The Dishwasher (a baseball blog)

Boomsauce

Also comparing any league to the NFL is a bad idea

They play a 17 games season

Baseball would be a lot more random if they only played 17 games it’s never going to be the same!

The finals every year for a decade.

Are those leagues better balanced than MLB who just have their first repeat champion since 2000?

I think not

This is my point about a salary cap not having much to do with competive balance

A lot of people mention other leagues with caps having better competitive balance but do they?

In the NFL the 2 teams have won the AFC 10 times in the last 12 years

In the NBA whoever had LeBron James went to…

That would appear to be the case

Some of it for sure but I think a lot of it is just “I want my favorite team the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series and they’re not likely to do so while the Dodgers are outspending everyone so I don’t care if it’s fair to the players I want things evened out” kind of mentality

lol thanks I wasn’t planning on having so much to say but alas

It would have been a bad contract for whoever signed it but that’s not Cedric problem now is it

Players reaching free agency while still in their physical prime would be huge

It’s one of the only things that would be worth even considering trading for a salary cap

Like Eric said though not sure how you get the veterans to agree to something that benefits them zero

I think about how much money Cedric Mullins would have made if he hit free agency after 2022.

He would have been 27, hed put up 10+ WAR over the previous 2 seasons

He would have gotten a bag

Instead by the time he hits the open market he’s a 30 year old centerfielder and he gets a 1 year deal

This is an interesting idea. Too many teams have figured out that most of a players productive years are before free agency and aren’t participating in free agency if players hit free agency after 4 years the Guardians/Brewers style of team building that is truly detrimental to player would go away

Piece of the pie in the upcoming TV deal

People are going to be very disappointed when the cap gets put in and poverty teams stay bad and the rich teams stay good

Im sure that a cap would go a long way towards helping some of these teams financially but my main point is that they’ve convinced a lot of people that they want to implement a cap to fix the perceived competitive balance issues and the real reason is that they want to make sure they get the biggest

I wasn’t born when the things you’re talking about happened so perhaps my use of “never” was hyperbolic BUT the union has kept a cap off the table for the most part up until recently and now the idea has picked up a lot of steam over the last couple years

Once the cap is in place the Pirates and the Twins will still be second tier teams and the only real change will be that a smaller percentage of league revenue will flow toward the players

That’s kind of my point. The owner’s primary motivation in pushing this is that they want to decrease what they’re expected to pay players

They’re laundering this desire to pay players less through the fans desire for competitive balance

Things that are sneaky

These people have a lot of resources and they’re not an honest group

If a group of billionaires want public opinion to sway and then it sways I tend to believe they did something to cause the sway

That’s just what I can see. The other reason I attribute opinion swaying this way to the owners is because it’s what they want. Rob Manfred toured clubhouses last year trying to convince players a cap would benefit them

If they’re willing to obvious about what they want they’ll be willing to do…

In the past year many major baseball writers (Passan, Drellich Rosenthal etc) have all written at least 1 piece about the salary cap usually with “sources” saying the owners really want one

The writers usually take the side of the players but just having them write about it legitimizes the idea

These other sports have all had caps for a long time and there hasn’t been any sort of fan-led push for MLB to adopt one despite mega spenders like the 90-00s Yankees a cap was never really discussed

In the past few years MLB owners have gone out of their way to talk about wanting a cap

They could have just paid the better player a little more!

Bruce Meyer showing up to negotiations and announcing: “We will accept a salary floor and nothing else”

Guardians sent Lindor packing because he was “going to be too expensive” in 2026 if Lindor was waking 60 million dollars a year the Guardians would be well below their proposed floor!

That could be part of it but the NFL has been successful for a long time and it hadnt resulted in MLB fans wanting a salary cap until now

The difference now is that the MLB owners have been very aggressive and intentional about getting the word out via the media that they need a salary cap

The “trust me my plan will help all of us” to “whoops my plan only benefitted me” pipeline

The salary cap messaging is very similar to how Rs positioned DOGE where they told everyone they were going to get rid of a bunch of corruption which sounds fine but really it was about crippling regulatory agencies that protect from corruption so that they could do more corruption

And the owners have done a good job getting the message out there that a salary cap is the way to fix it

There is sort of an “incomprehensible median voter politics” effect with these polls but I think what the poll shows is that fans know whose fault it is but they don’t care. They just want to feel like their team isn’t eliminated just because they’re a small market

Like sorry I don’t feel bad for these teams that can’t be bothered to spend more than what they get as part of revenue sharing

The Marlins entire roster was paid for by other teams and they kept all of the revenue that came in

Has that money been reinvested on the 2026 roster? Of course not!