Yankees: Alex Rodriguez’s Response to CBA Negotiations Draws Ire From MLBPA

Former Yankees star Alex Rodriguez delivered a polarizing response to ongoing CBA negotiations.

Former Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez seems to already be thinking like an MLB owner. Of course, the retired veteran, alongside fiancee Jennifer Lopez, has been busy rounding up a legion of (mostly athlete) celebrity investors to bolster his bid to purchase the Mets as he attempts to fend off hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, who’s reportedly made a top bid of $2 billion so far, and other potential buyers.

It goes without saying that — thanks to the collapse of labor talks and the lack of any real negotiations on logistics for a 2020 season — relations between MLB and the players’ association are as fragile and adversarial as they’ve been for some 25 years.

Like he’s brashly done in the past amid the bidding process, Rodriguez has elected to side with the owners, as he called for players to accept a revenue-sharing blueprint that is tied to a salary cap.

“So today, we have to really work collaboratively with the players and the owners to say, how do we compete together to become No. 1?” Rodriguez said during a conference call with reporters on Thursday. “The only way it going to happen is they get to the table and say the number one goal is let’s get from 10 to 15 billion dollars and maybe we split the economics evenly.”

As expected, this one-sided response was met with a wave of vitriol from the MLBPA, specifically executive director Tony Clark, who clapped right back at the former 14-time All-Star.

“Alex benefited as much as anybody from the battles this union fought against owners’ repeated attempts to get a salary cap,” said Clark. “Now that he is attempting to become an owner himself his perspective appears to be different. And that perspective does not reflect the best interests of the players.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, and Clark’s strong stance even had A-Rod scrambling to perform some damage control.

In an attempt to weather the storm on Twitter, the former three-time AL MVP stressed that he “never mentioned the word salary cap.”

We get that the league has the right to deny Rodriguez as a potential future owner, so he’s obviously doing everything in his power to get in their good graces. However, as a former veteran who made close to $450 million in his career, choosing to hang current players out to dry is a real sell out move.