Major League Baseball argues a salary cap would bring competitive balance

This year’s Major League Baseball season ended last week, when the Milwaukee Brewers won their first World Series championship ever.

But when the next season will start isn’t clear, and it’s possible the 2027 season won’t start at all. That’s because team owners want a salary cap, while the players are adamantly opposed to one.

The owners are expected to lock their players out starting in December, when the game’s collective bargaining agreement expires. A salary cap, the owners argue, would improve competitive balance between teams that have vastly different payrolls.

At the high end are the New York Mets. Two years ago, the team agreed to the largest contract in Major League Baseball history with then-26-year-old outfielder Juan Soto. The Mets agreed to pay him $51 million a year for 15 years.

At a press conference, billionaire Mets owner Steve Cohen told reporters he planned to keep spending big.

“My goal is that the Mets are going to be a premier, one of the elite teams in Major League Baseball,” Cohen said.

They are elite in one sense: They had the second-highest payroll in baseball this past season, a star-studded lineup totaling $451 million, according to MLB. That’s over six times more than the team with the lowest payroll, the Cleveland Guardians.

That disparity, Major League Baseball argues, is bad for the sport.

“Fans are saying to us loud and clear that they feel that we do not have a level playing field in baseball,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations.

To level that playing field, MLB wants to set a minimum and maximum total payroll for all 30 big league teams.

“Bring the bottom of the industry up in terms of what it's spending on players, bring the top of the industry down, but give fans in all of our markets confidence that, if managed well, their team can be successful,” Sword said.

The league would also give those smaller market teams more revenue to work with, Sword said, by pooling and equally sharing all the money teams make from deals they sign with local broadcasters. Right now, each team only gets revenue from its own deal.

“That creates disparity that's very hard to overcome for those smaller markets.”

The baseball players’ union did not agree to an interview by our deadline, but it has opposed a salary cap for decades. One reason for its opposition is fairly obvious, said Jeremi Duru, a law professor and head of the Sport and Society Initiative at American University.

“At least some of those players' salaries are going to be capped below what they might be if they were free on the market to get whatever they wanted,” Duru said.

Plus, the players argue, spending more money doesn’t necessarily mean winning.

The World Series that just ended is a good example. The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Tampa Bay Rays. Both teams had payrolls in the bottom third of the league. And the lowest-spending Cleveland Guardians made it all the way to the American League Championship Series.

The $451 million Mets, meanwhile … well, a moment in mid-September summed up their season pretty well.

Christian Encarnacion-Strand of the Baltimore Orioles hit a routine fly ball to left field, and three Mets all converged on it: Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor, and Bo Bichette, each of whom the Mets signed for 9-figure contracts. But the ball fell between them, and Encarnacion-Strand wound up at second base.

“About a billion dollars worth of Mets out in left field,” an ESPN announcer remarked, “and none of them could pick it up.”

The Mets lost that game 7-to-1 and finished last in their division.

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