reasons the players have for wanting to alter the revenue sharing system:
- The current system keeps small-market teams from competing
- The current system also works against large-market spending
- Revenue sharing is costing players money and not improving the game
For more information, MLB Lockout: Three reasons why the players union wants to alter baseball’s revenue-sharing system was originally published on CBS Sports.
