Rob Manfred has a plan: tell players they’ve lost billions, and build their trust in him – The New York Times

When the lockout ended three years ago, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred came to believe that union head Tony Clark had grown out of step with his members. In turn, Manfred devised what he called “a pretty disciplined plan” to deliver his own messages to players over the last three years in annual meetings.
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The first year, Manfred was positive about the game’s collective bargaining agreement. The next year, he said his tune changed a little. Then “this year, it’s really pretty pointed.”
He rails against the lack of a deadline in free agency. He tells players their salaries should be growing faster. In fact, he says, they could be $2-plus billion richer had they decided to equally split the game’s revenues with owners some 20-plus years ago. He suggests, however, union leadership doesn’t want to deliver change.
“There seems to be kind of a mismatch between what we see at the union leadership level and what the players are thinking,” Manfred said.
“The strategy is to get directly to the players,” Manfred continued. “I don’t think the leadership of this union is anxious to lead the way to change. So we need to energize the workforce in order to get them familiar with or supportive of the idea that maybe change in the system could be good for everybody.”
Manfred explained this strategy during an investor event held by the Atlanta Braves. There, the commissioner both criticized the union and detailed his approach to labor in ways he had not publicly in years.
In a statement to The Athletic, Clark called Manfred’s effort a “sales pitch” that’s “full of misleading or downright false statements,” and suggested the commissioner was simply trying to drive a wedge between players.
“At a time of resurgent attendance, record revenues, and increasing franchise values, MLB should be focused on further promoting our sport,” Clark’s statement began. “Instead, their stated plan is once again to try to divide players from each other and their union in service of a system that would add to the owners’ profits and franchise values, while prohibiting clubs from fully competing to put the best product on the field for the fans and limiting player compensation, guarantees and flexibility.”
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Sports Business Journal previously reported on Manfred’s comments.
The end of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement is nearing in December 2026, leaving one more regular season before another lockout could well arrive. Negotiations are likely to start no later than next summer, and both sides are laying the groundwork.
Touting the importance of improving MLB franchise values, Manfred wants to overhaul MLB’s media rights and revenue-sharing systems. He also continuously hints that he could push for a salary cap as part of those changes.
The revenue-split system Manfred described is typical in other major North American sports leagues, where it is also part and parcel to a cap. But a firm limit on player spending has always been anathema to the Major League Baseball Players Association.
Manfred has remained noncommittal when asked what he plans to propose. But no matter the specific approach, player buy-in will make any change Manfred pursues easier, and he’s been lobbying for it.
Manfred has met with virtually every team annually for three seasons now, an effort he said originated with the way the last lockout ended in March 2022. Back then, the union’s eight-player executive subcommittee — a group that works closely with union officials like Clark — voted against accepting the current labor deal, which MLB proposed. But almost all of the other 30 player voters, one representative from each team, held a different opinion. The final vote was 26-12 to accept the deal, ending the lockout.
That result is what Manfred said led him to believe there’s a disconnect between union and player thinking.
In the player meetings, Manfred said he starts players with a rhetorical question: “What does the current system do for players?”
“Over the last 20 years, the slowest growing salaries among the four major professional sports: baseball,” Manfred says. “And when I make that point, what I usually say to the players: ‘To me, that that’s a failure on our part.’”
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The arguments that follow then all seem like a nudge towards a cap. One point, he acknowledged, can fall on deaf ears when presented to players with big salaries.
“Ten percent of our players earn 72 percent of the money,” the commissioner says for his second point. “I usually try to avoid the high-earning guy at this point and find a younger player and say, ‘Look, if you’re one of the 10 percent, it’s a great deal. But if you’re the other 90, it ain’t so good.’”
It wasn’t immediately clear how MLB calculated those figures.
Manfred’s third point goes after the lack of a signing deadline during free agency, another feature of other major sports.
“They have free agency, it’s about a month, there’s lots of bidders, it’s a great marketing opportunity for the sport, players have their choice of where to go, all positive,” Manfred says. “Our free agency is like the Bataan Death March. It starts the day after the World Series. And in February, really, really good players are still wandering around the landscape.”
In baseball, players and agents have long feared a signing deadline would be used to effectively lowball players. Most other sports have deadlines. But in cap systems, determining which player receives what salary amount is a little more akin to a game of musical chairs. The overall split of revenue is predetermined.
The last point Manfred makes is the one that suggests players have hurt themselves over time.
“My first deal where I was the chief negotiator in 2002, we were spending 63 percent of our revenue on players,” Manfred said. “Today, we spend about 47 percent on players.
“I said, ‘So what does that mean?’ I said, ‘The math means you are getting — you the players — are getting a smaller and smaller percentage of each dollar.’ And in fact, if we had made the deal 10 years ago to share (revenue) 50-50, you would have made two and a half billion dollars more than you made.”
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Clark questioned MLB’s figures generally.
“MLB’s sales pitch, full of misleading or downright false statements, is coupled with their already announced intention to shut down the sport unless they get their way,” Clark’s statement concluded. “Players’ goal remains to continue to protect and improve the health of the sport, advance and protect the rights of players at all levels, and make the game as competitive as possible for the good of the game and the people who love it.”
Manfred has not definitively said the owners will bring another lockout at the end of the CBA. But officials across the industry universally expect one, and Manfred has made public comments that strongly suggest another is coming. The commissioner has made multiple references to offseason lockouts as “the norm” in professional sports.
Until the investor call, Manfred had typically been more publicly reserved on labor since the last lockout. The June event put him in front of a different audience than a typical press conference, however. But Manfred was also aware the event could be viewed by the general public.
The moment might have been opportunistic for Manfred given recent news around the union. Federal investigators have been looking into Clark, as well as officials at other sports unions, in a probe related to a licensing company co-owned by the MLBPA.
Manfred also shed light on another labor-related subject he’s generally avoided in other settings. After the last lockout, the league formed an “economic reform committee.”
“We’ve had sort of a purposely mysterious process that we’ve referred to as the committee on economic reform,” Manfred said. “And purposely mysterious in the sense that not everybody needs to know exactly what you’re doing all the time, despite the press interest.
“Really the focus of that committee from day one was franchise values. Where are we? Why are we where we are, and what can we do to fix our situation?”
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Braves chairman Terry McGuirk said at the investor event that MLB teams typically are valued at four to nine times their expected revenues. He directly compared that to NBA teams, which he said draw valuations at multiples of 10 to 15.
“There’s nine (MLB) teams that are at a five multiple or less,” McGuirk said. “Rob can fix that.”
Centralizing revenue, which would go hand in hand with more national media deals, would boost those values because it makes income more predictable.
“If you can grow your central revenue and level out your revenue disparity, it then gives you the flexibility to either dramatically reduce or get out of this revenue sharing business altogether,” Manfred said.
Most any change to revenue sharing has to be bargained with the union, however. The union has historically worried that if baseball teams receive too much central revenue, they’re disincentivized from investing in their product and players.
Centralized revenue also divides the owners themselves, because large-market teams make more money than those in small markets.
“People often say that when you make a (labor) deal bigger, it’s harder to get it done,” Manfred said. “This is one of those areas where a bigger deal, in terms of media, labor, revenue sharing, actually gives you trade-offs to accomplish things.
“People say, ‘Why are the big markets going to do X?’ The big markets are going to do X because they’re getting Y over here. … It is complicated, but I do think it creates a real opportunity for reform. And look, if we get to a multiple that is more in line with how we see the strength of the business, you’re unlocking a tremendous increase in franchise sales.”
(Photo of Manfred: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
Evan Drellich is a senior writer for The Athletic, covering baseball. He’s the author of the book Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess. Follow Evan on Twitter @EvanDrellich

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