3 Things I Would Like to See in the Next MLB CBA

With the 2026 MLB CBA coming up, and me already writing an article on what new changes could possibly be implemented, I thought that I would write an article on what rules I would actually go through with. Here are three things that I want in MLB.

1) A salary floor
I mentioned this a bit in a different article, but it really feels like some owners just aren’t spending as much as they could. I understand baseball is a business and teams want to make money, but some of these payrolls are so low that MLB is even threatening to cut their revenue-sharing money.

Fans notice this too, and they don’t like it. Nobody wants to support a team whose owner seems more focused on saving money than actually trying to win. That’s not what the sport is supposed to be about.

If MLB wants to fix this, they should consider a salary floor and actually enforce it. That could mean stronger penalties, like bigger financial consequences or even taking away draft picks.


2) Higher minor league and league minimum salaries
I do realize that I am on the players’ side of these arguments, but, in my opinion, a lot of these arguments make more sense from a player perspective.

I believe that minor league salaries are going to be an underrated topic at the CBA meetings. There is no working your way around it. Minor league salaries are absolutely criminal. The most an MiLB player can make is $45,000, and even then, most players make about $35,000 because $45,000 is with all bonuses, no injuries, etc. To put that in perspective, the very max a McDonalds manager will make is around $60,000 a year. That’s crazy. I am not saying that McDonalds is not a decent job, but you would think that the MiLB player would make more.

Teams are definitely taking advantage of players because they know that these minor leaguers will tolerate low salaries to have a chance at the big leagues, and I think the players are definitely going to fight it this CBA.

As for the minimum salaries, the league minimum a player in MLb must be paid is $780,000. To be fair, it does increase every year, but I do think that giving it a bump would do very well. Not something that is needed, but something that would make players happy.


3) An international draft
No, I don’t know exactly how an international draft would work (but I did touch on it in this article), but the very idea of it intrigues me very much.

I do know it would combine all players from all different countries such as the DR, Japan, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.

It would also eliminate the current international free agent signing period as all the players who would apply through that system could just flow into the MLB international draft. I assume that the international draft could work very similar to the regular MLB draft.

The only issue is that you would have hundreds of people of applying to the international draft, and players will probably not make as much money as they could in regular free agency.

The only thing I hope is that we don’t have another lock-out in MLB during the MLB CBA. Thanks for reading!