Major League Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement expires on December 1, and the drama over revenue sharing between owners of the more and less valuable teams has already begun.
New York Yankees President Randy Levine recently did an interview with FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal, and he made his feelings on the current revenue sharing structure clear.
"“What is very burdensome to us — and is unfair — is the amount of money we have to pay in revenue sharing compared, for example, to teams in our market that pay 10 times less than us.”"
The Yankees were recently listed for the eighth consecutive time as MLB’s most valuable franchise, and while Levine’s comments may not be exactly what similar executives for other teams ranked near the top of the list would say, it’s not hard to understand their frustrations.
There’s probably nothing more frustrating to the members of an MLB front office than another franchise using their own money to beat them, while imagining how they could use those funds to improve their own teams. It’s also comprehensible how the Yankees specifically are frustrated by the significant disparity between what they pay in revenue sharing compared to the New York Mets, who occupy the same metropolitan area.
At the same time, it’s hard to pity the Yankees as a victim of a system that is slanted against them, as Levine would try to paint his franchise. One of the big reasons why the Yankees pay more than their neighbors is because their revenue is drastically larger. For 2015, the Yankees brought in $516 million, nearly twice what the Mets did. Paying a bigger revenue share and penalties for surpassing the luxury tax threshold are costs of success that the Yankees knew about before the game started.
Regardless of how fans perceive the interests of the Yankees and the other financial behemoths of MLB, they will have their places at the bargaining table this year. They will be using these arguments that Levine made and others to seek relief in their obligations to pay into revenue sharing and more restrictions on how the teams who receive funds from that pool use said funds.
It’s almost certain that the thresholds for the luxury tax and revenue sharing will be raised. Valuations for MLB franchises are significantly up nearly across the board compared to when the current CBA was enacted. More regulations dictating how recipient teams use these funds will be more of a point of contention, however.
The Yankees and other teams like them will see revenue sharing funds as something that should be treated as sort of a “bonus” for recipients, not a budget staple that recipients depend on to pay the bills. The teams on the other end of the financial spectrum probably won’t see it that way.
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Before a new agreement is reached, there will probably be many more interviews given from teams on both ends and in the middle of the financial spectrum. Those interviews will contain more jabs at the other side of these negotiations. Levine’s comments just represent the beginning of what will be an intriguing dialogue as the coming months go by.