MLB, Owners May Burn Down Elysian Fields to Force ‘Great Egalitarian Reset’
We love to romanticize baseball, don’t we?
The truth is, today’s baseball isn’t the “game of base” once played in 1846 in a sprawling park in Hoboken, NJ. From its onset, the sport oozed myth, just as the park that derived its name from a fabled afterlife paradise reserved for heroes, demigods, and the exceptionally virtuous. Baseball was played long before, its first official rules drawn up in 1837. Sports journalist Henry Chadwick, who witnessed a spirited game at the Hoboken Fields, perpetuated the sport’s humble beginnings as its earliest and most vocal proponent. He’s credited, rightfully or not, with making baseball America’s pastime.
I chanced to go through the Elysian Fields during the progress of a match between the noted Eagle and Gotham Clubs. The game was being sharply played on both sides, and I watched with deeper interest than any previous ball match between clubs that I had seen. It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for Americans.
Baseball is a business now, and it’s booming. Neither Chadwick nor any of the game’s forefathers could ever have predicted the widespread growth and monetary gain the sport has witnessed in 180 years. Major League Baseball generated a record $12.2 billion in revenue in 2025, a continuing upward trend driven by media rights, gate receipts, and record-breaking sponsorship deals. The Yankees earned an estimated $800 million last year, followed by the Dodgers, who raked in $700 million. The Marlins earned $296 million, 30th among all clubs.
Those numbers are expected to increase this year, but the owners and commissioner Rob Manfred want the madness to stop. They don’t like the disparity in revenues, saying clubs like the Rays and Brewers can’t compete with the financial juggernauts that reside in major media markets. So they want a salary cap, what team and league officials often describe as “a great egalitarian reset.” Milwaukee has the best record in baseball, by the way, and Tampa Bay sits just 2.5 games behind them.
The Dodgers' $180 million luxury tax bill exceeds the total payrolls of these MLB teams 💰
Data via Spotrac pic.twitter.com/CyklGsl7r2
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) August 6, 2026
Competitive balance arguments are red herrings to the MLB Players Association. They see it as a distraction from the league’s ultimate goal: Higher profits and increased franchise values. Fans are equally divided on the subject. They see the Dodgers as the game’s chief villain, and the team’s players as their multi-millionaire minions. Pro-cap fans will tell you that MLB owners assume all the risk. The anti-cap faction will tell you that the game will suffer without its current free market capability. That argument followed Tarik Skubal from Detroit to Los Angeles at this year’s trade deadline.
Owning a Major League Baseball team is generally considered a low-risk, high-reward venture. The sport has its own financial ecosystem, one that leverages monopoly protections, revenue-sharing models, and skyrocketing franchise valuations. The Ricketts family bought the Cubs for $845 million in 2009. Forbes valued the franchise at $4.6 billion last year, and it’s worth approximately $5.25 billion today. That’s a 621% increase in 17 years.
Let me put it in layman’s terms for you. You’d be ecstatic if I borrowed $100 from you today and paid you back $19,286 in 2043. Imagine earning that from every person to whom you loaned $100. You’d print money to continue doing that if you had to, or you’d borrow from the bank, who’d very happily loan you whatever you needed with that kind of balance sheet in your possession. I could comfortably retire in 20 years on four paychecks, so please don’t tell me owners take all the risk.
Yet the league still cries poor. They need to save themselves from themselves, and the only way to do that is by instituting a cap on spending. They’re all for increased annual revenues, especially if they can cap expenditures at the same time. They want a floor, too, but that’s a parlor trick to make fans believe the ultimate goal is true competitive balance.
“Every day we hear from fans across the country who believe their team doesn’t have a fair opportunity to compete,” league spokesperson Glen Caplin said in a statement last February. “Our message to those fans is that we hear your concerns. We are committed to a solution that levels the playing field. While no proposals have been finalized, we look forward to discussing solutions with the MLBPA in the months to come so that fans in all of our markets, regardless of size, can feel that their team has a chance to consistently compete.”
Formal negotiations between owners and players over the next collective bargaining agreement have already begun. Talks are not expected to move quickly, and a December lockout is widely expected.
A ceiling won’t be a hard sell for the sport’s richest owners. The Dodgers, for example, would benefit from a limit on their spending. The biggest losers will be owners in smaller markets, who will be forced to increase payroll without any additional revenues. In other words, expect six teams to hit the cap, 12 teams to float in the middle, and another 12 teams to hit the bare minimum. How is that better for baseball? How does that make the game more competitive? It is just a scaled-down (read: cheaper) version of the current system.
If MLB gets its way, contracts like the $765 million deal Juan Soto signed with the Mets would cease to exist. That said, Soto would still be among the highest-paid players in the game. His $51.875 million salary represents 16% of New York’s total 2026 payroll, but he’d command a higher percentage in a cap/floor financial system. The trickle-down result is smaller contracts for mid players and aging veterans.
That’s because a salary cap converts baseball’s financial system into a zero-sum game. Every time a player earns a dollar, it comes from another player’s pocket. The mid-level players will ultimately get squeezed because stars will still get paid, rookies will get their minimums, and everyone else will fight for the leftover scraps. The nature of a salary cap is to artificially suppress payroll, so its issues are solely distributional.
The owners are locked in and determined not to give in without a unified agreement. The cap has long been a unifier of players as well. Will a compromise be reached? Eventually, but it may permanently hurt the game, much more than the 1994 work stoppage. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire aren’t around to resurrect it from the dead. Neither are Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Mariano Rivera, or Ken Griffey Jr., for that matter. The onus will probably be placed on players like Soto, Shohei Ohtani, and Aaron Judge, the very reasons that owners want a cap to begin with.
It just doesn’t make sense. The worst possible outcome for a sport that continues to trend upward is to kill the goose that lays those golden eggs. Those golden eggs are media rights, and if the fans move on, those rights will be worthless. A cap won’t matter at all if that happens. This, too, is something that baseball’s forefathers never could have envisioned 180 years ago when they spent their weekends playing ball at the Elysian Fields.
