This episode is brought to you by Expedia and Visit Scotland.

Start your story in Scotland.

Experience the pool of wide, untamed landscapes and fresh cuisine that feels rooted in place.

Discover castles steeped in legend.

And feel the genuine warmth from locals you meet in a place that will stay with you long after you leave.

Start planning your own Scottish holiday.

Today at Expedia.com.uk.

slash visit Scotland.

This is the D.P.H.O. and Rutherberg podcast.

Hello, Matty.

Listen live weekday mornings from 6 to 10 a.m. on 880 ESPN in New York, the ESPN New York app, or on your smart speaker by asking it to play ESPN New York.

New York, one week from today will be fully ensconced in the NBA finals. And again, this is the best thing that could have possibly happened to the Mets fan. If you're a Nix fan and a Mets fan, you should send thank you notes to the Nix for having gone on this run. At least the Yankees fan has something to fall back on. The Mets fan, we have football season to fall back on. At the moment, yeah. Yeah. I mean, Soto's heating up. So does red red hot. Oh, Soto's great. Is that eight home runs in 12 games? Not a Soto issue. I mean, now that you did bring up baseball, we should probably touch a little bit on what's going on with the CBA stuff. Yeah. So go ahead. All right. So, okay. So I played a sport.

I was on the CBA negotiating committee.

I was on the negotiating committee and everything else.

And it was, we were going to get a salary cap.

Now, I mean, the owners, when they decide they want to win, will win.

And now you're stuck there trying to fight for, you know, different things that are important to you.

Usually those end up being things that don't necessarily cost the owner's money. And by the time we were setting down with ours, it was not only do you have a salary cap, but you've got escrow, which means we're going to keep a percentage of your money. And then at the end of the year, we'll decide whether or not we keep 10%, April, whatever it ends up being, you will make up the difference for what we lost. Okay, so we got an awful deal.

Major League Baseball would be the union that we always pointed to. One of the reasons why we brought in Donald Fear for us was because they've been so successful and not having a salary cap. So we're all concerned because baseball has this tremendous momentum. As for your Yankees fan, it's like how many more years of Aaron Judge do I have left? Do I want to waste a year or a half a year or whatever? We can't lock this thing up. And we had our salvo offer by the – So the union made an offer – Yep. Right. Union makes an offer, and that's followed up by Major League Baseball's offer. And I think we're all thinking the same thing. if the owners decide that they want a salary cap, this does not look good because the players are adamant that they want.

So what the players offered was, and I understand why they would do this, because you don't want to tell people you can't spend it, but if you do want to spend a certain amount of money, you'll get taxed on it, if you want to spend at the very upper limits, and there will also be a penalty if you don't spend, if you don't spend to a certain floor.

So the floor I think they had was $150 million, and then they wanted to raise the actual,

the luxury tax threshold up to $300 million.

...