# I Thought I Opposed an MLB Salary Cap Because I'm a Dodgers Fan. Then I Actually Looked Into It.

I Thought I Opposed an MLB Salary Cap Because I'm a Dodgers Fan. Then I Actually Looked Into It.

My non-baseball friends keep asking me about the salary cap talk and the CBA negotiations. Now that the MLBPA has dropped their opening proposal—and MLB is expected to fire back with a hard cap for the first time since the strike that canceled the 1994 World Series—here's what you actually need to know, and why I think the players are closer to being right.

I'm the kind of Dodgers fan the front office and economists probably love: the irrational spender.

Even living outside LA, I still manage to hit a dozen games a year. When I lived in Echo Park, it was forty.

I buy first-base Dugout Club seats more often than my credit card likes—all-you-can-eat buffet, in-seat wait service, the works.

I pay for VIP parking because I'm too impatient to hike half a mile after nine innings and that buffet.

I will always splurge on MLB.tv, on jerseys, hats, and whatever else the team store puts in front of me.

By the time playoff baseball rolls around, my accountant is doing a full intervention.

And I've never resented the tab. Unlike fans in some cities, I can actually see where the money goes.

The Dodgers scout, develop, absorb bad contracts, and then go out and get Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. It's worked. Back-to-back World Series titles feels like a fair return on investment.

Which is why my first reaction to the salary-cap drumbeat was simple and not particularly nuanced:

Pay the players, screw a whiny billionaire.

But eventually, I dug in and read the proposals. And I learned something.

The Pro-Cap Argument Isn't (Entirely) Stupid. It's Just Aimed at the Wrong Villain.

Last year, the Dodgers paid $169 million in luxury tax alone. That's not a payroll—that's a penalty. And it was still more than the Marlins spent on their entire 26-man roster. Nine teams topped the tax threshold. Fourteen teams didn't crack $200 million in total payroll. The gap between the top and bottom spenders is at a 40-year high.

If you're a fan in Pittsburgh, Oakland, or Tampa, you start April already knowing your owner has decided to finish third. That's not a competitive balance problem. That's ownership treating fans like a captive audience—which, by the way, they are—while making zero effort to field a real team.

I get why those fans look at Chavez Ravine and want a hard cap. At first glance, it sure seems like a viable 'level-the-playing-field' move.

But here's where I get stuck: why is the proposed solution always to punish the teams trying the hardest?

The Rockies Are Not a Small-Market Problem. They're an Ownership Problem.

Detractors call the Dodgers a "dangerous imbalance" for spending $586 million to win two championships. Meanwhile, the Colorado Rockies owners get to hide behind altitude jokes and "financial discipline" talking points while pocketing revenue-sharing checks and running a roster that wouldn't threaten a wild card spot even if you spotted them 50 wins.

The Monfort family has turned operating the Rockies into a masterclass in 'strategic' losing.

Arte Moreno in Anaheim somehow managed to waste simultaneous prime years of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, two of the greatest players in the history of the sport, without ever seriously threatening a playoff run.

And we're treating these two situations—a team that spends aggressively and wins, and teams that collect revenue-sharing checks and then field subpar AAA rosters—as morally equivalent? As two sides of the same "competitive balance" coin?

They are not equivalent.

They are not even in the same conversation.

One approach demonstrates a serious commitment to being a steward of the game.

The other is a glorified landlord. They might as well be in the parking lot business for all the effort these selfish, greedy billionaires put into their pet teams.

Here's the thing about owning a sports franchise: you are not buying shares in an index fund. You are acquiring a civic institution with a captive audience.

Rockies fans don't get to unsubscribe like it's Netflix. There is no other baseball team in Colorado. That fan loyalty—loyalty those owners did absolutely nothing to earn—is an asset that gets handed to them the moment the paperwork clears.

If you get that asset, you should be obligated to actually try to be worthy of it.

Why an NFL-Style Hard Cap Doesn't Translate

The owners are expected to push hard for a cap. On the surface, the NFL comparison sounds reasonable—the league has parity, small markets win Super Bowls, everyone loves it. But baseball is structurally nothing like football, and pretending otherwise is either naive or dishonest.

Football has 17 games. Baseball has 162. Football has almost entirely non-guaranteed contracts. Baseball's deals are fully guaranteed, which changes roster construction entirely. Football has one massive, roughly equal national TV deal that all 32 teams share. Baseball has local TV deals where the Dodgers print money and the Oakland A's are literally playing in a minor league park in Sacramento while their permanent stadium gets built.

You cannot flatten those structural differences with one payroll number. A hard cap doesn't create parity—it just creates new, more creative ways for well-resourced teams to gain advantages while small-market teams get a permission slip to keep under-investing and call it compliance.

What the Players Actually Proposed—and Why It Makes More Sense

The MLBPA's opening proposal is worth reading on its own terms. Buried under the headlines about minimum salary increases is actually a pretty coherent theory of the problem. And it's not the one the owners are selling.

The union wants to raise the luxury tax threshold from $244 million to $300 million, which stops punishing aggressive spenders quite so harshly. They want to eliminate the draft-pick penalties that currently scare mid-market teams away from signing free agents. They want to nearly double the league minimum salary from $780,000 to $1.5 million. And the most interesting piece: they're proposing a Competitive Integrity Tax—a financial penalty levied against any team that fails to meet a $150 million minimum payroll floor.

In other words: stop fining teams for spending. Start fining them for not spending.

The revenue-sharing piece goes further. The proposal would guarantee small-market teams $240 million annually in shared revenue, but with strings attached requiring those funds to actually go toward improving the on-field product. Not debt service. Not front-office overhead. Players and development.

MLB's official response, delivered by spokesman Glen Caplin, was that the union's proposal "would reduce the amount transferred to lower-revenue clubs, weaken the competitive balance tax, and lead to even more payroll disparity than exists today."

Which is a remarkable thing to say out loud, because what it really means is: we'd rather keep the current system, where low-revenue teams pocket the transfers without any obligation to spend them on baseball.

The owners are using competitive balance as a costume. The real motivation is cost control.

Money Doesn't Guarantee Wins. That's Not the Point.

The easy counterargument is the Mets, who have spent like the Dodgers the last couple of seasons and missed the playoffs. Or the aforementioned Angels, who had arguably the two best players on the planet at the same time and turned it into a punchline. Fair point. Spending is not a panacea.

But look at the Tampa Bay Rays. They consistently win 85 to 90 games on a payroll that wouldn't cover Mookie Betts alone, let alone come within a time zone of Ohtani. They do it by drafting better, developing better, and making smarter decisions than almost everyone else. Nobody's holding them up as a problem.

The issue isn't that big payrolls guarantee wins. The issue is that big payrolls buy margin for error. They let teams survive injuries, bad contracts, and rebuilding years without bottoming out for half a decade. And right now, too many owners are using "small market" as a philosophical position rather than a financial reality. They're not trying to be the Rays. They're trying to be profitable without trying to win, and then collecting revenue-sharing money as a reward for that apathy.

That's the thing that needs to be fixed. Not the Dodgers.

What a Smarter Fix Actually Looks Like

If MLB genuinely wants a healthier, more competitive league, the levers are sitting right there in the MLBPA proposal:

Raise the luxury tax threshold to $300 million. Teams that reinvest aggressively shouldn't be strangled by penalty tax rates before they even get to building depth.

Implement a hard payroll floor with real teeth. If you're fielding a major league team, you spend like one. $150 million is not an unreasonable bar. Teams that stay below it year after year should face escalating financial consequences.

Tie revenue sharing to actual reinvestment. Every dollar transferred to a low-revenue club should come with a requirement that it be spent on players, coaches, or player development infrastructure. Not ownership costs. Baseball.

Kill the draft-pick penalties for free agent signings. Mid-market teams avoiding free agents because they don't want to surrender a draft pick is a broken incentive structure. Fix it.

Demand financial transparency. Local media deals, stadium revenues, true operating costs—open the books. Fans and the union deserve to know whether the "small market" designation is a genuine constraint or a convenient excuse.

The goal isn't a league of forced sameness. Nobody wants to watch 30 teams with identical payrolls pretend to compete. What fans want is meaningful competition. The realistic chance that a well-run franchise in any market can build something worth watching.

The Dodgers spent $586 million last year and won the World Series. Good. They earned it. That's what it looks like when an organization takes the civic trust of fan loyalty seriously and tries to honor it.

The Rockies spent a fraction of that, pocketed revenue sharing, and finished where they always finish. And instead of holding them accountable, the league wants to put a ceiling on the Dodgers.

That's not competitive balance. That's rewarding apathy and punishing ambition.

Constrain the tankers. Let the builders build.