I’ve really grown to hate the whole “millionaires versus billionaires” thing. Every owner is a billionaire. Not all, or even a majority, of players are millionaires. They make mid-six figures for about three years and then have to go get a real job.
The modal MLB player, the median guy, has a career length of about 2.5 years, so he never reaches salary arbitration, never makes over ~550k per season (then take out Uncle Sam, agent's cut, the absolutely insane local taxation there is for athletes they pay in every road city that no one knows about), spends multiple years in the minors which are essentially pay-to-play at this point, and foregoes a college education for the privilege in the modal case.
They get to live a dream. They make memories that last a lifetime. But they're getting the worst deal out of the four major sports by a country mile, and are under no circumstances making "life changing" money. No grandkids are going to college off the leftovers from a 2 year MLB career.
And then the players who are better than that average have their service time manipulated to exploit them while they're cheap on the front end and face all sorts of mechanisms to weigh down their free agent value on the back end.
This all used to be quite different. And it's profoundly different in the other sports, where only a small percentage make anywhere near the minimum salary. In baseball more than half of the player population is pre-arb and therefore making within 20-30k of the minimum.
And the owners, who in baseball as in other sports have loss-proof monopolies that are ensured by publicly financed facilities, are trying to squeeze MORE of the pie out of the players fingers.
That's why the players are so determined. There are prominent voices among highly paid stars, Scherzer in particular, but the majority of the votes are these guys, and not only are they getting screwed, the whole union can see a future in which becoming a baseball player is basically a fools errand financially, and they feel a responsibility to demand better for future generations.
Plus, as an aside, both parties pay lip service to wanting to combat tanking and make teams put the best product on the field. The player's proposals are serious in that regard, the owners' are a complete joke. Because tanking keeps labor costs down.
