MLB/MLBPA Negotiations, Why Reduced Regular Season and Expanded Playoffs is a Hangup

A lot of the issues between the MLB owners and the MLBPA has fallen on deaf ears throughout the past several weeks. You might be pro-player or pro-owner or just simply, pro-play-the-f’ing-game type. We’ve covered some of the issues here over the past few weeks, but I wanted to touch on a specific area of negotiation that a lot of folks might not fully understand. That’s regular season games vs expanded playoff games.

I don’t know if you noticed, but TBS and MLB just agreed to renew their playoff deal through the 2028 season. Under the current agreement, Turner pays MLB an average of $325 million per year to broadcast potentially 14 playoff games. Under the extension, the deal will have an average annual increase of 40% (Sports Business Journal) and will pay MLB an average of $470 million a season.

This is in addition to the MLB deal with Fox that will pay $5.1 billion between 2019 and 2028. The Fox deal also includes the broadcast rights to regular season games, the All Star game, and the World Series. Combining these two deals, MLB will receive $8.86 billion by time the deals are complete, following the 2028 season.

So why is this important?

MLB player’s salaries are paid during the regular season. They do not get regular pay once the playoffs start. However, any player in the playoffs receive a share of playoff gate revenue (ticket sales) through the first three games of the League Division Series and first four games of the League Championship Series and World Series.

The owners receive 100% of the TV revenue and of course the additional profit of ticket revenue.

Let’s look at the Chicago Cubs in the 2016 playoffs. In the NLDS, they played four games against the San Francisco Giants, in the NLCS they played six games against the Los Angeles Dodgers, and then they played seven games against the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. That’s a total of 17 games and the players were only paid for 11 of them. The owners received a share of the rest of it.

But here’s the real kicker, the 59-103 Minnesota Twins received a revenue share, amounting to more than the Cubs playoff pool of money. In fact, each Cub made $368,871.59 for the 2016 playoff run, whereas every MLB franchise earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $15-20 million in just TV revenue.

This is a reason the baseball owners have been jockeying for a smaller amount of regular season games and the potential of more playoff games. Without ticket revenue and through TV revenue, owners are primed to make much more in 2020 if they can expand the playoffs. So their idea is to offer a 50% revenue share on the regular season, where they (MLB) make considerably less per game, and increase the amount of playoff games, where the MLB makes considerably more and player’s earnings are capped.

The MLBPA is no dummy, which is why they’ve included expanded playoffs in each of their last couple proposals. They asked for more regular season pay, while providing the owners with the ability to recoup some lost revenue in 2020 while offering more opportunity to earn in 2021. They additionally offered even more reductions in salary from the already agreed upon deal from late-March. This was a fair and balanced offer for MLB owners, and from initial proposals, the MLBPA was conceding somewhere in the neighborhood of $360 million.

The owners, well they conceded as well. They moved off their original proposals by around $71 million while still asking for expanded playoffs and a smaller amount of regular season games.

So I’d ask, if one side moved by more than $360 million, while offering more opportunity for owners to earn in 2020 and 2021 and the other side moved by only $71 million – which side is trying to get back on the field?