With the future of baseball up in the air, all fans’ eyes turn toward salary cap discussions.
Baseball’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires after the 2026 season. While most casual fans may not worry about the relations between team owners and the players’ union, this upcoming offseason may impact even the most relaxed viewers.
For the past several years there has been a growing unease among fans. Recent years provide strong reason for increasingly widespread discontent with teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Mets outspending everyone else by hundreds of millions of dollars each offseason in free agency.
Many fans have been calling for a salary cap. Especially those from small-marketed teams, such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, want to see their team given the capability of competing financially with big-market teams.
Unfortunately, a cap alone will not solve the problem.
“I think it’s probably easy to say, well, the Dodgers have all this money, and so they’re killing everyone with that,” Kyle Gould, head coach of Taylor baseball, said. “I think the challenge is, in Major League Baseball, if you put a salary cap, then you’re basically saying the owners keep more and the players make less and I don’t love that. So I think I actually would probably be more in favor of a salary floor.”
The players’ association would never want to accept a cap; however, the same can be said about the owners’ desire for a floor.
A cap may be a more pressing issue among fans who seek parity, but a salary floor has its own merits.
“Having something like a salary floor would be really helpful, especially for those lower teams to be forced to spend more money,” senior Echo staff writer Caleb Joshua Heffron said. “So I would say a salary floor would solve some issues when we talk about a cap.”
A floor would certainly prove effective in certain respects. If a small-market team, like the Pirates, were forced to spend 125 million dollars each year, it would help them remain somewhat competitive with opposing clubs.
MLB can’t stop with just a floor; they need to prevent wealthier teams from pulling too far ahead.
“The one thing we don’t want to do is look at the Dodgers and say they’re just playing by the rules that we have now,” Heffron said. “Their owner is willing to spend money. We think they’re going to win, so we’re going to make rules that only punish them….There has to be some kind of balance between having a floor. So you have to feel some level of competitiveness from a lower team, but you don’t want to punish teams that are doing well or spending a lot of money.”
One way to do this could be setting a higher hard cap for wealthier teams, while a series of harsh penalties would discourage them from approaching that cap. Simultaneously, a salary floor would ensure small-market teams may compete while paying players their fair share.
“I think one of the biggest things that I might be able to get on board on, if there’s a cap, that there would be a floor,” Jake Wallbaum, Taylor’s sports information assistant said. “If there’s going to be a cap, there has to be a floor.”
While baseball needs a salary cap to prevent teams from pulling too far ahead of the pack, it also needs a floor to force all teams to compete at some level.
