Major League Baseball’s labor battle might be in the early innings, but the league is already firing 100-mph fastballs.
In recent weeks, MLB has gone on an advertising blitz to gain support for a salary cap with a political-style campaign around the tagline “Level The Playing Field” on MLB.tv and social media, while rankling the union in the process.
It might be a battle between owners and players, but the league has been aggressively pushing fans into the equation months before the Dec. 1 expiration of the collective-bargaining agreement.
“It’s a very sophisticated, politically influenced approach. There’s a winner and a loser, and you go right for the jugular,” said Jeff Hunt, founding partner of Legend Labs, who has worked on media strategy and reputation management with high-profile athletes, including golfers Dustin Johnson and Jordan Spieth, tennis players Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova, and NFL quarterback Cam Newton.
“You try to get the public on your side and get ahead of it,” Hunt said. “Whether it works or not, whether it’s right or not, it’s a smart and aggressive strategy.”
The one-minute commercial cites a Morning Consult poll from last year that found that 79% of avid fans support a cap.
The ad features fans of teams with the five highest payrolls in the majors — the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays — along with a few others, appearing to be interviewed at stadiums and opining on why a cap is the right solution.
“100% needs a salary cap, that’s the biggest issue in baseball right now,” a Blue Jays fan says.
“It needs to be more equitable,” a Dodgers fan adds.
“We are listening,” the ad says. “It’s time to fix it.”
A page on the league’s official website about the campaign reads, in part: “Fans overwhelmingly support a salary cap and floor, like all the other major American professional sports have long used, because they don’t believe a $446 million spending gap from top to bottom is a fair fight.”
The league declined comment on whether an agency was involved in creating the campaign, or how much was spent.
“We think we have a responsibility to communicate with our fans on every platform and reach fans wherever they are on what we’re trying to solve in this round of labor negotiations,” said MLB spokesperson Glen Caplin, a self-described “recovering political operative” who is viewed as the force behind MLB’s campaign.
In separate sessions about 15 minutes apart from the same podium in the Liberty Ballroom of the Philadelphia Marriott Hotel in the hours before the All-Star Game, MLBPA Interim Executive Director Bruce Meyer and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred provided their opposing views of the strategy, with a few pointed jabs along the way.
Meyer, taking the podium in the first session: “The supposed stewards of the game have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince those same fans that they don’t have hope or they shouldn’t have hope, or that the product that they’re paying to consume in record numbers is somehow broken. I think it’s perverse.”
Manfred, following in the second session: “When you have a difficult public issue, particularly when the other side on the issue is very public about what their views are on the negotiation, I think it’s incumbent on us to keep our fans informed of our view of the world. And particularly given sometimes the other side may not be completely accurate or fair in terms of their recitation of what’s going on. So it seems kind of like a basic thing to me. Not that hard.”
Finding what matters
Manfred said the league’s process of listening to fans is “very sophisticated,” and includes professional pollsters; demographics cut by market, age and avidity; and focus groups. Last year, the league established a central fan council featuring 90 die-hard fans from across the country. In November, the focus of its monthly meeting with the council turned to competitive balance in response to fan surveys in which the topic was consistently brought up.
“We need to make sure that fans in markets at the beginning of the season have a realistic belief that their team has a chance to win,” Manfred said. “And honestly, I think we need a system where there is a more robust free agent market. So, if you don’t want to go to New York or Los Angeles, you have a realistic opportunity to get a viable free agent contract.”
Greg Bouris, who served as director of communications for the MLBPA for nearly two decades before resigning in 2018, said MLB is painting the effort to add a salary cap as “doing something noble for the fans.”
“They’re only responding to what the fans want. They’re pinning this on the fans,” Bouris said of the campaign’s message.
Bouris also minimized the importance of what the fans think in the context of the union’s fiduciary responsibility to its membership. From the union side, the players are “the only audience that really matters in this negotiation,” he said.
The union has said it would be “more transparent than ever” regarding its CBA proposals after Meyer took over following Tony Clark’s resignation. Meyer has held multiple press conferences. The league has taken a quieter approach, but also used social media, with MLB having the substantially larger reach with 13.4 million followers on X, compared to the union’s 211,000.
On May 27, the MLBPA went public with its opening proposal in a press release. The following day, MLB introduced the salary cap and sent its own fact sheet to the media.
“I don’t think you’re going to see me or [lead negotiator] Dan Halem holding press conferences every time that we have a meeting,” Manfred said, pointedly. “But I do think it’s important to share information with our fans, because as the process unfolds, opinions shift, and that’s significant for us.”
Said Meyer: “We’re in a bargaining year. Both sides have engaged in media efforts. We do it. Sadly, we don’t own our own TV network.”
Keeping ‘momentum’
Less than 4 1/2 months before the CBA’s expiration, MLB is seeing gains in attendance and national television viewership. Droves of fans attended the All-Star festivities in the City of Brotherly Love, highlighted by Jordan Walker of the St. Louis Cardinals capturing the Home Run Derby in a thrilling finish. Yet, amid a growing gap between the haves and have-nots, the league believes the economic system in place requires a dramatic overhaul.
Meyer accused MLB of supporting “a form of subsidized mediocrity,” designed to increase profits and franchise values. “A salary cap is the ultimate excuse not to compete,” he said.
Manfred cited baseball’s momentum after implementing the pitch clock and the automated ball-strike challenge system to a largely positive reception.
“We got that momentum by listening to our fans and making changes that, candidly, the MLBPA was not interested in,” Manfred said. “Those changes have paid off in terms of creating that momentum. And the best way to lose momentum is to stand still.”
(It’s worth noting that “momentum” is a word likely to be heard often from MLB officials and partners as the deadline nears.)
Part of that effort is the campaign to rally public support.
“MLB fears that if fans take the players’ side, they will lose interest in the game even when the sport ultimately returns, potentially after a long lockout,” said Marc Edelman, a tenured law professor and sports ethics director. “Second, this is just one more means of trying to put pressure on the MLBPA.”
MLB’s advertising campaign has certainly caught everyone’s attention.
“Why does it make any sense to basically have fans throughout the game watching ads about how you should be in favor of a salary cap?” Meyer said. “Which I find ironic, since as the owners of the league have said, ‘Hey, we’re just listening to the fans, right?’ Yet somehow, they feel it’s necessary to spend millions of dollars running ads to persuade those fans that they should really be in favor of this thing.
“I had someone come up to me and say, ‘I saw more ads for the salary cap watching baseball games than for the All-Star Game.’ There’s something wrong with that.”
