Jeff Passan

And inherently, a salary cap system takes away from that.

You know, when Juan Soto is making $60 million a year and Kyle Tucker is making $60 million a year, and all of a sudden that's a quarter of the potential payroll that you have, it drastically changes things.

So even though the floor that MLB is proposing is high and does bring up some of those lower spending teams and certainly shrinks the gap,

between the top and the bottom.

The consequences of that are what players are not going to be on board with.

And the argument at this point is getting very semantic, Pat.

Major League Baseball says that Major League players are going to be paid more in 2027 than they are this year under the proposal.

And

that sounds good, right?

But if you look at the mechanics of the proposal itself right now, major league players have been getting paid more each of the last five seasons under this collective bargaining agreement, just naturally, just by the way that the market is moving.

So when players see that, that, you know, the inherent mechanics of the market are likely to make the spend even higher and to make our salaries go up, they're asking the question, so what

What exactly are we getting here from limiting our ability to earn?

It was gnarly.

And one thing, Pat, I think this is a really important point for people to understand is

Even though we talk about this barreling toward a work stoppage, right?

That would be on December 1st.

If the parties have not come to an agreement, then the likelihood is that Major League Baseball would lock out the players.

That's not the day that you need to be concerned about.

A work stoppage in and of itself is nothing new.

Let's not forget, five years ago in 2021, when the collective bargaining agreement expired,