Forget eliminating Shohei Ohtani-esque, $700 million contracts in free agency. If the owners have their way in baseball’s labor negotiations, Alex Rodriguez’s $252-million signing from December 2000 wouldn’t be allowed in the future either.Major League Baseball’s owners on Thursday proposed a $202 million limit on contracts for free agents who leave their current team — $50 million less than the amount A-Rod took to leave Seattle and sign with the Texas Rangers a quarter-century ago.Last month, MLB revealed some pieces of how its proposed salary-cap system would work, but left many core elements a mystery. At the bargaining table in New York on Thursday, the owners filled in the blanks on subjects like free agency and the minimum salary. The players’ union then responded with just as much disappointment as it did a few weeks earlier.Starting in 2027, MLB wants free agents who leave their teams to be limited to five-year deals worth no more than $202 million. Players who re-sign with their teams as free agents could come back for six years and $265 million — a means of encouraging players to remain with their present clubs.The league also dangled changes that, in isolation, would be better for players compared to the status quo. It proposed eliminating the qualifying offer for free agents, a mechanism that can sometimes depress player markets. MLB also said it would raise the minimum salary to $900,000 for players in their first two years in the big leagues, and to $1 million for players in their third. Today’s minimum is $780,000.And the league said it would allow players who are at least 30 to become free agents after five years of service, rather than the current six, something the players’ union itself proposed earlier in these negotiations.“Today, in addition to proposing the largest ever increase in the minimum salary, earned by over half of MLB players, we accepted two landmark changes to free agency that have been in place for 50 years,” MLB spokesperson Glen Caplin said in a statement.A lot more is included in the league proposal, including the elimination of deferred salary for future contracts. But all the proposals come with an important requirement: players would have to buy into MLB’s salary-cap structure, which the union is adamant it does not want to do.“I will tell you with all honesty, I have never seen this degree of unity at this point among agents and players,” Bruce Meyer, interim head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, said on a conference call with reporters. “I think, honestly, the league has done us a favor. Because their proposals are, in fact, so obviously and extremely bad for players at all levels, that it’s actually been a benefit for our unity.