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President Donald Trump sided with MLB owners on a salary cap as labor tensions rise and a work stoppage threatens next season.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump threw his support behind Major League Baseball owners Friday, endorsing a salary cap just days after labor negotiations began and as concerns grow that the sport could be headed toward another damaging work stoppage, even one that could cancel part or all of next season.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s remarks immediately placed his administration on the same side as MLB owners in a growing battle over competitive balance, player salaries and the future economics of the sport \u2014 a fight some fear could lead to a repeat of the 1994 work stoppage catastrophe that led to the first season without the World Series being played since 1904<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump made the comments aboard Air Force One, responding to a reporter\u2019s question about whether baseball needs a salary cap.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t they sort of have one?\u201d Trump responded.<\/p>\n A reporter explained that the luxury tax threshold allows wealthy clubs to spend freely beyond the line. Trump then stated his position on the MLB issue.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a salary cap you don\u2019t have a sport, because they can\u2019t help themselves,\u201d Trump said, as quoted by Dan Zaksheske of the Fox-owned sports site Outkick<\/a>. \u201cThey should have done it a long time ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump added he found it \u201cshocking, frankly, that they didn\u2019t put a cap on many years ago\u201d and said baseball had \u201ca chance to implement one a long time ago but they blew it.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s statement comes with some degree of irony. A majority of the players he is effectively opposing are his own supporters, or at least supporters of the Republican Party. A VoteHub analysis of publicly available<\/a> voter registration data found that among 434 sampled MLB players, 233 were registered Republicans and just 34 were Democrats, with 157 independents and 10 registered with an alternative party.<\/p>\n MLB Salary Cap Debate: The Numbers<\/p>\n The Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> carry a payroll of over $420 million<\/a> \u2014 roughly five times the Miami Marlins\u2019 figure \u2014 and paid an additional $169 million in luxury tax penalties last season, according to a report by ESPN<\/a>\u2018s Jorge Castillo. That tax bill alone exceeded the Marlins\u2019 entire payroll by more than $100 million.<\/p>\n Owners have proposed capping each team\u2019s payroll at $245.3 million, with a salary floor of $171.2 million. The union rejected both. The current luxury tax threshold sits at $244 million, but clubs can spend as far beyond it as they choose, as the Dodgers have clearly demonstrated.<\/p>\n MLB is the only major North American professional sports league without a salary cap system. Commissioner Rob Manfred has called the luxury tax system a failure on competitive balance. The union has opposed a salary cap for decades and is not expected to soften.<\/p>\n MLB Lockout Risk, and What It Could Mean for 2027<\/p>\n The current collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1. Owners are expected to lock out players on Dec. 2, beginning a standoff industry officials expect to grind into spring \u2014 and potentially wipe out regular-season games in 2027. The last time a salary cap was seriously on the table, during the 1994-95 strike, players walked out for 232 days and the entire World Series was canceled.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course I do,\u201d Manfred said Wednesday at league headquarters when asked whether he feared a repeat, according to ESPN\u2018s Castillo. \u201cYou just can\u2019t ignore that financial penalties have not gotten it done for us.\u201d<\/p>\n The MLBPA declined to comment Friday, and the league did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tJonathan Vankin<\/a> JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist who covers MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, boxing, golf, and Olympic sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Newspaper and Press Association awards for sports feature writing. He was a sports editor and writer at The Daily Yomiuri in Tokyo, Japan, covering the Olympics, pro baseball, boxing, sumo and other sports. More about Jonathan Vankin<\/a>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Getty President Donald Trump sided with MLB owners on a salary cap as labor tensions rise and a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718287,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-718286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}