Conflict resolution specialists will tell you that solutions to major disagreements are usually found in complicating the root issue and finding common ground. The worst disputes, then, are the extraordinarily simple ones.
Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association may be digging trenches for one of these quite-simple but quite-destructive disagreements: should Major League Baseball have a salary cap? The MLB owners, represented by Commissioner Rob Manfred, seem to think it’s non-negotiable for baseball’s continued growth, while the players seem to think that would be the worst thing ever. Good start.
The two sides cannot just get divorced and go their separate ways — they are chained together by billions of dollars that nobody gets if they don’t work together. If they can’t agree (“you never do the dishes”) there will be a lockout, and because of the depth of this lovers’ quarrel (it’s not really about the dishes), there is a legitimate chance the 2027 MLB season is simply cancelled. Then nobody will do the dishes.
Can the two sides avoid a lockout? No. There will be “a lockout” of some length, but whether its explosive yield is measured in July 4th sparklers or in megatons of TNT is yet to be determined. How can the two sides avoid cancelling most or all of the 2027 season? Can they just hug it out?
The reason this is a big story is that there is a big problem: this is not a sports disagreement, though it is about baseball. This is not a financial disagreement, though it is about money. This is, in reality, a philosophical disagreement about the meaning of life—er, Major League Baseball, and the first one that threatens the very fabric of the sport since the last time the owners really tried to get a salary cap in 1994.
Come this offseason, this will go from a somewhat-threatening idea to one of the biggest stories in the world overnight. Describing the sticking point in detail could reasonably fill up a 4000-word legal brief. But remember: this is a simple issue, not a complicated one, so I will describe it simply:
The MLB currently has no mechanism to control team spending on contracts and players, known as a salary cap, which exists in each of the other three major men’s leagues in the United States. This is a very pro-player arrangement, creating uninhibited bidding wars for elite players which, for the super-elite Juan Soto, ended at a preposterous $765 million. Owners would like to end this situation and place some controls on this spending because they believe it will fix baseball’s competitive balance problem, which has allowed the Los Angeles Dodgers to sign most of the best free agents in the past three offseasons and win the last two World Series. The Players Association, understandably, thinks the owners just want to spend less money and would like to keep the lucrative status quo.
I, for one, am generally inclined to support the labor side of labor vs. billionaire showdowns, as are probably most people on planet earth. However, what makes this issue so fascinating is that the owners believe they have broad public support for a salary cap; and they do, per a poll after the World Series that showed both casual and avid MLB fans overwhelmingly support the introduction of a salary cap. I do too.
Some writers and industry experts will tell you that all this saber-rattling is simply pointless hot air, and that the owners will ultimately back down when the small-market teams realize that a salary floor, which must exist with any salary cap to maintain competitiveness, will cost them too much money. The Miami Marlins, for example, have a total team payroll just above Shohei Ohtani’s individual salary. That will not be allowed to continue if the owners get what they want, and it is possible the MLBPA will be able to leverage a fifth column of small-market owners to preserve their criminally low spending.
Key word: criminal. The embarrassment that is the MLB’s payroll disparity has gotten bad enough that I do not believe this arrangement will be tolerated unto eternity, and it is why I am perhaps more willing than others to imagine a legitimately apocalyptic future in which we lose a full season for the first time ever.
Frankly, small market owners categorically refusing to spend money on their baseball teams and the MLBPA’s vicious, decades-long opposition to any and all pushes for a salary cap can no longer survive baseball’s brush with the most disruptive of concepts: modernity.
Baseball is, more than ever, swept up by modernizing forces. The pitch clock, extra-inning ghost runners and challenging balls and strikes would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Now, innovations are flying off the factory line like bags of candy in the last week of October. And the public has greeted these innovations with open arms. Baseball is more popular than ever, and 79 percent of avid fans support a salary cap. It looks like that final dam is ready to break.
We shall see how much this public support survives the impending cancellation of actual baseball games next winter. I contend that the support for a salary cap should continue. Anachronisms like totally free-market sports leagues do not hold up with how Major League Baseball is actually financed these days. Local control over revenue has collapsed with the regional sports network model. MLB owners understand this; when they renegotiate their media rights deal in 2028, it will be a defining moment for the sport and how much money it can make in the future.
A salary cap could thus be the difference of billions of dollars in the long term for the MLB if they can successfully argue that enforced competition will command higher prices for media buyers. That will certainly be their argument to the players, though the MLBPA cares far less about long-term revenue boosts, which may or may not increase salaries 10 years from now. Many players in the league today will not be in said league in 10 years, so what do they care about all that? The players will clap back by saying, “can you just relax until we renew media rights in 2028? We have such a good thing going, let’s sell that to ESPN and Fox, not your new thing!”
That tension is what makes this such a philosophical disagreement, and one that could actually torpedo an entire MLB season. Unlike the 2021 MLB lockout, which saw the owners push for a salary floor (side note: this 2021 push is one of the reasons I don’t buy the anti-salary floor fifth column idea above) and expanded playoffs, everyone is dealing with much starker media rights realities than last time. Baseball will have to radically change itself to keep up in the modern sports market, and I do believe the owners will have a high level of patience to ensure that. There is too much money at stake long-term.
So how can we avoid a disaster that I have just spent 1000 entire words describing the severity of? You could bet on the inherent goodness of human beings, and the owners and players ultimately love each other; love is always stronger than hate, right? Maybe, but let me tell you what’s stronger than both: fear.
As we get closer to this throwdown actually throwing-down, long-winded position papers and carefully crafted press releases will quickly turn to widespread fear of how bad cancelling the 2027 season would be for both of them. And it would be a calamity, with baseball riding a wave of public momentum that they simply cannot afford to squander. Players would lose a year of their physical prime, owners a year of revenue. Broadcast and merchandising partners may distrust both groups if they cannot figure this out, as will investors and fans, the most important consumer of their shared product. All of this will create tremendous fear in both camps, and they might have to run into each other’s arms for comfort — that will probably mean just small adjustments to the luxury tax and perhaps some more league regulation on spending and player control of contracts.
The benefits of a salary cap for owners are potentially massive, but the risk associated with cancelling a season is colossal and could make things significantly worse instead of better. Avoiding that outcome may be the players’ silver bullet, as they just want to keep the hype train going. When you took a wrong turn and are now careening toward a precipice, the one who wanted to make the turn is at fault.
But something big should happen. Much opining about the looming lockout centers on whether or not baseball actually has a competitive balance problem. It all depends on how you define “competitive balance” and how far back you push the definition. To keep things short, you can come up with any statistic (World Series wins, team records, division titles) and any time frame to argue that there is or is not a problem. I will pick secret option C: it feels like there is a problem, and that means there is.
Competitive balance is a perception, not an outcome. Whether or not smaller markets have actually succeeded is inconsequential next to how impossible their chances feel. The Dodgers winning the last two World Series is not the thing that annoys me. It’s that they have done so on the backs of signing basically every exciting free agent on the market in recent years. Kyle Tucker, Edwin Diaz, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, Teoscar Hernandez… the list goes on. When there is a big free agent (everybody get ready for Tarik Skubal hooooo boy) they are now expected to sign with the Dodgers. If they don’t, then they go to the Mets. Everyone else, including the once-Dodgers-esque New York Yankees, feels like a surprise.
For fans of smaller-market teams, having a good player like Skubal in Detroit or Paul Skenes in Pittsburgh, two of the best pitchers of the last 20 years, is a total bummer. They cannot keep that player because they cannot pay him. That is the worst, and that is the great crime of baseball’s salary cap-less system. When a team decides they are not going to pay the luxury tax, like my Boston Red Sox did in 2020, it costs their fans everything. It cost me my favorite player of all time: Mookie Betts. And then Xander Bogaerts. And then Rafael Devers.
How much of my desire for a salary cap is based on hatred for a system that the Red Sox ownership group has exploited for maximum profits and minimum baseball enjoyment? A… bit, but a salary cap would ultimately damage teams like the Red Sox more than it would help them. For all my griping, Boston is still one of the biggest markets in the sport. I have no idea the actual plight of a Pittsburgh Pirates fan who just has to count down the days until Paul Skenes is traded or leaves for nothing.
All of the above is stupid. Some of the above are fixable with a salary cap. Fear about what would happen to baseball’s resurgence if this death match goes the distance will probably stop any push for a true cap short… for now. But in five years, we will be having this same conversation with 20 times the fervor, as another half decade of modernity bludgeons baseball’s anachronistic systems into submission. We will eventually have an MLB salary cap; we just might not get it now. Because while we are currently in a generation-defining staring contest, both sides will probably realize it is in their shared interest to blink. A compromise is the only way out. But it is not in my interest, and not in my kids’ interests, who I want to share my love of baseball with, even if I live in Pittsburgh. Eventually, we’re going to have to get uncomfortable so we can get something done.
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