The Dodgers’ recent success has been shrouded in controversy and disapproval. The most controversial part about their success is their “excessive” spending. They are spending 396.5 million dollars. This is 26.7 million dollars more than the second-highest-spending team and more than the bottom four teams combined. Many people point to this as a major problem making baseball boring, but the real problem that will lead to baseball’s demise is cheap owners unwilling to spend money. Cheap ownership is a real threat to baseball because when teams are unwilling to spend on free agents, it hurts them, and these players will continue to go to teams willing to pay them what they are worth. This leads to a cycle in which bad, cheap teams get worse and good teams continue to dominate the league.
Calling the Dodgers’ spending a problem is problematic because, according to CNBC and Bleacher Report, they spend 57% of their revenue on the roster. This is not a ridiculous amount. We see that the best teams in the league are those that spend 50% or more of their revenue on players. The Blue Jays spend 76%, the Yankees 47%, and the Phillies 59%. All of these teams made solid World Series runs. The worst teams in the league are the Rockies (36%), the White Sox (32%), and the Nationals (34%).
While some point to the Dodgers and Yankees as big-market teams in Los Angeles and New York as an advantage, this year disproved that. The Toronto Blue Jays beat big-market teams like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, yet ranked just 15th in revenue in the league. This proves that market size isn’t the driving force behind success; it’s whether owners are willing to invest in their teams. For comparison, the White Sox have the 16th-highest revenue, and they ended the season with just 60 wins and the 29th seed. This refusal to spend money is making the league less and less competitive. This is leading to a spiral in which the Dodgers continue to spend money because no one else is willing to. As of now, the Dodgers have eight of the top 100 players in the league, and without some kind of solution, this gap between the top and bottom will only continue to grow.
One popular proposed solution is a salary cap, similar to those in other sports. Leagues like the NFL have a hard cap, meaning they are not allowed to exceed a certain amount. The NBA uses a soft cap system: once a team goes over, they have to pay higher taxes based on how much they exceed it. One problem that may prevent this from ever happening is that the players simply get paid less. This means the MLBPA would strongly oppose this. Another suggestion that has gained significant public support is a salary floor. This would be the minimum amount a team would have to spend on payroll. In other leagues, this is based on a percentage of the salary cap, but the suggested system would be a percentage of revenue instead. The biggest problem is that the owners would strongly oppose it because they are required to pay a certain amount but receive no benefits. Because a salary cap benefits owners but not players, and a salary floor does the opposite, the league finds itself in a tense situation about how to keep it competitive. This situation will likely be the main topic of the 2027 CBA agreement and is predicted to lead to a lockout.
This spending predicament is between the players and owners, but the real victim here is the viewers. If cheap owners continue to field non-competitive teams, league parity will suffer, and the viewing experience will be poor, with a couple of teams that spend money dominating the league. A lockout is also horrible for viewers because it could take an extremely long time to fix, and the season will be cut short. One way you can support the MLBPA and help prevent a lockout is to find your team’s contact information at https://www.mlb.com/team and voice your opinion on the situation.
