Early this year, Major League Baseball formed a fan council, a group of now 90 diehard fans from across the sport who meet monthly on a video call with league executives.
MLB makes a presentation at every meeting on topics that, most of the time, are innocuous. In June, the league went over the science behind the unusually designed “torpedo bats,” which were a popular storyline in early 2025. In August, the league discussed its social-media strategy.
November’s meeting, however, stood out to some council members because it veered into one of the most politicized and contested issues in the sport: competitive balance. Those two words sit at the heart of a labor fight between players and owners that may soon grow more combative.
Through the newly formed fan council, MLB might have brought the fight directly to fans — or at least planted seeds for discussions to come.
The owners are widely expected to pursue a salary cap and to ultimately lock out the players when the collective bargaining agreement expires in December 2026. Formal negotiations between MLB and the players’ union are likely to begin in the spring, but informal talks are already underway, and both sides have already made public volleys.
“They know they have a major PR battle coming up with this CBA negotiation, and they’re trying to test the best ways to frame the discussion to the public as to why a salary cap, or changes like that, might make sense,” said P.T. Tierney, a New York Yankees fan who is part of the fan council. “Competitive balance could be the way that they go to the public and try to justify it.”
Most — if not all — of the fans MLB invited to the council have followings on social media, making them potential influencers in their niche fan communities. Tierney has almost 4,000 followers on the platform X (formerly Twitter) where he’s branded himself “Rational Yankees Fan.”
“My first kind of impression was that it was a little strange that they were bringing it to such a large panel of fans when publicly facing — like the commissioner, for example, has shied away from commenting on that publicly,” said Matt Chowansky, a Philadelphia Phillies fan on the council with 9,100 X followers. “One of the biggest things that came into my mind was like, ‘Why us?’”
Not all council members raised an eyebrow at the competitive-balance conversation, however.
“It didn’t feel like to me, at least, that they were trying to throw a narrative out there,” said Cincinnati Reds fan Greg Kuffner, a contributor to Sports Illustrated’s website, who has roughly 17,400 followers on X. “I think they were simply just giving us statistics.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred and his primary spokesperson for labor issues, Glen Caplin, have repeatedly said this year that smaller-market fans are worried about their teams’ ability to keep up with larger-market clubs’ revenues and payrolls. The Los Angeles Dodgers set a record this year with a payroll of about $415 million, per Cot’s Contracts.
Caplin himself led the competitive-balance presentation to the fan council this month. In emailed responses to questions from The Athletic, Caplin framed the discussion as a matter of fan service, separate from labor.
“The MLB fan council is a collective of baseball fans brought together by MLB representing teams across the league so that MLB can continue to receive feedback directly from fans about the issues they care about and improve the game they love,” Caplin said. “Competitive balance as a topic has consistently come up from council members in the monthly surveys, including the last survey in October in an open-ended question.
“The November topic on competitive balance was scheduled in response to those surveys. Fans deserve an opportunity to discuss the issues most important to them.”
For many fans, particularly in smaller markets, their team’s ability to build a winning roster is indeed top of mind. Some owners and executives in smaller markets have long complained about their plight, and some teams have long struggled. Whether baseball is suffering compared to other sports is something the league and the union disagree on.
In its presentation, MLB compared the Dodgers to the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League, a circuit that has a salary cap.
“The Cowboys are like the most recognized fan base or recognized sports team in all of sports,” Reds fan Kuffner recalled of the points MLB made. “They have to play by the same rules basically as everybody else in the NFL, whereas the Dodgers can go spend more money than the (Colorado) Rockies or the Reds. And they showed some slides of, over the last however many years, this is how many small-market teams have won, and this is how many big-market teams have won.”
But any conversation about competitive balance inevitably leads to the economic and structural elements of the sport. Asked what the league told fans about labor, Caplin replied, “We have not discussed labor and/or the upcoming CBA negotiations.”
That characterization is tenuous. A salary cap and spending were ultimately discussed during the presentation, participants said.
“It wasn’t like they said, ‘We’re gonna sit down and talk about a salary cap,’” said Rockies fan Shannon Hurd, who has about 4,000 X followers. “The presentation was basically educating us about payroll and how much money has influenced team performance over the past. Very detailed slides and graphs that really gave facts about how important payroll is to performance, and more so in MLB than other sports. So that naturally led to people talking about a salary cap.”
The Major League Baseball Players Association declined comment on the presentation to the fan council. Union head Tony Clark has often argued that many clubs can spend more than they do. MLB teams, save for the publicly traded Atlanta Braves, do not regularly publicize their finances, although the union receives regular reports for every team. (The Toronto Blue Jays are also owned by a public company, Rogers Communications, but are not a separately traded company as the Braves are.)
Five fan-council participants who spoke to The Athletic said MLB asked them to join the council the same way: via direct message on social media from the league’s main account. For many invitees, it was an honor just to be recognized and asked to participate. Some fan council members, like the Yankees fan, Tierney, tout their council position in their social-media profiles.
“It was cool, because I am just some guy with a Twitter account,” Tierney said. “I started it with zero expectations, just trying to talk Yankees baseball with people. Now I’m actually on calls with former players or people high up at MLB, and I’m learning kind of the inside story of how they’re operating.”
Couple important things here:
1. We all know the owners want a salary cap in the next CBA negotiation. Regardless of how Hal actually feels, he’s not going to come out publicly against other owners a few months before the negotiations start. Those optics would be terrible.
— Rational Yankees Fan (@rational_yankee) November 24, 2025
Fans are allowed to ask questions during the video calls and are told they can publicly discuss whatever the league presents. The television show Foul Territory earlier this month first reported on fan discussions of the competitive-balance presentation.
All league presentations are “on the record,” Caplin said. However, MLB does not permit screenshots. Caplin also declined a request from The Athletic to share his slideshow on competitive balance.
“Being part of the fan council does not restrict members from expressing their candid opinions publicly about the league, the game at large or the discussions,” Caplin said. “As part of the focus group nature of the group, presentations may include proprietary or work-in-progress content like product prototypes or exclusive trailers. For uniformity across the program, we did not want to set different sharing guidelines for each session, so we introduced a set of guidelines that prioritize transparency while still allowing a deeper look into content that hasn’t been released to the public yet.”
MLB said it does not ask the participants’ ages; the five whom The Athletic spoke with ranged from 15 to 38.
Ryan Schlesinger is a teenage Miami Marlins fan on the council who plans to major in journalism when he goes to college and ultimately wants to work in sports. He started podcasting at 13 and has about 1,200 followers on X.
“I’m one of the original members, and they reached out to me in, I believe, in March,” Schlesinger said. “I remember pretty distinctly that it was on the same day as when (the video game) MLB: The Show came out. I don’t think it’s anything too serious. When they first reached out, I thought maybe it could help me make some connections, and I kind of have.”
MLB does not pay fans to be on the council “nor will that be part of this program,” Caplin said. There have been raffles, and council members have been sent merchandise from MLB, including a baseball, a hat and a miniature bat. Members do not have to attend every meeting.
MLB said the council equally represents large, mid- and small-sized markets, and that it invites equal numbers from each market. Several council members agreed the distribution seemed even, while one thought there was a greater small-market presence.
“I’m Team Salary Cap,” said Hurd, the Rockies fan. “The discrepancy has gotten out of control to the point where it’s almost not even interesting sometimes. Something has to be done.
“People are making assumptions that this will be an issue that will cause the 2027 season not to happen,” Hurd continued. “Maybe they’ll be more agreeable. But at some point, how much money is enough? I mean, some of these salaries are getting insane. I think the players should be somewhat reasonable in negotiations.”
It will be difficult for owners to make changes players have historically fought against without changing hearts and minds everywhere: both in the general public and amongst players. MLB might now be trying to influence the discussion through multiple forums.
Manfred this year brought arguments directly to big leaguers, telling them in meetings that they’ve lost billions in the current system. (One such conversation led Bryce Harper to get in the commissioner’s face.) Through the fan council, MLB might be trying to reach hardcore fans whose voices are recognized online.
“I don’t know if it really is about competitive balance,” said Tierney, the Yankees fan. “I think at the end of the day, it really is just about money. That’s what a CBA negotiation is. It’s a fight over money, every time. But they’re going to try to bring in competitive balance as a way to galvanize the public for their cause. I think that’s something to watch out for as negotiations kind of get more serious.”
Chowansky, who initially asked himself “Why us?” during the presentation, concluded MLB doesn’t have an ulterior motive.
“I know some people kind of feel skeptical of their real intention behind it,” Chowansky said. “I feel like they genuinely want feedback and opinions.”