Just a week into baseball’s labor talks, President Donald Trump has taken a side.
The president said Friday that he supports a salary cap in Major League Baseball, aligning himself with the owners in a nascent negotiation that could grow contentious enough to cancel games next year.
“If you don’t have a salary cap you don’t have a sport, because they can’t help themselves,” Trump told reporters Friday aboard Air Force One, per audio published online by the White House. “They should have done it a long time ago.”
The president added it was “shocking, frankly, that they didn’t put a cap on many years ago.”
The players’ union declined comment to The Athletic on Friday. MLB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
To presidential historians, it seemed only a matter of time before Trump weighed in on baseball’s negotiation. During his time in the White House, Trump has tried to exert influence on sporting matters in a way few presidents have.
“I know so much about sports,” Trump said at one point during his exchange with reporters, in which he also addressed the college sports landscape and the NBA Finals.
In baseball, Trump previously claimed credit for improving the chances that the late Pete Rose would be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Trump has also publicly criticized MLB and the league’s commissioner, Rob Manfred.
That he would now side with the owners during collective bargaining isn’t necessarily surprising.
“What jumps out at me is his extreme hostility to labor organizing,” Allan Lichtman, a historian and political analyst at American University, told The Athletic for a story published earlier this year. “If he were to jump into a labor management dispute within baseball, I have no doubt that his anti-union proclivities would prevail.”
MLB is the only major sports league in the U.S. without a cap and floor, in no small part because the MLB Players Association has historically been the strongest union in sports.
Baseball’s current labor deal expires Dec. 1. Owners are expected to lock out the players on Dec. 2, setting up a stare-down that’s expected to last until at least the spring.
The last time the two sides seriously fought over the possible introduction of a cap system, from 1994-95, the players went on strike for 232 days, leading to the cancellation of the ’94 World Series. Now, at the outset of negotiations that are expected to last at least nine months, fans and industry officials alike fear the sport could be headed for a repeat of that ugly clash.
Asked whether he worried about a conflict on the level of 1994-95, Manfred said Wednesday at league headquarters, “Of course I do.”
Trump appeared to refer to the 1994-95 strike when he said baseball should have added a cap “a long time ago.”
“They had a chance to do a cap, and they blew it,” the president said Friday.
But if MLB’s owners insist on a cap in the coming months, baseball could well see games canceled in 2027 — perhaps, in a worst-case scenario, the entire season.
Players and owners exchanged opening economic proposals just last week. The league, citing competitive-balance concerns, proposed each team’s payroll be limited to $245.3 million starting next year, with a salary floor of $171.2 million.
The union opposes a cap for a long list of reasons, including an argument that player salaries would no longer be guaranteed.
Cap systems formalize a revenue split between players and owners. In that system, if the league’s revenues were to drop in a given year, players would have to give back money via escrow. Player salaries today do not directly fluctuate based on how the league fares.
When a reporter on board Air Force One on Friday asked Trump whether baseball needs a salary cap, the president’s first reaction was, “Don’t they sort of have one?”
MLB currently has a restricted market system, in which teams pay a luxury tax this year if they spend more than $244 million on players. But ultimately, clubs can spend as much as they want. Manfred said this week that the luxury-tax system has “failed” in terms of delivering competitive balance. The union disagrees.
The Los Angeles Dodgers have the highest payroll in the sport at $420 million, per Cot’s Contracts. That’s roughly five times the payroll of the team with the lowest, the Miami Marlins.
