If there is certainty about Major League Baseball, it is because every few months, a franchise owner will call for a salary ceiling. The economy of the league is again a problem of the chaud button – this off -season has seen Juan Soto Sign the richest contract in the history of sport; The title champion of World Series Dodgers of Los Angeles Continue to spend as they wish; And almost half of the rest of the league choose to sit on the market for free agents – it was only a matter of time before it happened.
Effectively Baltimore Orioles Friday, the owner David Rubenstein carried out the prophecy by declaring his preference for some sweet and soft financial constraints.
“I hope that this is the case we would have a salary ceiling in baseball as other sports do, and maybe we will do it, but we don’t have that now”, ” Rubenstein told Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum. “I suspect that we will probably have something closer to what Nfl and the Nba Have, but there is no guarantee of this. “”
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Of course, this should not be surprising when an owner wants a mechanism that will artificially limit players’ salaries. Let’s be clear: this is what the salary ceilings really, even if they are marked as means of improving the competitive balance of a league. As the researcher of the James Smyth network presented on Bluesky, MLB empirically more parity than the other leagues which have ceilings. Indeed, Mlb More teams have won championships since 2000 than the other three major male major American leagues; He also had the second teams most reactive to the Championship’s Championship since 2010, only dragging the National Hockey League in this regard. And so on.
This is not intended to reject anyone who observes that there are financial disparities between clubs, especially at this time when local television rights are a waste. It is simply a question of stressing that the salary ceilings are not a panacea for competitive balance problems – problems which, at least quantifically, may not even exist when you compare MLB parity to those of the capped leagues. As such, it is worth using skepticism whenever a owner – the person who benefits the most from a salary ceiling – calls the mechanism.
The Orioles of Rubenstein, for everything it is worth, are currently ranking 15th in the payroll tax provided, according to data provided in Spotrac. Their planned payroll payment of $ 156 million, as estimated by COT contracts, would represent the highest second in the history of the franchise, behind the 2017 team.
As for the chances that Rubenstein obtains his wish and the MLB implementing a cap and a floor as part of the next ABC talks … well, who knows? The head of the MLB players’ association Tony Clark seemed to close the door to this possibility in 2023, declaring: “We are never going to accept a cap.”
The reality is that this song and this dance occur since the dawn of the free agency. The MLBPA has long pushed an official salary ceiling, going back to the time of Marvin Miller in charge of the Union. In recent years, the owners have mainly joined that unofficial in the form of the competitive balance tax. According to Clark’s comments, however, this does not mean that the union would see an official ceiling more favorably.
For the moment, the only certainty with regard to the MLB and the salary ceilings is that another owner is only weeks (if not days) sheltered from one.
