Zack Scott is a 4x World Series champion with the Red Sox and the former acting general manager of the Mets. Today he’s the founder of Four Rings, where he builds senior leaders in and out of sports their own AI system to make better calls on the high-stakes decisions they can’t take back. He’s also an associate partner at PBI Sports, representing more than 20 coaches and executives across MLB. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series with a unique proposal to the upcoming collective bargaining negotiations. You can read the first part here.
In part one, I argued that the salary cap the owners proposed is the wrong fight, and that three problems sit underneath it: a local-television gap, low-revenue teams that pocket their checks, and players who capture none of the value created when a franchise sells. The fixes there started with the owners’ own idea, pooling local television, and added a luxury tax that restrains the top without a hard ceiling. Here’s the rest of the deal, the half that breaks new ground.
On the floor itself, the two sides are closer than the headline numbers suggest. The owners’ $171.2MM counts benefits and bonus pools, so it works out to roughly $148MM in actual payroll, and the union didn’t counter with a hard floor at all. It would tax teams that spend under about $150MM, almost the same place. The number is nearly settled. The harder question is what counts toward it.
The floor has to be real, which means the money has to get spent. But a payroll-only floor carries a risk nobody is pricing. Free agency is the oldest corner of the talent pool, the largest concentration of financial downside in the sport. Teams pay free agents close to full value the day they sign, and by the back years of a long deal they’re paying for production that has faded. A large share of the league runs payrolls well under the line, so a payroll-only rule would push many of them from the $80MM range up toward it through free agency alone, where the downside grows faster than the upside and they have less room than big markets to trade or eat a mistake. So define the obligation broadly. Tie revenue-sharing and centralized-media money to major league payroll plus baseball operations infrastructure, defined tightly and league-audited so nothing gets hidden from the players. A club should be able to satisfy the floor by building one of the best development operations in the game instead of handing a 31-year-old the five-year deal nobody else would. That forces owners to invest in being good at baseball, which helps the smallest markets far more than forcing a number onto the payroll line.
Then pay the young players. The system underpays its best bargains for six years. Raise the minimum salary, expand the pre-arbitration bonus pool, and move arbitration up a year. It’s the union’s stated priority and it’s cheap next to the star market. It won’t fix the service-time games, and I won’t pretend it does. Teams hold down good-but-not-elite prospects and sign others to pre-debut extensions, and you can’t legislate that away when nobody can prove a player is big-league ready on a given day. But the case stands on its own. These are the most productive, most cost-effective players in the sport, and they’re paid the least. It does something bigger too. Every dollar committed to young players is a dollar that can’t go to free agency, the highest-downside spending in the game. Pushing payroll toward that talent and away from the oldest, most expensive end of the roster ties pay more to production than tenure, good for the clubs and good for the game.
