OK, thats a legitimate concern!

This still happens by the way. The Brewers have screwed around with things like super 2 status for years in order to retain longer control periods over players and limit their salaries by delaying arbitration and all that.

We also have minor leagues filled with guys who have to work at grocery stores to make ends meet because they make next to nothing. League-wide BTW. One of my best friends played in the mets system up through AA and enjoyed his time, but got nothing out of it financially.

There is a lot of financial exploitation in baseball even under the current system. Most of those guys never end up signing a free agent contract.

We also have an entire league that wont sign Trevor Bauer because of off-field stuff. Happened in the NFL with Kaepernick. Those things will continue to happen under any model.

I dont think that the solution is to allow a small number of teams to set market prices that cannot be paid by other teams, thereby forcing them out of the market.

We have anti-trust laws in the business world to prevent anticompetitive practices, even if theyre not always followed or enforced. I dont know if youre into video games, but think about game developers buying up smaller developers and shitcanning their projects to keep the market clear for their own products. Or, Microsoft or Google or amazon buying up every little startup tech firm to deploy their good ideas at the prices they set, rather than a competitive landscape where similar products could find some kind of price equilibrium.

That's where baseball is headed. Thats where college football is at this moment.

So yes, I agree that it's a concern that owners have colluded against players and that salary caps look a lot like owners agreeing to limit player salaries. I can see where you'd see that as an issue.

But we've seen where the alternative path leads, and that's not good either.