On Thursday, news broke that Kyle Tucker, the top free agent in this year’s market, signed a four-year, $240 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Tucker’s massive contract — the second-largest by average annual value in MLB history — gets added to a cadre of other gigantic free-agent deals the team is currently paying for:
- Shohei Ohtani: 10 years, $700m (through 2034)
- Blake Snell: five years, $182m (2031)
- Mookie Betts: 12 years, $365m (2032)
- Tyler Glasnow: five years, $136.5m (2029)
- Yoshinobu Yamaoto: 12 years, $325m (2035)
- Freddie Freeman: six years, $162m (2027)
- Edwin Díaz: three years, $69m (2028)
- Teoscar Hernández: three years, $66m (2028)
- Tanner Scott: four years, $72m (2028)
- Tommy Edman: five years, $74m (2030)
- Will Smith: 10 years, $140m (2033)
In 2026, the Dodgers will also pay Max Muncy $10 million and the nearly unusable Blake Treinen $13.5 million. Spotrac has the Dodgers’ 2026 payroll at $413,597,413, which
will add a luxury tax penalty of just over $160 million, which means that the Dodgers will be paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $575 million for their roster in 2026, at least as far as the bookkeeping goes (Ohtani, for example, will get paid $2 million in 2026 to play for the Dodgers and $68 million sometime after he is retired; for luxury tax purposes, his contract counts as about $46 million in 2026). The total amount of money they have committed is over $2 billion.
Frankly, this is absurd.
The second-most expensive roster in baseball is the New York Mets, who come in with a pre-tax payroll of about $360 million. The Phillies and Blue Jays are at $325 million and $312 million, respectively, and five other teams (the Yankees, Red Sox, Padres, Braves, and Cubs) fall between $250 and $300 milliion. As of this moment, half the league has a payroll under $200 million, or less than 47% of the Dodgers’ pre-tax payroll. When you factor in the luxury tax, only the Mets are within even 80% of what the Dodgers are spending. And 22 of the league’s 30 teams would be spending less than half of what the Dodgers are.
The Milwaukee Brewers, with a current estimated total payroll via Spotrac of $155.5 million, will barely spend a quarter of what the Dodgers will, and will spend less on their entire team than the Dodgers will pay in luxury tax. These two teams met in the National League Championship Series last season.
I’m not really here to talk about how unfair it is that the Brewers could realistically only afford to pay one or two contracts like the 12 that the Dodgers currently have on their roster — and simply could not afford several of them, no matter the circumstances. I’m not really here to bemoan the fact that the Brewers aren’t stretching their budget a little further; while I might have one or two complaints, what, realistically, should they do? The Tuckers, Alex Bregmans, and Bo Bichettes of the world simply are not going to play in Milwaukee. There are enough teams in “more desirable” cities that would merely need to match the Brewers’ offer — which they could, easily, without stressing their overall payroll in the same way that Milwaukee would have to — that those players would simply go somewhere else, no matter how good the Brewers are. Needless to say, Milwaukee is not going to be a destination for a player like Ohtani, no matter how good they are and how much money they could offer.
I don’t blame the players for this. I don’t really even blame the Dodgers for this: they have the money for Tucker even though they don’t really need him. Why not spend it?
No, I’m writing this because, while there are arguments to be made that certain small-market clubs should be spending more money and some mega-wealthy owners should invest more of their own cash into their teams, the simple fact is that baseball has reached an untenable place.
For what it’s worth, I do not believe the Brewers are cheap. They’ve done an excellent job investing in infrastructure and player development, and while they’re in the league’s smallest market, they have a bigger payroll than 11 other teams at the moment. The numbers are a little tricky to track down, but by net worth, Mark Attanasio — while mega wealthy — ranks near the bottom of the league (27th among 30 by most estimates). Frankly, he’s done an excellent job getting results on the field, given the market he’s working in and the resources available to him.
The problem here is that the wealthiest owners in the sport keep getting wealthier. The Dodgers and Blue Jays, for example, are effectively governed not by “owners” but by conglomerates that are worth tens of billions of dollars. How is a team like the Brewers supposed to compete with that?
This will all come to a head after next season, when baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) expires. It is almost a guarantee that there will be a lockout; whether that extends into the beginning of the 2027 season will be the biggest storyline of next offseason.
But the first battle that will happen in 2027 is not going to be between the owners and the players, but between the owners like Attanasio and the ownership groups like Guggenheim Baseball Management and Rogers Communications. Essentially, what’s going to happen is that most of the teams in the league are going to argue that baseball needs far more revenue sharing and limits on how much money the wealthiest teams can spend. The wealthiest — and most powerful — owners are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid this outcome. (Interestingly, the teams arguing for more revenue sharing, or at least on salary limitations, will likely include the New York Yankees, the traditional “evil empire.”)
We keep hearing about a salary cap and how ownership is going to push for that as a solution to limiting salaries. If they’re smart, the owners will come up with a slyer way of presenting this option; the term ‘salary cap’ is politically charged in baseball labor history and is thus something that the players will probably absolutely refuse under all circumstances.
Ownership should look to the NBA for inspiration, in more than one way. In 2023, the league snuck what was essentially a hard salary cap by the players in the latest CBA, but instead of calling it a “hard cap,” they called it “tax aprons.” The penalties levied on teams for exceeding these aprons, which include severe restrictions on roster flexibility in addition to financial penalties, function essentially as a hard cap. But they didn’t call it that, so players were more open to it, and it seems like the effectiveness of these tax aprons was perhaps underestimated (probably by both sides).
Personally, I’d like to see baseball go to a flexible cap system more like the NBA used prior to the last labor negotiation — I think this type of system can benefit both the best players, who can still make massive amounts of money, and younger players, who reach a version of free agency more quickly (they become restricted free agents after four years) than their counterparts in baseball (unrestricted after six years). The “max contract” system also naturally limits how many huge contracts a single team can have at a time, and the accompanying salary floor required in this system means that every team in the NBA can — and often does — have max contracts. The Cleveland Cavaliers currently have three players on max contracts, more than the Los Angeles Lakers do.
Beyond that, the league can push for more revenue sharing, but I think the roster restrictions will be the key to creating real change. What if, for example, teams who exceed a certain luxury-tax threshold aren’t allowed to trade more than one prospect at a time, making it harder for them to get in on bidding for players available in trades without giving up their most precious assets?
What’s the downside of sticking with the current system? People can complain all they want about how poorer owners should spend more or sell, but the gap is widening. Many fans already believe that the league is unfair. The Dodgers have won three of the last six World Series and keep adding the best players in the league. The worst case is that fan sentiment turns to the point that fans of smaller teams just lose interest. If fans of the Cleveland Guardians or Miami Marlins figure they have absolutely no shot, what’s to keep them interested?
I’ve felt this way at times this offseason. The Brewers, for example, could really have used Bichette, who is, what, like the 85th best player in the league? But at no point did I think it was remotely plausible that the Brewers would sign him, nor did I think it would’ve been the right move, given how it might’ve caused tough financial decisions down the line. He ended up with a contract worth $42 million a year, 75% more than the Brewers have ever paid a player in a single season.
The other thing that I feel has already started to happen is that MLB will evolve into what we already see in European soccer. Take, for example, the Premier League: there are extremely unpopular and convoluted rules in place about who can spend what — in the most basic sense, it’s ostensibly to prevent teams from spending more than they can afford, but it’s an inequitable system that heavily favors the teams who were already rich when the rules went into place. As a result, the same teams consistently dominate the top European leagues. In some cases, like in England, it’s a group of teams — the “Big Six,” as they’re called there. It’s even worse in the other, slightly less popular leagues — Bayern Munich has won the German Bundesliga in 13 of the last 14 years, and just this week set the league record for points at the halfway mark of the season. The last time a team other than Real Madrid, Barcelona, or Atlético Madrid won the Spanish league championship was in 2004.
While the playoff system will ensure that surprises happen in baseball, this isn’t where MLB is headed — it’s where they already are. The Dodgers might not win the league every year, but they will be right there every year, and the smaller-market teams that are left adrift — the Rockies, the Pirates, the Reds, etc. — will just fall further and further behind, only occasionally making leaps into relevancy, crossing their fingers that the chips fall their way just once. It’s where we are right now as Brewers fans.
Milwaukee has done an excellent job keeping pace thus far, but they cannot pull this off forever. The playing field needs to be leveled, at least a little bit, or the league risks losing huge portions of its fanbase. People like to feel like they have a fair shot.
Baseball has never exactly been a league that thrived on competitive balance; between 1936 and 1962, for example, the Yankees won 16 of 27 World Series, including separate stretches of four and five in a row. And one could argue that there’s nothing more quintessentially American than baseball, jazz music, and a rapidly widening wealth gap in which hyper-capitalists dominate those with fewer resources.
But the league and its players need to understand that the Dodgers being this far ahead of the field is not good for the game. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a top dog — that can be good for the game in its own way — but in the last three years, the gap between the top of the league and the bottom of the league has grown from what was already a chasm into the Mariana Trench.
I certainly hope that we don’t miss any games in 2027, spring training or otherwise. I’m not optimistic. People at this level of wealth think that they should never have to settle for anything other than exactly what they want, and we live in an adversarial time. Missing games would be another huge mistake. The best thing is for everyone to admit that something needs to change and come up with reasonable, intelligent solutions that make fans of the poorer teams feel like they have a chance.
Should be easy, right?
