Jon Morosi

One...

One piece of this, and this is my own interpretation of it, is that according to what Jesse Rogers has reported initially as what the MLB proposal is, is that it's a hard cap, it's at this level, and it's coming in in year one.

There's a lot of time, again, between now and when an agreement could happen to where, okay, does the hard cap get a little softer?

Or does the rollout of the hard cap take a little longer to come into play?

All these things are levers that you can push and pull and negotiate over.

The optimist in me, Jeff,

looks at this and says there are so many things that were put on the table by both the union and by MLB especially you look at the union's proposal about free agency coming earlier and a higher minimum salary and a higher salary a guaranteed salary through the salary arbitration process those things

could be things that you bargain over because they would be enticing to the rank and file.

And that's where I think ultimately in the current CBA, there was that realization on the part of a lot of the players who overrode the wishes of the executive council of the union and the players themselves said, listen, I'm not so much worried about a salary cap that's going to impact Juan Soto because

except for one person, I'm not Juan Soto.

And so the players are saying, let's optimize for the middle player.

And I think that's where, from MLB's perspective, there will be a lot of education as they're filtering this information to the union to say, wait a minute, and the players themselves, the membership, to say you stand to benefit by upping the floor.

And it's important to point out that based, again, on the initial figures that were reported by Jesse –

there are many more, I believe it's twice as many, if not more than twice as many teams, that were below the proposed floor than above the proposed cap.

And that's where teams like the Guardians, Brewers, etc.,

would need to do a lot of spending.

And that becomes really great news for those marginal free agents, not marginal, but the league average free agents.

Again, someone like Chris Bassett, for example, who would get to the market, who have done the right things and who have said, wait a minute, where's my multi-year deal?

In this universe,

this CBA would be a lot better for a Chris Bassett than it would be for a Juan Soto or a Shohei Otani or a Kyle Tucker who operate in an entirely different realm than just about everybody else playing the sport.