Media rights won’t be enough to bring MLB owners to negotiating table during lockout

Among all the bluster between MLB owners and players ahead of an expected lockout following the ongoing season, there seems to be a belief among the chattering class that owners will be willing to find common ground with players, even around a proposed salary cap, if it means avoiding missing a significant part of the season.

Perhaps that’s true. The reasoning isn’t so far-fetched. Canceling games means missing out on broadcast revenue that is the lifeblood of the league. And, as was recently reported by Forbes, if MLB misses too many games next season, there are clauses in the league’s current national media rights deals that would trigger and automatically extend those agreements another year, thus delaying the league’s future rights negotiations, and associated revenue windfall, by an additional season.

That’s quite the incentive to get a deal done before too many games are missed next season. But what maybe isn’t talked about enough in media circles is the relative value of one season of broadcast revenue (and delaying more lucrative broadcast deals) versus the value inherent to what the owners are really fighting for: a salary cap.

Under the league’s current broadcast agreements, MLB rakes in about $2 billion annually from its national deals with Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Comcast, Apple, and Netflix. League-wide local media rights revenue is a bit harder to peg, but an additional $1 billion is a conservative estimate (the Dodgers and Yankees alone would account for about half of that estimate). So all told, MLB would stand to lose at least $3 billion in broadcast revenue if it missed an entire season next year.

That’s hardly chump change, but when one examines how much owners stand to benefit from instituting a salary cap, that $3 billion looks more trivial than it sounds.

Above all else, sports owners care about one thing: franchise valuations. And given the relative popularity of MLB compared with peer leagues like the NBA and NHL, MLB franchise valuations have long lagged behind, in part because it doesn’t have the one thing those other leagues do: a salary cap.

Without a salary cap, MLB teams pay more for player talent. That’s great for the players, who get paid closer to market rate for their talents than athletes in practically every other professional sport, but it’s a major concern for owners. Not only are owners paying more for players relative to teams in salary capped leagues, but the market for player talent is much less predictable. When the Los Angeles Dodgers decide to throw $700 million at Shohei Ohtani, that drives up the price for players league-wide. MLB teams cannot model salary outlays with the same certainty that teams in salary capped leagues can. The higher price for player talent and unpredictability make MLB franchises far less attractive to buy than, say, an NBA team, and that is borne out in the data.

Take one look at Forbes’ annual franchise valuations for MLB, the NBA, and the NHL, and this will become clear. The Memphis Grizzlies, for instance, are pegged as the least-valuable franchise in the NBA, and Forbes assigns the team a value of $3.5 billion. That valuation would place the Grizzlies as the sixth-most valuable franchise in MLB, between the San Francisco Giants and New York Mets. The Grizzlies!

Here’s another stark difference. In 2025, Forbes estimates nearly one-third of MLB franchises operated at a loss. Meanwhile, every single NBA franchise made money in the 2025-26 season. The same can be said for the NHL, where each team also made a profit in the most recent season Forbes estimated franchise valuations in 2024-25. Teams in salary capped leagues make money every single season. That certainty drives franchise valuations higher.

Based on metrics like television ratings and attendance at games, MLB is a far more popular league than the NHL. Yet the median MLB franchise is valued at $2.1 billion, while the median NHL franchise has a nearly equal value of $2.05 billion. (For what it’s worth, the median NBA team is valued at $4.8 billion.)

These are the types of figures MLB owners are looking at and saying, “If only we had a salary cap, our teams would be worth closer to what NBA teams are valued at, not on-par with the NHL.”

And this is precisely why MLB owners will be dug in on the issue this offseason. To them, losing $3 billion in broadcast revenue for a canceled season is insignificant if it means franchise valuations skyrocket because a salary cap was instituted. To be sure, MLB’s gross revenue from media rights, gate receipts, sponsorships, etc., is closer to $12 billion per year. It’s not just broadcast revenue the league would be sacrificing in a lockout, making the calculus a bit less favorable.

But the point stands. Many owners are looking at this CBA negotiation as an opportunity to dramatically change how much their franchise is worth. When it comes to which side in this negotiation will have the appetite to hold out longer, the prospect of the owners becoming considerably richer with the implementation of a salary cap should provide them plenty of motivation. Meanwhile, with each paycheck the players miss, and with many of those players seeing their limited window in the big leagues ticking away right before their eyes, it’s a wonder just how firm a line the MLBPA can hold.