The Los Angeles Dodgers have caused quite a commotion throughout MLB with moves the past two offseasons. Their success in the 2024 World Series, coupled with further spending and talent acquisition this winter has reignited MLB salary cap discourse from team owners and fanbases alike.
As the oldest league in the country, MLB is wholly unique when compared to the other major sports in North America.
Not only is it the only sport without a game clock, but MLB is also the only league without a salary cap or floor. It has never been an issue worth pursing before, even as the New York Yankees leveraged their financial advantages to help them capture 20 World Series titles before 1962.
If there was ever a perfect opportunity to implement such a measure, that would have been it.
Nevertheless, there is real worry that the current financial imbalance in baseball will be the sports’ undoing, according to Jeff Passasn of ESPN:
The anger — from disillusioned fans, from dispirited front offices, from owners made to look as if they don’t care — is very real. And it’s growing to the point that people at the highest levels of Major League Baseball acknowledge it concerns them. Most worrisome is the rhetoric that fans are done with the game. That what L.A. is doing is unfair. That the financial imbalance ruins the sport.
The problem with the mindset of needing an MLB salary cap is that it absolves other parties of any wrongdoing while placing all of the blame squarely on the Dodgers.
It is worth remembering the Boston Red Sox elected to trade Mookie Betts to the Dodgers, who then signed him to what was a record-setting contract extension.
It also was not the Dodgers who could be blamed when the Atlanta Braves refused to pay franchise cornerstone Freddie Freeman his worth despite coming off a World Series win.
Nearly all of the contracts handed out by the Dodgers in the past five years have been market-level deals, and certainly none was as massive an overpay as Juan Soto’s deal with the New York Mets.
Implementing an MLB salary cap would likely artificially lower contract values for players around the league, allowing owners to pocket more money year over year.
Implementing a salary cap fixes a superficial issue while ignoring the root of the problem. Some owners are committed to building winning organizations, while others are far more invested in their bottom line.
MLB salary cap discussed because of Dodgers
Motivated by the recent contracts handed out by the Dodgers and Mets, a proposal of an MLB salary cap seems to be back on the table when the current collective bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1, 2026.
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