“Leveling the Playing Field” what Bullshit

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

I just started seeing MLB’s salary cap and salary floor commercials. I do not know exactly how long they have been running, but I know what they are doing. The league is playing politics now. It is repeating the same polished bullshit over and over like it is running for office. Control the message. Frame the issue. Propagandize the fans before the labor fight really gets ugly.

MLB’s new salary cap and salary floor campaign is not some honest civic conversation about the future of baseball. It is a sales pitch. It is a labor ad dressed up as concern for the fan.

The league is calling it “Leveling the Playing Field,” because that sounds clean. It sounds fair. It sounds like something a normal fan should support. Who doesn’t want every team to have a chance? Who doesn’t want Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Kansas City, Tampa Bay, and Miami fans to believe Opening Day actually means something?

But let’s be very clear about what MLB is doing here. The league is not suddenly worried about fairness because it found a conscience. MLB is trying to shape the conversation before the next labor fight. It is trying to get fans angry at the Dodgers, the Mets, the Yankees, the Phillies, and the players before fans start asking harder questions about the owners.

MLB wants you asking, “Why are the Dodgers allowed to spend so much?”

It does not want you asking, “Why is my owner allowed to spend so little?”

The league is pushing a proposed salary cap of $245.3 million and a salary floor of $171.2 million, with a claimed 50/50 revenue split between owners and players. But even those numbers are not as clean as they sound because they include benefits and other payroll accounting items. So when MLB says “floor,” fans hear “every cheap owner has to spend $171 million on players.” That is not necessarily what is being sold.

And notice how the league always pairs the cap with the floor. That is the clever part. Fans hate cheap owners. MLB knows that. So it gives fans the floor as the candy and hides the cap inside the wrapper.

The floor is the part fans want. The cap is the part owners want.

A real salary floor would be a good conversation. A real requirement that every owner must invest in the major league product would be worth discussing. But MLB does not get to spend decades tolerating owners who cry poor, collect revenue sharing, demand public stadium money, slash payroll, trade stars, and insult their fan bases, then suddenly pretend the real villain is the player who got paid market value.

This league is not broke. Not even close.

MLB reported record gross revenue of $12.1 billion in 2024, up from $11.6 billion the year before. That was not some dying industry limping through a crisis. That was a money machine getting bigger.

The franchises themselves are exploding in value. Forbes says the average MLB club is now worth $2.9 billion. The Yankees are valued at $8.5 billion. The Dodgers are valued at $7.8 billion. Even the so-called small-market teams are not exactly mom-and-pop operations. The Brewers are valued at $1.9 billion. The Pirates are valued at $1.62 billion. The Marlins, the bottom of the Forbes list, are still valued at $1.5 billion.

And because we throw the word “billion” around too easily now, let’s slow down and say what a billion dollars actually is.

A million seconds is about 11 and a half days.

A billion seconds is almost 32 years.

That is the difference.

A billion dollars is not “a lot of money.” It is civilization-level money. It is dynastic money. It is money so large that normal people can barely understand it because our brains were not built to process numbers that absurd.

So when Forbes says the average MLB team is worth $2.9 billion, that is not a struggling business. That is nearly three billion dollars for one baseball team. When the Yankees are valued at $8.5 billion and the Dodgers at $7.8 billion, we are not talking about owners scraping by, hoping to keep the lights on and the hot dog rollers spinning.

We are talking about assets worth more than most human beings could spend in several lifetimes. And these are the people asking fans to help them control labor costs. Spare me the poverty act.

This is not about saving baseball from financial ruin. This is about cost control. This is about owners wanting guaranteed franchise appreciation, public money for ballparks, national media money, revenue sharing, gambling money, jersey patch money, streaming money, real estate money, and then a hard limit on what they have to pay the labor that creates the product, they want the fan to clap for that.

MLB wants to make this about competitive balance, but competitive balance has become the most abused phrase in the sport. If the league cared that much about competitive balance, it would have done something serious about owners who refuse to compete. It would have forced revenue-sharing dollars into payroll and player development. It would have punished deliberate losing. It would have stopped letting owners use their teams as appreciating assets while treating the season like a budget exercise.

Instead, the league let the mess build. It let bad owners hide behind market size. It let fans in certain cities get told to be patient for five years, then five more years, then five more after that. It let teams sell hope while banking checks. Now that the Dodgers have turned spending into a weapon, MLB wants to point at Los Angeles and say, “See, this is the problem.” The bigger problem is that MLB has owners who want the benefits of owning a public civic treasure without the obligation to act like stewards of one.

And that is where this commercial campaign becomes insulting. MLB is using the language of fairness to protect ownership economics. It is trying to recruit fans into an owner-player fight while pretending the fan is finally being heard.

Fans should want a better system. Fans should want every team to try. Fans should want a real salary floor. Fans should want local TV money handled in a way that does not leave some clubs buried and others printing cash. Fans should want owners to invest in the product. Fans should want teams that receive public stadium subsidies to open their books. Fans should want revenue sharing tied to winning effort, not just ownership comfort. But fans do not need to carry water for billionaires.

That is what the arrogant MLB is asking them to do. The league is trying to say, “We need a salary cap so your team has hope.” The better question is: why did MLB allow so many owners to take hope away in the first place?

A cap might limit the Dodgers. Fine. But it also limits every player’s market. It gives owners cost certainty. It protects franchise values. It makes the business cleaner for the people who already own the asset. And when the dust settles, the same fans who were told this was about fairness will still be paying more for tickets, parking, concessions, streaming packages, and publicly funded ballparks.

That is the part MLB does not put in the commercial.

They want fans mad at payrolls. They do not want fans mad at ownership.

They want fans looking at Shohei Ohtani’s contract. They do not want fans looking at franchise appreciation. They want fans saying the Dodgers are bad for baseball. They do not want fans saying cheap owners are bad for baseball.

This is not a conversation. It is a campaign.

It is politics. It is message discipline. It is propaganda with a licensed logo slapped on it. They are not informing fans. They are conditioning fans. Say “level the playing field” enough times and hope people stop asking who tilted the field in the first place.

And I am sick of this bullshit.

If MLB wants to talk about leveling the playing field, then level all of it. Open the books. Show the revenue. Show the public subsidies. Show the real estate deals around the ballparks. Show where revenue-sharing money goes. Show how much these franchises have appreciated while fans were told their teams could not afford one more bat.

Until then, do not sell me a billionaire labor strategy as a gift to the fan.

Baseball does not need owners pretending they discovered fairness.

Baseball needs owners with enough integrity to compete.