Jeff Passan

The Major League Baseball Players Association wants status quo.

They're talking two entirely different financial infrastructures to govern the sport.

And so until they can even agree on something as simple as, okay, what are we going to have to enforce the rules of the game, there's not going to be a whole lot of progress.

And yet I found some solace in two things.

Number one, the MLBPA yesterday in its proposal came to MLB and said, we want to share more local television revenue.

Their proposal said the first $50 million that every team makes in local television revenue will go into the same pot.

And then on top of that, whatever you have remaining, two-thirds of that will go into the pot as well.

And that will all be distributed evenly.

MLB went a step further and said every local television dollar there is will go into a pot, and we will just have centralized TV money in the same way that the NFL does, and we'll distribute that evenly.

And the reason I appreciated that, Jeff, is because, you know, at the end of the day, the real question is how strong is the MLBPA and

How stubborn is Major League Baseball?

And I say that because the strength from the union will be holding off on accepting a cap, and the stubbornness from the league will be pushing for a cap.

Because let's not forget, the league is the one that's trying to change things here.

It's incumbent on them to convince the other side to do so.

So whatever the system winds up being, though, there is going to be a giant pot of television money that's coming in.

There's going to be a, you know, the national television rights are going to be huge.

And the local television rights, especially if MLB can get every team or the vast majority of teams under one umbrella, are going to be big, too.

So this pot of money is going to go up significantly.

And

Look, I get MLB's desire and instinct to narrow the gap between the top-end teams and the bottom-end teams.