If there’s a certainty about Major League Baseball, it’s that every few months, a franchise owner will call for a salary cap. With the league’s economics once again being a hot-button issue — this offseason has seen Juan Soto sign the richest contract in the sport’s history; the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers continue to spend as they see fit; and nearly half the rest of the league choose to all but sit out the free agent market — it was only a matter of time before it happened.
Sure enough, Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein fulfilled the prophecy on Friday by stating his preference for some sweet, sweet financial restraints.
“I wish it would be the case that we would have a salary cap in baseball the way other sports do, and maybe eventually we will, but we don’t have that now,” Rubenstein told Yahoo Finance during the World Economic Forum. “I suspect we’ll probably have something closer to what the NFL and the NBA have, but there’s no guarantee of that.”
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Of course, it shouldn’t be surprising when an owner desires a mechanism that will artificially limit player salaries. Let’s be clear: that’s what salary caps actually achieve, even if they’re branded as ways to improve a league’s competitive balance. As YES Network researcher James Smyth laid out on BlueSky, MLB empirically has more parity than the other leagues that have caps. Indeed, MLB has had more teams win championships since 2000 than the three other American men’s major leagues; it’s also had the second-most teams reach the championship round since 2010, trailing only the National Hockey League in that respect. And so on.
This isn’t meant to dismiss anyone who observes that there are financial disparities between clubs, particularly at this time when local television rights are a mess. It’s just to point out that salary caps are not a panacea for competitive balance problems — problems that, at least quantifiably, may not even exist when you compare MLB’s parity to those of the capped leagues. As such, it’s worth employing skepticism whenever an owner — the individual who benefits most from a salary cap — calls for the mechanism.
Rubenstein’s Orioles, for whatever it’s worth, currently rank 15th in projected luxury tax payroll, according to the data provided at Spotrac. Their $156 million forecasted Opening Day payroll, as estimated by Cot’s Contracts, would represent the second-highest in franchise history, behind the 2017 squad.
As for the chances of Rubenstein getting his wish and MLB implementing a cap and a floor as part of the next CBA talks … well, who knows? MLB Players Association leader Tony Clark seemed to shut the door on that possibility back in 2023, stating: “We’re never going to agree to a cap.”
The reality is that this song and dance has been happening since the dawn of free agency. The MLBPA has long fended off an official salary cap, dating back to Marvin Miller’s time in charge of the union. In recent years, the owners have mostly adhered to an unofficial one in the form of the Competitive Balance Tax. Per Clark’s comments, though, that doesn’t mean the union would view an official cap more favorably.
For now, the only certainty when it comes to MLB and salary caps is that some other owner is just weeks (if not days) away from calling for one.
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