Tag: salary cap

Do MLB owners want a salary cap, or for everyone to believe that’s true?

Like with free agency, you have to think of why certain positions are stated in public.

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There’s been a whole lot of discussion lately, from the ownership and league side, anonymously and with names attached, to the idea of both an MLB lockout in 2026 when the current collective bargaining agreement expires, and the desire for a salary cap being part of the impetus for said lockout. I’ve already written about the lockout portion of things, but I wanted to reiterate something this morning, given that the owners wrapped their winter meetings in Florida, where the subject of discussion was often the game’s economics.

Evan Drellich wrote a story last week about part of that, headlined, “MLB owners debate push for salary cap at summit this week”. A key section from that piece, for our purposes:

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Orioles’ owner publicly wishes for salary cap

David Rubenstein spoke up about his wishes for a salary cap, which signals we should be watching to see if other owners start bringing it up, too.

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There’s been all kinds of talk in MLB lately about the need for a salary cap. There is no need at all, of course, given it’s attempting to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist in more ways than one: there’s what Rob Mains pointed out last week at Baseball Prospectus, in that the competitive imbalance cited as evidence of the need for a salary cap doesn’t actually exist, and there’s also what I’ve been harping on for some time now, where the problem is not the teams like the Dodgers that are outspending everyone, but the huge chunk of the league that wasn’t spending enough years ago and isn’t spending more now even as other clubs do increase spending.

It keeps coming up, though, so let’s dive in again. Jeff Passan, over at ESPN, wrote a piece last week that included this bit that I want to highlight:

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The NBA’s ‘second apron’ seems bad, to me

A new threshold of punishment for spending has arrived in the NBA, and it’s not great.

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It’s not that Major League Baseball’s rules regarding the luxury tax and penalties are great. Let’s just get that out of the way now. The luxury tax has effectively been a salary cap for the league, albeit a soft and unofficial one, and new restrictions like the “Cohen tax” meant to discourage the wealthiest teams from truly and continuously flexing their financial muscle already makes that much more apparent. When teams like the Yankees can lie about their available resources and you can also kind of squint and get why they’d want to lie, that’s a problem.

All of that sounds pretty good in comparison to what the NBA has going for it starting with this upcoming season, however. A “second apron” has been introduced that makes the NBA’s actual soft salary cap more like a hard one. In short, you can basically spend and spend to retain players already on your roster, within the existing rules of what max contracts look like in that capped system, but if you’re over this second apron — it’s a threshold, just like with MLB’s system — and need to acquire more players. Well. You basically can’t. Per The Ringer’s explanation:

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MLB’s owners want to put a cap on contract length

There’s little chance such a cap would exist, but we can still explore why the league would want it.

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Late last month at Global Sport Matters, I wrote about how the Padres and Mets were “paving the way for the next era of MLB labor relations.” The idea was that the union was able to keep MLB from accomplishing all of its lockout-related goals in the new collective bargaining agreement, and now, on top of the league’s failure to squash the union and its power, they had this terrifying new era where minor leaguers were unionized, the regional sports network model was faltering, and clubs like the Padres and Mets were not following the unwritten rules of spending like they’re supposed to.

I concluded the piece with these thoughts:

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