The Braves shed salary by trading established players for prospects over the past two off seasons and now have the fourth-lowest payroll in baseball. Yet team owner Liberty Media reported that the team increased its operating income in 2015 in spite of a drop in attendance and concession revenue because of lower salaries and game operating costs.
There are a handful of other teams that have taken a similar approach of offloading expensive players for draft picks and relatively inexpensive prospects, a practice that critics deride as tanking. It’s a situation that theoretically could concern the players’ union when it negotiates a new collective bargaining agreement with owners as the current deal expires at the end of the year.
Tony Clark, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, said players believe individual clubs should have the flexibility to adjust payrolls for their specific circumstances that include the team’s market. But Clark said it’s critical that the overall product isn’t damaged as teams reduce payroll.
“As you start talking about markets, start talking about flexibility, you want to make sure that everyone functions within certain parameters that suggest the well-being of the industry are also part of the conversation,” Clark said after meeting with Braves players Thursday during his tour of major league clubhouses. “We understand decisions that are made by particular clubs against the backdrop of what it believes it needs to do in order to be successful moving forward. We simply want to make sure that flexibility doesn’t affect the industry in such a way that it ends up being a negative rather than a positive.”
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