The offseason is up and running. Sort of. With the short and supposedly frenzied period of transactions ahead of the expiration date of the CBA still starting its engines (at least, we hope), there’s still a lack of fresh talking points that involve signings and big trades. As such, many of us are defaulting to the looming lockout, the CBA talks, and so on. It’s only natural to talk about the giant smoldering ball in the sky when it takes up so much of the available sightlines.

In the midst of all this talk, I recently came across a question that essentially goes like this: Say the MLBPA would be willing to accept a salary cap system as long as it got big concessions in other places—what do those concessions even look like? Basically, what would the MLBPA ask for in order to balance out a cap?

Coming up with a proper response to such a question is obviously little more than mental stimulation; the MLBPA’s stance on the salary cap topic is a pretty clear and logical “nuh-uh”. Still, for those of us not personally involved but willing to engage in such mental gymnastics, trying to find the invisible imaginary key to unlock baseball’s complicated owner-player relationships in a semi-realistic way makes for a very interesting exercise. It also inevitably highlights that, for as much as MLB and its owners would love a salary cap and the skyrocketing franchise values that would come with it, they’re probably totally unwilling to make the kinds of concessions that could get a strong players’ association to bite on the topic even a little.

(This is, obviously, par for the course. Generally speaking, those wealthy enough to own an MLB franchise do not reach such mind boggling levels of wealth by compromising and looking to strike fair deals. But that’s besides the point.)

I’ve thought about this quite a few times, and most of my answers are points you probably thought of as well: a generous salary floor, the ability for the MLBPA to audit the league through a third party, an increase to the league minimum salary, a reduction in the duration of team control, etc. All of these touch on many of the areas of concern for players today. Careers are short; a more substantial minimum salary makes every week on a big-league roster all the more rewarding. Most players enter free agency at too old an age, which negatively impacts the contracts they sign; fewer years of team control would get more and younger players to free agency.

But these are all obvious and part of the status quo—short of some major concession such as slicing years of team control from six to four, the MLBPA would probably be unimpressed with a shinier coat of paint on the same body and chassis. They certainly wouldn’t budge on their firm refusal to even consider a salary cap system. (And they shouldn’t.) They would need more concessions.

Is there something pro baseball can incorporate that would be enough of a shock to the system to bring the players’ association to the table? Is there some system in place that severely undercuts a player’s agency at some point in their career which can be removed, perhaps one so established that we can’t imagine life without it?

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