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There has been more and more discussion of MLB’s owners pushing for a salary cap of late, which makes sense: as the regular season approaches, we also move closer to bargaining season. Despite all of this, I’m still not fully convinced that the owners actually plan to give up part or all of the 2027 campaign in order to implement a salary cap, and it’s actually because of the increased chatter.
I don’t mean that contradictorily for the sake of it, don’t worry. What I’m getting at is that the nature of the conversation is convincing me that this is more feeling out, more keeping a discussion topic alive rather than letting it die, than a true and honest attempt at implementing a salary cap. Or, as Joe Sheehan more accurately refers to it, a payroll band: a cap comes with a floor, which means a team’s payroll lives within a specific band. And the band that MLB is rumored to be proposing at some point, per Jon Heyman, is laughable.
A $260-280 million cap, and a salary floor of $140-160 million, shows that MLB isn’t actually serious about any of the things they say they need a cap for. As Craig Goldstein pointed out on Bluesky following the report, “…a floor set at 55% of the cap makes it very clear what they’re interested in is not parity or competitive balance or anything else they will dress up cost savings as”; for reference, the NBA and NFL both use a floor of 90 percent of their caps; it’s a very narrow salary band in both cases. A 55 percent floor is nothing. It’s a non-starter for the players, naturally — why agree to cap spending by the teams willing to spend without forcing true spending by the rest?
For reference, five teams are above the $280 million mark at the moment, heading into the 2026 season: the Dodgers, Mets, Yankees, Phillies, and Blue Jays, while the Padres are above the $260 million one. There are 11 teams below the $140 million level and 13 below $160 million, but the math doesn’t check out in the player’s favor here, as the amount the top teams get cut down is more than what it would cost to bring the bottom teams up. It’s worth noting, too, that these figures are based on the luxury tax calculations that include the entire 40-man roster, medical costs, and not actual salaries going to players.
There are reasons for teams on the low end to dislike this setup, as well. Again, between 11 and 13 teams would be under the potential floors, and that’s without the floor being anywhere near where it should be — let’s say the PA did engage on cap discussion instead of treating it as a non-starter. Do you think that they would nod and agree to a 55 percent, or try to push that thing to 90 percent? Does it seem likely that the Pirates are going to agree to a system in which they spend $252 million a year?
And consider, as well, that the current luxury tax system ends up benefitting these teams that spend less and quality for additional revenue-sharing. Nine teams exceeded the $241 million luxury tax threshold last year and had to pay a bill for that, totaling just under $403 million. A not insignificant chunk of those funds are tossed into the revenue-sharing pool to be distributed among the teams eligible to receive those checks, and some of it does end up going to the players, as well, in the form of paying into pensions — but that’s also money that teams do not have to contribute themselves, so it’s still subsidizing spending. Having 21 teams lose out on a check they are used to getting and then having to cut another one on top of raising their payroll to meet a floor is going to be missing some buy-in.
“Ah, surely these owners have all considered this beforehand—” stop right there and consider how much the wealthy tend to break things on a whim without thinking through the potential consequences of their actions or how something would even work in reality, and then try to tell me that MLB’s owners have already worked all of this out in advance. They should assign Lords of the Realm in school, I swear.
To reinforce this point in fewer hundreds of pages, consider: that these reported salary band figures have such a wide range in between them tells me that the owners are nowhere close to either figuring out or conceding what is and is not “baseball revenue,” which is a discussion that has to be had in order to implement a floor and a cap. Players would be owed a specific percentage of league revenue, and the floor and cap are based off of that agreed-upon figure. A 55 percent floor screams that the league absolutely does not want to go into full detail on the state of its finances, which is a prerequisite for a cap.
As I’ve been saying for some time now, any real salary cap discussion — if the owners are serious about fighting for one — is more likely to come in 2032, after the next wave of broadcasting deals are agreed to: the current crop expires after 2028, meaning they will be negotiated then, in commissioner Rob Manfred’s final year in the job. That’s if a cap is ever truly a topic, though. It remains far more likely that that the cap discussion is a prelude to a revamped revenue-sharing model that cuts into the spending of the Dodgers, Mets, etc. by forcing them to hand over more money to other teams, subsidizing their spending further. That would not mean a cap nor a floor, but it would allow for those clubs to pull in more money and spend less of their own, in a sense, without having to hit a specific figure — and without the same kind of fight against the union to implement it.
Plus, as a concession to ending a cap push — real or imagined — the league can attempt to hammer on the teams exceeding the luxury tax threshold by even more. That Dodgers’ money is going to belong to other teams one way or another.
That all being said, I do want to reserve some space here to say that just because this kind of floor/cap is a bad plan that will never work out is no reason to think that it won’t have its supporters who make all of this drag on longer than it should. A lockout seems assured, a terrible offseason of sniping and arguments and leaks and lies will follow. It’s just that the knockdown, drag-out fight might be more between owners than just owners vs. players this time around, but we’ll all suffer from the infighting.
My two features for Baseball Prospectus this month were both on subjects related to the above. The first, “Whose Fault is a Lockout? An Investigation” was a reaction to Jeff Passan’s take on what the MLBPA needs to change after Tony Clark resigned as executive director. While Passan made some good points in his piece, he also had some real weird asides that put blame at the feet of the Players Association for things that absolutely were not the PA’s doing nor their responsibility to fix. Jeff is better than that, so just very strange all around in a way I had to note.
The second published earlier this week, and is on how “Baseball May Have Found a Path to Expansion,” through a more robust revenue-sharing system. Basically, putting more local revenues from the Dodgers, Mets, Yankees, Red Sox and so on into the central pool in order to create more competitive balance, parity, whatever terms will be tossed next to that joke of a salary floor the rest of this article was about, can also subsidize media markets that would not normally be viewed as attractive or viable. An MLB team in Las Vegas doesn’t make a ton of sense under the current model, but with Los Angeles footing a larger chunk of the bill? Viva Las Vegas, baby.
And that idea came out of a conversation I had with Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes earlier this month, on how these rumors of expanded revenue-sharing and a salary cap relate to the stadium game.
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