The Salary Cap Isn't About Competitive Balance

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain

With the current Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire on December 1, 2026, baseball is once again heading toward a labor fight. The possibility of a lockout is real. Owners have already made it clear that a salary cap is one of their primary objectives in the upcoming negotiations. That should concern every baseball fan.

Every time the salary cap discussion comes up, I hear the same tired argument. The players make too much money. What fascinates me is how often the conversation begins exactly where ownership wants it to begin. Before anyone talks about franchise values, antitrust protections, revenue sharing, gambling partnerships, media contracts, or private equity investment, the discussion immediately shifts to player salaries. The focus becomes the millionaire shortstop instead of the billionaire owner. The debate becomes whether a player deserves $35 million rather than why a franchise that was worth a few hundred million dollars a generation ago is now worth several billion. That isn’t an accident.

For decades, ownership has successfully framed labor discussions around player compensation rather than ownership wealth. The public sees the contract because the contract is public. What they don’t see is the franchise valuation, the equity growth, the appreciation of the asset, and the many structural advantages ownership already enjoys. As a result, the first question many people ask is whether players make too much money. The more interesting question is why ownership needs more protections when it already holds so many advantages.

MLB.com Image

Ownership likes to talk about baseball as though it operates in a free market. It doesn’t. There is no competing major league. There are only 30 ownership groups. Thirty. That’s it. They control franchise locations, expansion, territorial rights, media agreements, and the structure of the sport itself. They operate under an antitrust exemption that businesses in most industries could only dream about.

The average franchise is now worth billions of dollars. Even teams that lose year after year continue to increase in value. Think about that for a minute. In most businesses, failure destroys value. In Major League Baseball, failure often still creates wealth.

Owners benefit from revenue sharing, national television contracts, sponsorship agreements, gambling partnerships, data licensing deals, and in many cases public assistance for stadium projects. Now private equity firms and institutional investors are lining up to get a piece of the action because they recognize baseball franchises for what they have become. Assets.

That is why I roll my eyes every time an owner starts talking about the need for a salary cap. A salary cap is not about competitive balance. It’s about cost control. If owners were truly concerned about competitive balance, they would be fighting just as hard for a meaningful salary floor as they do for a salary cap. They would be demanding that every owner spend enough money to put a competitive product on the field. Instead, the conversation is almost always about limiting what players can earn.

Funny how that works…

The Players Association has long argued that teams should be required to spend more of the money they receive. Ownership’s focus is almost always on spending less. That tells me everything I need to know.

What makes this even more frustrating is that ownership has spent years flattening the game itself. The ballparks are becoming more alike. The entertainment is becoming more alike. The sponsorships are becoming more alike. The between-inning promotions are becoming more alike. The local quirks, traditions, weirdness, and authentic fan culture that once made baseball special are slowly being sanded down in favor of the same corporate experience from city to city. The game has become increasingly centralized, increasingly controlled, and increasingly optimized. Now they want to optimize labor costs too.

One of the reasons I think so many American baseball fans have become fascinated with Japanese baseball is because it reminds them of what baseball used to feel like. The game itself is exactly the same. Ninety feet between bases. Three strikes. Three outs. Yet people come back from Japan talking about the atmosphere, the chants, the traditions, the connection between the fans and the team, and the feeling that the experience belongs to the people in the stands rather than a corporate marketing department.

Nobody comes home talking about salary caps. They talk about how much fun they had. They talk about how alive the game felt. That’s because baseball’s greatest challenge isn’t player salaries. It’s the gradual replacement of authentic culture with manufactured entertainment.

I don’t think most fans are blindly siding with ownership anymore. In fact, I think more fans than ever understand the business side of baseball. They see franchise values climbing into the billions. They see gambling partnerships everywhere. They see private equity entering the sport. They see owners asking for public money while the value of their teams continues to soar.

What I think is happening is something much simpler. Many fans are afraid of losing baseball. Baseball is different from almost every other sport. It isn’t a weekly event. It becomes part of your life. For six months, it is there every day. It’s on the radio during the drive home. It’s playing in the background while you’re making dinner. It’s the game you check during lunch. It’s the West Coast game you fall asleep watching at night. It becomes part of the rhythm of your day and part of the rhythm of the seasons.

When labor disputes happen, fans aren’t simply watching a fight between billionaires and millionaires. They are worried about losing something they genuinely love. They are worried about losing something that has become part of their routine, their memories, and in some cases their identity. I understand that fear because I feel it too.

That fear has often worked to ownership’s advantage. Fans become so concerned about preserving the game that they sometimes stop asking difficult questions about who is asking for what and why. Nobody wants another strike. Nobody wants another lockout. Nobody wants to look at an empty schedule in April.

The easiest response is to blame whichever side appears to be threatening baseball. The harder response is to step back and look at the economics honestly.

When I do that, I keep coming back to the same conclusion. Owners already possess enormous advantages. They already operate within one of the most protected and profitable business models in America. They already benefit from rising franchise values, revenue sharing, national media contracts, gambling revenue, sponsorship deals, and a legal monopoly.

The stars who sign massive contracts are easy targets because their salaries are public. Fans see the numbers and lose their minds. What they don’t see is the owner whose franchise increased in value by $500 million while everyone was arguing about a free agent contract.

Players earn income. Owners build equity. Those are two very different things.

A player may earn $300 million over an entire career. An owner may make several billion dollars simply because the asset appreciated while he sat in the owner’s box.

And here’s the part that really gets lost. The odds of becoming a Major League player are microscopic. Millions of kids play baseball. Only a tiny fraction ever reach the major leagues. An even smaller fraction stay long enough to earn significant money. Every player who reaches the big leagues has survived one of the most competitive talent pipelines in professional sports.

Most owners didn’t win that competition. Most owners made their money somewhere else. Finance. Real estate. Technology. Manufacturing. Inheritance. Then they bought a baseball team.

When fans complain about millionaire players while defending billionaire owners, they are often criticizing the people who actually won baseball’s hardest competition while defending the people who purchased the asset afterward. There are roughly 750 active Major League players and only 30 ownership groups. Yet somehow the discussion almost always circles back to what the players make rather than who controls the billions generated by the sport.

The absence of a salary cap is one of the few remaining checks on ownership power. Once a salary cap is in place, it never really goes away. Ownership gains another lever, another control, and another protection. And that’s the part I can’t get past.

Owners already have the antitrust exemption. They already have revenue sharing. They already have gambling revenue. They already have national media deals. They already have franchise values that continue to climb into the billions. They already operate within one of the most protected and profitable business models in America.

At some point, you have to stop calling it competitive balance and start calling it what it is. A desire to keep a larger share of the money. I don’t blame owners for wanting that. If I owned a team, I’d probably want it too, maybe, not sure if I am that greedy. But let’s stop pretending it’s about saving baseball. The game doesn’t need a salary cap. The owners want a salary cap.

Those are two very different things.