During last week’s contentious collective bargaining sessions between MLB and the MLBPA, one of the main sticking points between the two sides was the fate of the Competitive Balance Tax—known more commonly as the luxury tax—over the next five seasons. Disillusioned by the fact that most owners have treated the luxury tax as a de facto salary cap in recent years, the players came into negotiations looking for big increases to the threshold that triggers the tax as a way to counteract this.
The owners, however, opposed raising the luxury tax much at all, claiming that doing so would be detrimental to the long-term parity of the game (as a side note: the correlation between team payroll and wins over the last decade has been proven to have been rather weak).