The Salary Cap Won't Stop the Dodgers
Cheap owners will still be cheap, rich owners will still buy everything
It’s nearly February and the Dodgers continue to collect all the free agents that aren’t locked down like a rogue black hole. Now everyone wants a salary cap and a salary floor. Except that won’t work.
The Dodgers are doing something that’s already been done. The defending champions acquiring several impactful players is good for them. And they already had a winning roster with three recent MVPs, one of whom just went 50/50 while rehabbing his pitching elbow. When you actually look at their additions, though, it’s not like they made their roster unbeatable. Blake Snell is their biggest signing by dollar amount, for 5 years and $182million. That’s the third highest amount a pitcher got this offseason. They added a very good reliever in Tanner Scott. Teoscar Hernandez and Michael Conforto are quality hitters. Roki Sasaski and Hye-Seong Kim are still unknowns, regardless of their international pedigrees. Also, this is the oldest roster in baseball going into 2025, and that’s not including the inevitable signing of 37-year-old Clayton Kershaw.
But buying a championship? Putting aside the unique Shohei Ohtani contract, which was legal yet still ridiculous when you look at it, this is still a team that had to mix and match its exhausted and oft-injured pitching staff to the point that a team with a payroll of $240million was starting rookie Ben Casparius in the World Series. Yes, they have the best player in baseball in the lineup. And Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman are still elite talents putting Hall of Fame careers together. Will Smith is arguably the best catcher going into 2025. But look at that rotation. Most of their arms are duct taped on and it’s a spin of the roulette wheel to see who makes it to 100 innings pitched this season.
Unlike the NBA, where paying the best players the most money is an easy ticket to the Finals, baseball is still a game where even the all-time best teams lose 30-40% of the time, including to teams that pay their rosters less than a quarter of the Dodgers. So you can’t buy a championship. If you could, the Angels would’ve had one when they signed Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton and CJ Wilson to play with Mike Trout. Or Anthony Rendon and Justin Upton to play with Trout and Ohtani. The Mets bought all the free agents before 2023 and had to sell at the trade deadline. Then made the NLCS this year in a “reset” year before signing Juan Soto to a mountain of gold. The Padres have repeatedly added big names over the past decade to varying degrees of success, yet only one NLCS appearance and no division titles.
So you’re not mad that the Dodgers are spending money, you’re mad that they’re spending it well. Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are all signed for $30million-plus per year. Glasnow pitched 134 innings last year then broke. Yamamoto pitched 90 innings, or $333,333.33 per inning. Snell threw a no-hitter last year, the first time he’d ever even pitched into the 9th inning. This is not Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz, or Hudson-Mulder-Zito, or even Woodruff-Burnes-Peralta.
The NHL tried this, to mixed results
What about the clamoring for a salary cap and salary floor? Regardless of who the offseason’s biggest spender is, there will always be calls for this system, especially when other teams spend next to nothing in free agency or trade homegrown players rather than extending them. All a salary cap does is save owners from themselves. The Mets having to spend $100million less and Marlins $50million more does not mean the Marlins will start making playoff runs. It just means you’ll have more randomly large contracts given to iffy players in an effort to get to the bottom.
The NHL has had a salary cap for 20 years. The owners cancelled the 2004-05 season just to get it. It was because smaller teams were mad at the Rangers and Maple Leafs for paying huge contracts. But then the cap came in. For a short while, there was some chaos as teams figured out how to work within the confines of the new spending rules. It didn’t really change anything except to suppress the salaries of star players. Big markets still signed players, while markets like Winnipeg and Buffalo continually struggle to sign anyone. They just had to get creative. Suddenly 32-year-old centers were getting 13-year deals to bring the value down. The NHL had to put a new rule in. Then teams started fussing with the long-term injured reserve cap relief, “hiding” star players recovering from injuries to be able to add salary at the trade deadline. You know what the cap didn’t do? It didn’t change who these owners were.
Owners who wanted to win at all costs would still find a way to buy an advantage, whether it was analysts looking for ways to navigate the cap, buying out players, or hiring better scouting and data departments to maximize their dollars. Cheap owners were still cheap. The Arizona Coyotes are no longer in existence after an embarrassing decade of not paying their rent, moving to a college rink and constantly cheaping out on standard amenities. Do you really think a floor will make the A’s and Marlins and Pirates of the world operate in good faith? They’ll just find other places to save money, like the Diamondbacks refusing to keep their AC functioning correctly.
The richest owners will still outspend the cheapest ones
MLB has tried to address outlandish spending. It’s why we have the collective bargaining tax, which I explained in this article:
When Steve Cohen came into the league, they added a new third tier to the luxury tax for repeat and egregious offenders. That only stops the “lesser” billionaires from going over the cap, or going over temporarily and immediately implementing austerity rules and going back under. Steve Cohen can afford it. The Dodgers and their immense local TV deal and uber-rich ownership group can afford it. Rogers Communications, who owns the Blue Jays, can afford it. If Bob Nutting, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, somehow doubled his net worth by pulling a crypto scam on baseball fans (maybe they’d call the coin $NUTTING 😉), he’d still be at $2.2billion, or just 10% of Steve Cohen.
Obviously $1.1billion, which is what the Nutting family is worth, is more than enough money for several lifetimes. But if he’s suddenly asked to put a $200million payroll out there on the field to compete, what’s going to stop the Mets or Dodgers from going to $500million? Where would it end? As wealth gets gobbled up by fewer and fewer oligarchs, we’d soon have only a couple teams actually able to compete. While baseball just announced $12.1billion in revenue in 2024, the good times won’t last forever. A system will have to be put in place to keep things from getting too far out of hand.
But is a salary cap the answer? It wouldn’t stop the Dodgers. Let’s put a theoretical cap in place for 2025 and force the Dodgers to get under it. And then we’re going to put that floor in place. In the NHL, the salary cap is 115% of what the players’ share of revenue divided by all the teams. The floor is 85% of that number. So if the players’ share is $100million per team for the season, each team must be in between $85-$115million to comply. The NFL forces teams to spend 89% of their cap over a 4-season span. The NBA is too complicated for me to touch in a free article.
The Dodgers would do what other big market teams do, pay smaller teams to solve their problems for them. Chris Taylor’s $15million contract? They’ll just send that to the Marlins for a low-level prospect to help both teams get to their boundaries. Same with Max Muncy, probably. What would end up happening is smaller market teams would hoard cheap talent and bloated aging player contracts. They would not be competitive in the free agent market to get to their minimums. Again, going back to the Coyotes, they constantly traded for contracts of de facto retired or long, long-term injured reserve players like Pavel Datsyuk and Marian Hossa. They did not reach their floor by signing actual stars.
This is probably the best system we can do
As long as our sport is operated by billionaires acting in their best financial interests, fans are at the whims of that particular owner. Maybe they’re going through a divorce, like when the McCourts ruined the Dodgers, or John Moores and his ex-wife ruined the Padres. Maybe they’re the heir to the team who took over for their successful parent, and the realities of operating a billion-dollar asset is way above their skill level, like the Yankees or Nationals or Tigers. Maybe their wealth was all a mirage and came crashing down in a Ponzi scheme, like the Mets. Maybe they’re just assholes, like Ken Kendrick or John Fisher.
The point is, the Dodgers are today’s enemy. Good, it’s about time the rest of baseball joins me in my lifelong hatred of them. Yesterday it was the Yankees. Tomorrow it’ll probably be the Mets. But I’m just here to say, Tanner Scott, Michael Conforto and Blake Snell do not guarantee a World Series. And you know what? Neither do Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts. They certainly help, but it’s a marathon where you’ll need every one of your 26-man-roster to pull their weight at some point. And it doesn’t take a super-billionaire to assemble that roster, just a super-intelligent baseball operations department.
If you really want to force teams to spend more, make it harder to get to the playoffs. We’ve added 4 playoff spots in the past decade and now, with 6 teams per league getting in out of 15, the barrier to entry is low. Why would a team try to keep up with the Dodgers and their projected $303million payroll when they can spend $95million and win 88 games to get into the playoffs and roll the dice? The best part of the Yankees-Red Sox battles in the 2000s was that it was an arms race. The division was your best chance, and the Wild Card was no guarantee with 11 other teams competing for that top slot. You had to open up your wallet and put a star team together to take these juggernauts down. Now, you just hope you get some clutch hits and a couple surprise shutdown starts and make your run, like the Diamondbacks in 2023 and the Phillies in 2022.
That’s all I really had, hopefully it seems like a level-headed approach to the coming season that is increasingly hard to find in a sea of anger and despair from the other teams not named the Dodgers or the Mets. While we can be rightly mad at Hal Steinbrenner for saying he can’t keep up with the Dodgers even with his YES Network money, or the Cubs “trying to break even” on the books, the Dodgers buying older talent at a premium is not the end of the world. As a Padres fan, I look forward to my roster full of competitors trying to take down the dragon to the north, and will celebrate every victory along the way.
Well written. I don't know if this is related, but baseball has the best trading deadline and the worst offseason. Furthering your point about spending just enough money to get into the postseason, the 2021 Braves taught us you can build a World Series lineup in the middle of the season. The offseason costs money, in-season it mostly just costs prospects.
Also, if I wasn't so unorganized and lazy, I'd compile a list of Republicans who complain about the evils of socialism and also want a salary cap in pro sports. I hope somebody else does it for us.