How do the MLB solve their multi-million dollar problems?

Once played as a game, baseball has now turned into a lucrative billion dollar business for Major League Baseball. From billionaire owners to millionaire stars to young stars looking to become the next big face of Major League Baseball.

All of these things have come first hand during the 2019 MLB off-season as we saw the Philadelphia Phillies owned by David Montgomery and Bill Giles hand out $330 million dollars over 13 MLB seasons to Bryce Harper. Meanwhile in San Diego, the Padres shelled out another $300 million over 10 MLB seasons for Manny Machado.

As these two teams shelled out millions of dollars for two players, two other players who put together stellar seasons during 2018 were all but forgotten. Those two players are starting pitcher Blake Snell of the Tampa Bay Rays and third baseman Alex Bregman of the Houston Astros.

Snell who is just 26 years old took home the 2019 American League Cy Young Award while Bregman became a first time All-Star while finishing the 2018 MLB season with a .286 batting average to go with 31 home runs and 103 runs batted in.

Despite the success Bregman received a $41,500 raise and Snell just a $5,000 raise in their last season before arbitration. While both players are expected to see significant raises next season just like Harper, Machado had in their first years of arbitration.

Meanwhile the next pipeline of talent who are just beginning their careers at the minor league level earn as little as $850 per month despite the rigorous workload that is required to develop during the regular season as well as the extensive off-season work to continue to mature as a player on the field.

Now as another MLB season is just a few weeks away, the big possibility of another work stoppage is just around the corner after a slow off-season that saw multiple veterans including former All-Star Dallas Kuechel fail to land a big deal.

The question it leaves us to ask is what should both the owners of all 32 MLB clubs and the Major League Baseball Players Association do to fix the financial side of a business that has multiple flaws that run from the owners to the lower level player that makes billions of dollars annually?

For the players at the Major League level they want all 32 owners to spend money during the offseason to increase the annual contracts of each player at the Major League level. For the owner they want to find a way to win at a point that will also make them as much as possible. In the end, the players who are up and coming are forgotten stars who have to fight to just to play the game in hopes of making it to a MLB contract one day.

While it would take multiple solutions to correct the problem, two solutions that could help solve two of these issues is a higher annual salary for the newly drafted and signed teenagers for each MLB club and a performance based pay structure for players once they make it to the majors. For the annual salary side for the next wave of stars an annual salary of $40-50,000 should be implemented allowing these stars to focus on becoming the next wave of stars in the Majors while also improving the talent pool around the game.

Meanwhile at the Majors, an implemented performance based pay structure can be incorporated that would include base annual salaries based on the season you are in while set milestones for each MLB statistics would earn the player more money.

Once a player becomes a free agent the player would get the same annual contract from a team that spends money like the Boston Red Sox or from a team that spends on the low side like the Tampa Bay Rays.

The new structure would eliminate the minor raises that Snell and Bregman received while stars like Dallas Keuchel would land a new contract based on a team willing to give him the same contract as another starter who might have the same annual time in the Majors.

In the end, no solution on paper would be enough to appeal to the owners and the players to fix one of the worse compensation systems in all of Major League Sports as well as in any big business. Can a solution come to the table before the end of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement or will we see our next work stoppage?