When I was an adolescent, I’d often stay up late basking in the glow of my 27” cathode ray tube television watching movies on cable. Sometimes, I’d push it so far as to bump into TV networks’ “nite owl” programming. If that happened to be something religious or controversial, a title card would flash reading “The preceding telecast does not reflect the views of this station”.
Why convey that odd anecdote here? Well, because “the preceding post on TwinkieTown may not reflect the views of this blogging
community” when it comes to the salary cap. You have been warned.
Generally speaking, we seem to be living in a society that is pro-labor (in thought, if certainly not in action). We look around at the enormous amounts of wealth accumulated by minuscule percentages of the population and think “huh…that seems a little unfair”. Applying the same logic to Major League Baseball, it would stand to reason that a salary cap/floor system would hinder the transfer of dollars from ownership to labor.
Not having any sort of business or economics education besides managing a bank account and investing in a few stocks hurts me in this regard, but my gut feeling tells me the above supposition is true. If MLB were to institute a cap/floor system in 2027, it would result in less raw $$$ going into players’ pockets than in 2026.
But there are other factors to consider beyond $/player—and that’s why I’d still like to see a cap/floor introduced into MLB.
As these summer months have shuffled by, I’ve examined…
- How franchise values rise, but the disparities remain the same
- MLB’s market size disparity and how it keeps clubs on unequal playing fields financially
By no means can MLB solve these problems outright—but at least other similar professional sporting endeavors have tried to do so.
I don’t watch much NBA or NHL, so I can’t speak too intelligently to those leagues—but I also don’t hear constant chatter about competitive imbalance or inequity. Both those sports are salary-capped.
I do watch a lot of the National Football League’s product, which—IMHO—has the best revenue-sharing, competitively-balanced league of them all. Television profits are split equally, while the cap/floor system is strict enough to be binding (unlike MLB’s competitive balance tax) and also malleable enough for teams to structure their finances in myriad ways. In at least some part because every franchise (barring the perennially poorly-run Jets or Browns) has legitimate championship hope on Week 1 every season, the sport continues to grow even in the midst of serious health concerns over brain CTE.
In the strictest sense, NFL players make less on a per-player basis because of non-guaranteed contracts and the aforementioned cap. So, by that metric, they are less labor-friendly than MLB.
But is that the only way to judge league success? The NFL has proven to be such an insatiable product nation-wide (and they continue to push for worldwide market shares) that the salary cap rises every season. It has gotten to the point now where more players are getting guaranteed contracts because. well, the money is there for it.
When I take all this into consideration, I always come out on the side of “I’d like baseball to have a salary cap/floor”. Of late, four words could sum up the case: Tarik Skubal to LA. In MLB’s case, the floor may be more important than the cap, what with the penchant for owners turtling up for years on end and just collecting profits instead of re-investing.
But as I said—that’s just, like, my opinion, man. I’ll do the democratic thing and put it to a vote. When voting, do not factor in a work stoppage (I’ll be covering the “is a stoppage worth it?” topic with my final post in this series). Imagine a world in which a strike or lockout simply will not happen with either result.
