Foul Ball: MLB’s Billionaire Owners Keep Getting Richer While Baseball Fans Face Affordability Crisis
Average Owner Worth $4.7 Billion While Day at Ballpark Costs Over $225
With the new Major League Baseball (MLB) season underway, the economic divide between team owners and fans is clearer than a strike down the middle of the plate, according to a new review by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). Major League owners have an average net worth of $4.7 billion, which translates into annual income of over $260 million. Meanwhile, a day at the ballpark for a family of four averages over $225 and free broadcasts of games are on the wane as the sport moves increasingly to streaming.
All the MLB owners fall into the top 0.1% of highest-income households and thus each will enjoy an average tax cut of $286,000 in 2026 (with more to follow in future years) thanks to last year’s Trump-GOP tax-and-spending law. Their families will all receive a $6 million reduction in the estate tax if it’s owed in 2026, and more in later years. But all except the wealthiest baseball fans will wind up paying more because of what was included and excluded from the Republican law plus Trump’s price-hiking tariffs.
The $225 average cost of watching a game in person assumes cheap tickets and thrifty family eating habits (two beers, two sodas, four hot dogs) and excludes merchandise purchases. The cost tops $400 at Dodger Stadium and runs over $300 to take in the Red Sox, A’s and Cubs. The latest MLB.tv streaming deal tied pricing to a subscription to ESPN.
All but three of MLB’s 30 teams are owned by billionaires, billionaire families or in two cases corporations with market value of over a billion dollars. The “poorest” baseball owner, the Reds’ Bob Castellini, is worth an estimated $400 million. The average owner wealth of $4.7 billion is about 25,000 times more than the average wealth of American households, which stood at slightly less than $200,000 as of 2022 (the latest year with available data).
Baseball players are well-paid, but the difference in the tax treatment of their income compared to that of their bosses is as wide as the outfield. Because they are compensated for their labor–playing a 162-game schedule–players are mostly taxed at 37% on their multi-million-dollar salaries. Because owners let other people do the work and instead live off their money, owners are never taxed at more than 20% on the bulk of their income.
How We Can Even the Playing Field
MLB’s billionaire owners are among the super wealthy benefitting from Trump-GOP fiscal policies while fans must add rooting for the home team to the list of things that cost too much. Fairer taxes on the rich with the revenue invested in our communities would be a winning double play for workers and families.
By more fairly taxing billionaires we can raise revenue that would make life more affordable not only for baseball fans but Americans more generally. Several leading Democrats in Congress have plans for how to even the playing field for ordinary workers and families.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) have proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax, which would place a 2% annual tax on wealth exceeding $50 million and 3% on fortunes of over a billion dollars. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, which would create a 5% wealth tax on billionaires and invest the resulting revenue in a half dozen initiatives including direct cash payments to working- and middle-class families, better funded healthcare, and more housing construction. The Sanders proposal would raise $4.4 trillion over 10 years; the Warren proposal, $6.2 trillion.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking Democrat on the tax-writing Finance Committee, along with Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Steve Cohen (D-TN), would create the Billionaires Income Tax. This plan would not tax wealth but rather the annual increase in wealth of billionaires and those who consistently have income above $100 million. Their proposal would raise some $500 billion in revenue over a decade.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) have crafted a Millionaires Surtax: a 10% charge on family incomes above $2 million ($1 million per individual). Crucially, the tax would apply both to ordinary income (which mostly means wages) as well as the kinds of investment income that normally are taxed under a separate and more generous schedule. It’s estimated that it would raise $1.5 trillion of revenue over 10 years.