MLB, don’t implement a salary cap! Doing so will punish the wrong people, the players. Their play brought baseball back to the forefront.
Baseball and the MLB are back. After being written off as a sport for Baby Boomers and purists, Major League Baseball has accomplished one of the greatest comebacks in sports history. Global superstars like Shohei Ohtani and the pitch clock have revived a game that once appeared to be flatlining.
MLB has even outdrawn the NBA in viewership as of 2025-26 and is now the second-most-watched sport in America. So, naturally, it is time to threaten it all.
Rearing its ugly head is the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) deadline, which could trigger a labor strike. The last lockout lasted 243 days in 1994, while this one threatens the 2027 MLB season. The central issue holding up the CBA is whether MLB should institute a salary cap.
The case for a cap begins in places like Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Oakland, or rather, where Oakland used to be. The Athletics recently abandoned the city they called home for over fifty years, gutted in part by an inability to compete financially with the league’s big spenders. Now they are moving to Vegas.
Graphic courtesy DirecTV
Meanwhile, the Yankees and Dodgers routinely field payrolls that dwarf what small-market teams spend in three or four years combined. Many fans of small-market teams feel that the season is over before it ever truly begins. They’re not wrong to feel that way.
The NFL and NBA both operate under salary caps, and fans in small markets believe their teams can compete because of it. Unfortunately, baseball is neither football nor basketball. NFL and NBA rosters change constantly because draft picks contribute immediately. But in baseball, it takes years for a player to develop while stuck on a low-cost contract with a minor league team. MLB teams already exploit that time period. A cap wouldn’t fix it. It would just give owners an excuse to move on from their cheap prospects once they become too expensive.
That is where I part ways with the cap advocates. A salary cap does not put money into the pockets of fans or even players; it puts money into the pockets of owners.
Many small-market teams already squeeze payroll to pad their bottom line while reaping the benefits of revenue sharing. A prime example of this is the Miami Marlins, whose payroll falls more than $100 million under the League average. A cap would give those owners a structural excuse to continue paying less. As a fan, I want to see the players benefit fully from the fruits of their labor, not subsidize frugal owners.
Money does not buy championships in baseball, at least not reliably. As a New York Mets fan, I have witnessed this firsthand. The Mets have spent extraordinary sums in recent years and have one NLCS appearance to show for it. The Yankees, historically known for their spending, have not been to a World Series since 2009. Only four of the last ten World Series winners ranked in the top five in payroll in their championship season. So if payroll alone determined outcomes, we would know the champion before April. Fortunately, we do not.
Graphic courtesy Major League Players Association
More fundamentally, a salary cap is a constraint on what players can earn in a free market. The MLBPA has fought against it for decades, and for good reason. These are athletes at the absolute peak of human performance, operating in a sport where careers are short, and injury is always one pitch away.
If a player proves his value in the open market and a team is willing to pay for it, who are we to say that number is too high? The free market exists precisely to match talent with compensation without a ceiling imposed by the owners, the very people who stand to benefit most from capping player salaries.
The competitive balance problem in baseball is real, but a cap is not the only solution. Stronger revenue sharing can level the playing field without handcuffing players’ earning potential. A more robust luxury tax, with escalating penalties for teams that chronically outspend the rest of the league, can discourage the kind of payroll arms race that leaves small-market teams behind. Tampa Bay is the pinnacle of outperforming a smaller budget, sustaining success over the past eight years, and demonstrating that it can be done.
A lockout would halt baseball’s historic comeback; however, the solution should not come at the expense of the players who made that comeback possible. Invest in ownership.
Fix the revenue sharing. Raise the luxury tax. Let’s protect the little guy, not the cheap owners. The players and the fans deserve a real team, not salary excuses.
Do not put a cap on the players; they’ve earned every last cent.
