Updated June 5, 2026, 3:52 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Major League Baseball needs a salary cap, taking the position held by the owners as the league works on a new collective bargaining agreement to avoid a lockout after the 2026 season.
“If you don’t have a salary cap, you don’t have a sport, because they can’t help themselves,” Trump told reporters on June 5 aboard Air Force One. “Football has a salary cap. They should have done it a long time ago.
“It’s shocking, frankly, that they didn’t put a cap on many years ago,” Trump added, seemingly referring to the MLB strike in 1994 and 1995. “They had a chance to do a cap but they blew it.”
MLB’s current collective bargain ends on Dec. 1. MLB is the only one of the United States’ four major sports leagues without a cap on how much money a team can spend on roster salaries ‒ an arrangement that typically works to the advantage of teams in large markets. A salary cap has long been dead-on-arrival for the MLB Players’ Association.
Labor talks kicked off last week. MLB proposed a $245.3 million salary cap, including benefits, which is lower than eight current MLB clubs’ payroll, requiring a total reduction in payroll of $578 million. The league proposed a $171.2 million salary floor, which would require 12 teams to increase their payroll by a combined $617 million.
The players union emphatically rejected the proposal. Bruce Meyer, interim executive director of the MLB Players Association, said the cap would result in a $500 million pay cut, with portions of their contracts becoming non-guaranteed.
The players union proposed that each team be guaranteed a minimum of $240 million in revenue-sharing each season, with the league’s lowest-revenue teams receiving monetary bonuses for making the playoffs or having winning records.
The proposal would penalize teams for not putting the revenue-sharing money back toward players, with each club required to have a payroll of at least $150 million. The union also proposed that minimum salary increases nearly double from $780,000 to $1.5 million, and lowering free agency from six years to five years for players 30 and older.
The last MLB lockout lasted 99 days, from December 2021 to March 2022, but it did not eliminate any games from the regular season.
It’s perhaps no surprise Trump would see the labor negotiations from the owners’ point of view. Trump, an avid sports fan, owned the New Jersey Generals in the United States Football League from 1983 to 1985 before they league dissolved.
Contributing: Bob Nightengale of USA TODAY
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
