Push for artificial contract length limitations, instead of allowing the market (which appears to be going there, for all but the most valuable stars) to just move there on its own?
The fundamental problem, IMHO, remains the inequity in club revenues. How do you impose a salary floor, if that salary floor represents 60% of one club's revenue, but only 6% of another club's revenue? A hard salary cap would have a similar problem - do you cap total salaries at a level all franchises can afford - with the result that the bigger-market clubs would have huge windfall profits that couldn't be spent (under the rules, of course) on salaries. How would the big-market clubs deal with that? By finding ways outside the rules, or on the margins of the rules, to exploit their wealth to increase their competitiveness.
If you have serious revenue sharing (which MLB does not), you can mandate a salary floor and ceiling, and all clubs are relatively equal in terms of financial competition. That's the NFL model. But how does MLB get there?
I don't see how you can get where you want to be by limiting contract length, and simultaneously mandating that MLB spend a higher share of total revenue on salaries. How does that play out? What does a Pittsburgh franchise do, when their costs for younger players go up (as part of industry-wide mandated "increased total spending on salaries"), but their revenue is still way below industry average? What does a Minnesota franchise do? Unless you couple these things to vastly increased revenue sharing (which has about as much chance of happening as Senator Inhofe's snowball actually being the solution to climate change!), all you've done is put some franchises out of business. So MLB downsizes to only those markets that can support the higher minimum salary requirements. I don't think the MLBPA is willing to trade the 40-man roster slots of two clubs (or six clubs?) for more salary equity.
