‘Salary floor’ slaps all players across face

Don’t be fooled. Major League Baseball’s reported first “proposal” in advance of Labor Armageddon is not really about making teams like the Pirates spend more on players via a “salary floor.” It’s about helping all teams spend collectively less via a drastically reduced, de facto salary cap.

This “proposal,” as reported by The Athletic, appears to be a direct slap across the players’ faces and a complete non-starter. The only way it could ever be implemented is through a lockout, the way NHL owners forced players into a hard salary cap by shutting the lights for a full season.

I defer here to baseball writer Craig Calcaterra, as I often do, because he cuts through the bologna faster than the Pirates have sunk to the bottom of the league (and they are headed toward last place overall at a rapid rate of speed). He applied the owners’ “proposal” to this season.

“This proposal, if enacted for 2021, would suck around $114 million out of overall payrolls,” Calcaterra writes on cupofcoffee.substack.com. “If MLB cares about tanking, it would simply suggest a salary floor to address it. It doesn’t care about that, though. It only cares about limiting the overall amount of money

going to players, which is what this scheme would lead to.”

I know it’s easy to salivate upon hearing the phrase “salary floor.” That would force the Pirates to spend! That would turn Bob Nutting into Daddy Warbucks!

Did I mention this entire scheme is a non-starter?

Let’s look at this soberly. Let’s take a complicated, emotional issue and simply acknowledge some facts with the current collective bargaining agreement set to expire in December:

• MLB already has a salary cap, albeit a de facto one. It is euphemistically called the “Competitive Balance” tax. It means teams that spend at least $210 million on payroll are prohibitively taxed. Only the Dodgers have exceeded the threshold. All the other owners obviously don’t want to pay the prohibitive taxes (these people are rich for a reason).

Players will likely want to increase the tax threshold in the next CBA, not lower it by $30 million.

So let me repeat: The owners apparently want to lower the “cap,” reducing the tax threshold by $30 million, to $180 million — a figure most teams would then treat as a new de facto cap. That’s not a proposal. It’s a first shot fired in what promises to be a protracted labor war.

• Based on The Athletic’s reporting, the payroll jumps for low-spending teams would apparently be subsidized by the aforementioned tax on the rich teams, if rich teams choose to exceed the $180 million figure. A few will. And that money would go toward Nutting and others, for whatever it’s worth (not much).

• The Pirates’ best path toward winning is to continue on the path they’re on. Sink to the bottom of the league and accumulate talent via draft position, trades and all other available means. If the Rays, A’s and Brewers can make sub-$100 million payrolls work, so can the Pirates.

• As Calcaterra said, if MLB really cared about tanking, it would simply institute a floor and force owners like Nutting to spend more.

• Then again, it’s not like forcing teams to spend $100 million would end tanking. Teams would continue to tank because it works. Not all the time, but it works. The Cubs and Astros are examples of recent tank-jobsturned-terrific, to the point where the Cubs are trying it again. If a team wanted to tank, it would simply take on a terrible contract or three in order to pump its payroll to the floor of $100 million. And then continue to lose.

It’s not that difficult to understand, and neither is MLB’s first “proposal.”

It’s an absolute joke and completely useless to Pirates fans.