The Revenue Sharing Designer lets you build a hypothetical split of baseball’s money and see what players would actually receive. This page is the full method behind it: every input, where it came from, how confident anyone can be in it, and what the model deliberately does not claim.
One thing to say plainly up front. These are stylized educational figures, not real financials. League-wide MLB accounts are not public, and only 2 of 30 clubs publish financial statements at all. Any league-level model is therefore a construction assembled from public reporting, and this one is no exception.
The model starts from a single total that never changes while you work: $14.7B of all revenue. That total is split into two parts.
Because the total is fixed, these two move against each other exactly. Dialing unreported revenue up does not grow the pie - it moves dollars out of the reported side, one for one. That is a deliberate design choice: it stops the tool from becoming a machine for inventing money, and it keeps every comparison honest.
Under a salary cap, players are paid a percentage of a shared pot rather than a percentage of everything. The pot is built category by category. Some categories go in at close to full value, some go in partially, and some do not go in at all.
| Category | Default | Kept out |
|---|---|---|
| National media | $2.0B | 22% |
| Local media | $1.8B | 17% |
| Ticket sales | $4.4B | 17% |
| Concessions & merch | $2.31B | 17% |
| Ads & sponsors | $2.4B | 20% |
| Parking & ballpark districts | $0.5B | 49%* |
| Gambling & casinos | $0.11B | excluded |
| Unreported* | $1.18B | excluded |
Rows one to seven add to the $13.52B reported total. Row eight is the unreported component. Six of the seven rates are as reported by The Athletic; the way they are added up is ours.
* The parking and ballpark-district rate is re-derived, not published. The source describes a structure rather than a rate: gameday parking is shared, a slice of district signage and seasonal restaurant revenue is shared, and the rest of the district is shielded. We model that structure as roughly half the pot kept out. No outlet publishes that number, and it should not be read as though one did.
Every readout in the Designer counts every rate in full, including the re-derived parking and ballpark-district kept sliver and the gambling and casino exclusion. Both are real money and both are described in the source reporting: ballpark districts are largely shielded, with only gameday parking and a slice of district signage and seasonal restaurant revenue shared, and casino and sportsbook earnings count only where they derive predominantly from gambling on baseball.
This matters because a headline deduction figure that leaves those two out overstates the players’ effective share. That is the lesson of the whole tool in miniature: a headline rate is not an effective rate once the exclusions are counted. We say it here rather than bury it, because it is the single most useful thing this model has to teach.
Not every figure in the model deserves the same confidence, so it is worth separating them into three tiers.
Contract structures and published proposal terms. The league’s July 2026 proposal is on the record: a 2027 cap of $245.3M, a floor of $171.2M, a 50-50 split of baseball-related revenues, and, for the first time, a small share of ballpark-development revenue (Forbes / Maury Brown).
Figures published by outlets with sourcing: six of the seven category rates above, and the outside revenue estimates. Sportico’s team-valuation research estimated $13.1B for 2025, on a convention that includes non-MLB revenue where owners operate or own the stadiums, such as ballpark-district business. Reported is not the same as verified: league totals are estimates that outside outlets cannot independently check, and net revenue is never disclosed by anyone.
Our own construction, and it is a larger share of this model than the section above. It covers the $1.18B unreported default, the per-category dollar weights, the projection of the totals forward to 2027 - including the $13.52B reported default, which is ours and not Sportico’s - and the parking and ballpark-district rate, which is re-derived from the source’s structure rather than published by anyone. The gambling and casino pot is the least evidenced figure here: no public source covers the narrow slice the reporting describes, so ours is an estimate and we would rather say so than imply a source. Ballpark districts are real and contested money - the Braves’ Battery development is the most-cited example, at roughly $97M in annual revenue - and the league’s own 2026 proposal would count a slice of ballpark-development revenue for the first time.
The same call-it-versus-actually gap shows up inside the salary cap itself. The league measures payrolls the Luxury Tax way, an AP-attributed definition that adds roughly $17.2M in benefits and $1.7M in pre-arbitration money per club. So a headline cap of $245.3M implies materially less direct salary space - call it $245.3M, but actually about $226.4M, and that is still before amateur signing bonuses, which hit a record $392.5M league-wide in 2025 (MLB.com).
These are payroll-side figures. They live inside what players get, not inside the deductions, so they are a different axis from the pot construction above and are never double-counted against it.
The audit control is a governance lever. Moving it never changes a single dollar figure anywhere in the tool, and that is on purpose: no published source quantifies a relationship between how often you audit and how much revenue turns up, so building one would mean encoding an allegation as arithmetic.
The real-world weight sits in what the current agreement already says. Under Article XXIV(D) of the 2022-26 Basic Agreement, the Players Association holds enumerated rights to consultation, to information, to audit, and a confidentiality obligation in return. It receives club financial statements through the Plan’s Administrator - the Commissioner by default - within ten days of preparation or receipt, with a handful of longer carve-outs, and it receives summaries of local media contracts rather than the contracts themselves.
On audits the agreement is strong and specific. The union may require the Administrator to audit any club, or any single transaction, at any time and without showing cause, with the Administrator bearing the full cost. It may run its own audits of six clubs a year as of right on written notice alone, and more on good cause. What those rights police - that shared receipts be used to try to win games - is enforceable only through grievance arbitration, and the Players filed such grievances in 2018 and 2020 without ever obtaining a merits ruling on any of them.
You will notice this page lists inputs and never prints the finished percentages. That is deliberate. The Designer computes every result live from a single calculation engine, so a number that appeared here as static text could quietly fall out of date the moment the model was refined. Open the tool to see the current figures - they are always computed, never transcribed.
The Athletic: the union, a salary cap, and the revenue split
Sportico: MLB Team Values 2026
Forbes / Maury Brown: inside MLB’s battle over economics
AP: how the Luxury Tax payroll is measured
MLB.com: 2025 draft signing deadline recap
MLBPA: 2022-26 Basic Agreement (Article XXIV)