MLB's Salary Cap Fight Isn’t About Competitive Balance, It’s About Money

The World Series is over. And the only thing more uncovered over the last four weeks than a certain commercial for a certain sports trading app was the real reason Rob Manfred and Major League Baseball owners want a salary cap.

Check that. The phrasing there really should be “Major League Baseball owners and Rob Manfred,” because they are the boss of him.

A salary cap isn’t about competitive balance — not after a postseason that was dominated by the small markets and ended with the Milwaukee Brewers, the team from the smallest market of all, capping a historically great season Wednesday night with a World Series-clinching 4-1 win over the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 5 of the Fall Classic.

It’s all about finding more ways to squeeze more money out of what is already a comically lucrative enterprise. How about ALL those sports trading app commercials you saw this month, not just the one with a well-known actress?

Franchises are worth well over a billion bucks apiece and appear to be immune to the ebbs and flows of the everyday economy. The San Diego Padres, the only big four team in the nation’s 30th-ranked media market, were sold for $3.9 million in August. Stan Kroenke, owner of recent champions in the NFL, NBA and NHL, agreed in September to buy the Los Angeles Angels — who haven’t made the playoffs since 2014 and haven’t posted a winning season since 2015 — for more than $4 billion on Sept. 1.

But a lot isn’t enough, not with private equity barging into baseball. Per Sportico, private equity firms have minority stakes in 18 teams, including the famously underfunded, non-profitable New York Yankees. The cap is all about cost containment and making billion dollar enterprises even more valuable, even if it comes at the cost of much or all of next season.

And Manfred and the owners — sorry, the owners and Manfred — seem eager to drive the car off the cliff, even though baseball can’t afford another season-wrecking work stoppage like 1994.

There’s no Cal Ripken Jr. or a (tainted) home run chase waiting to try and restore baseball’s status as the American pastime — not in a nation run by the NFL and occupied by residents spending most of their waking hours staring at their phones.

If last night was it for a while, at least we got a postseason in which well-run teams — regardless of market — were rewarded and a worthy champion emerged from a field of long-suffering contenders by sprinting through the tape following a dominant regular season.

The four teams to advance to the LCS — the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers, with the second-highest payroll in the game, along with Milwaukee, Tampa Bay and the Cleveland Guardians, who ranked 19th, 28th and 30th, respectively, in payroll— have combined to make 31 playoff appearances since 2017.

While the Rays remain in search of their first title and the Guardians’ drought extended to 78 years, the Brewers won their first crown in resounding fashion. Milwaukee joined the 1998 Yankees and the 2022 Houston Astros as the only World Series champions in the wild card era to go 11-2 in the playoffs following a regular season in which they won at least 100 games.

The Brewers’ playoff run and the composition of the postseason field offered another reminder of what might have been in 1994, when the small-market Montreal Expos, in search of their first championship, had the best record in the game when the strike ended the season on Aug. 12. Seven other contenders were in the midst of a championship droughts lasting a decade or longer.

Who knows what might have happened that fall? Thirty-two years later, the what-ifs are entirely different. But after these playoffs, at least we know who and what the lockout is about — the owners for whom so much is not nearly enough.