MLB players have been adamantly against a salary cap in baseball for decades, for good reason: In general, it would depress salaries.
I’ve noted briefly here, mostly in comments, that a salary cap system might be palatable to players if it were combined with a salary floor. That would mean that all teams would have to have a minimum payroll, and in many cases that would force some MLB teams to increase payroll significantly. A general rule of thumb for such systems is that they would have to have a floor somewhere around 90 percent of the cap. That would have the effect of making financial competition between teams much less, and thus putting together a good team wouldn’t be simply about money, it would be having a good executive team with sound player evaluation skills.
You see this in the NFL, where all the TV money is split equally among the 32 teams, since all the TV money is national. That allows small-market teams like the Packers and Jaguars to be competitive, and conversely, the New York teams, in the nation’s biggest TV market, have been largely awful for many years.
My colleague Patrick Creighton, manager of our SB Nation Astros site The Crawfish Boxes, wrote an article proposing exactly this sort of system over the weekend, and I thought I’d present his arguments to you.
The first key to understanding how such a system works is noting that the other professional sports leagues that have a cap — the NFL, NBA and NHL — all give their players somewhere around 50 percent of league revenue. The specific details are in the article. But MLB doesn’t do that:
MLB is nowhere near that. In fact, in 2024 MLB salaries were 42.1% of revenues. That is the highest percentage for players over the past 12 non-pandemic seasons, ranging from 2012 to 2024.
And so, Creighton proposes:
In reality, if the MLBPA told the owners that they would agree to a cap system, with a 50/50 split and a 90% floor, players as a whole would make MORE MONEY.
I believe if the players came out with this position, they would back owners into a corner they can’t really get out of, because owners have screamed they need a salary cap for over 40 years but they would 100% balk at a 50/50 split because it would cause them to spend more than they currently do.
(Emphasis in the original article.)
I agree with this completely. The headline of the article says players should “call the owners’ bluff.” Whether this would work or not is unknown, but it’s unquestionably true that players, as a whole, would make more money if they got 50 percent of league revenue instead of 42 percent.
Now, the note above about NFL TV revenue is cogent here. MLB doesn’t have the national TV revenue that the NFL does. Thus such a system would involve sharing of local TV revenue, where the Dodgers’ take dwarfs everyone else’s. I think you can see the difficulty in convincing the Dodgers to do that.
What would also happen in such a system is that teams like the Marlins, Pirates, A’s, Guardians and others would be forced to spend a lot more money than they do on players. Now, which of those teams is the outlier among those four? Right, the Guardians, who consistently contend even with small payrolls. That’s a credit to their baseball ops teams. Every team would have to have such a group in order to compete under a salary cap/floor system like this, not just have the most money like the Dodgers do.
Creighton concludes:
This current CBA battle currently looks to be a protracted one, but players can really score big the court of public opinion by changing their salary cap position, and putting all the onus on the owners to accept what they have been clamoring to get for over 40 years, and writing the bigger check that would need to go with it.
I concur with this. Whether owners would go with a suggestion like this if it came from players is unknown. But it’s likely worth an attempt by players to try it.
