If You Were GM and There Was No Salary Cap, What Would You Do?
You’d spend. Everyone would. So maybe the Dodgers aren’t the ones ruining baseball.
The gap between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the lowest-spending clubs in baseball is $441 million1.
"It defies human experience to ask a fan to think that the bottom end of that gap has the same opportunity to win as the top end," said Rob Manfred.
That's his reason for pushing a salary cap.
But let’s do the numbers2.
The Dodgers’ estimated payroll total according to Fangraphs is $408 million, which is the highest in the league. The Miami Marlins have a total payroll of $75 million, which is the lowest in the league.
Okay, that’s quite a difference.
Quick context for anyone who doesn't follow baseball. MLB is the only one of the four major North American leagues with no salary cap and no salary floor. No ceiling on what a team can spend, no floor forcing anyone to spend a minimum. The league says a cap-and-floor system would restore "competitive balance," the idea that a team in Pittsburgh should have the same shot at a title as a team in LA.
First, let’s get one thing straight. The Dodgers are not ruining baseball. Period. I’m honestly not sure how we’re back here again, because let’s be clear about what actually happened this weekend. The Tarik Skubal move was a trade. Detroit chose to trade with Los Angeles.
If you told any team in the NBA, NFL, or NHL the cap was gone tomorrow, every single one of them would empty the bank. The Browns would somehow still find a way to screw it up, but every team would spend.
Still don’t understand? Try this. You have unlimited money. What do you do?
At the end of the day, the Dodgers are just playing it smart. Yes, they’re a big market team. Yes, they’re backed by an ownership group with real money behind it. Yes, their local TV deal alone is worth more than some teams’ entire operating budget. None of that is a crime. The question people keep asking is whether a team should be able to go get Mookie Betts, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Tarik Skubal in the same decade. Under the current rules, yes. That’s the whole point of not having a cap.
People talk about the Dodgers like they’re an ATM with a stadium attached. They’re not. They might be the best-run player development machine in the sport, and that has almost nothing to do with their payroll.
Since MLB Pipeline started ranking farm systems in 2015, the Dodgers are the only organization to land in the top 10 every single year. They’re currently ranked No. 2 in baseball, and they got there without a single top-10 draft pick since 2006. Twenty years without a premium pick, and they’re still running one of the best pipelines in the sport off scouting and development.
Look at what they actually gave up in the Skubal deal. Zyhir Hope was baseball’s No. 55 overall prospect. River Ryan was the Dodgers’ own No. 6 guy internally.
Even Roki Sasaki, one of the most hyped arms on the planet, didn’t sign for Dodgers money. International amateur deals run through a bonus pool that’s basically identical for every team in the league. He picked LA for the pitch lab and the development plan, not the money.
Nobody could outbid anyone on that one, and that’s the whole point of that rule.
Their front office builds it this way on purpose. GM Brandon Gomes said the entire offseason plan every year is to make the “headline acquisitions” before the season even starts, specifically so they’re not stuck overpaying out of desperation in July as most do.
So no, it’s not just the money. Drop a salary cap on this league tomorrow, and the Dodgers still have a scouting department that hasn’t missed in over a decade.
Here’s how revenue sharing is supposed to work. The Dodgers, the Yankees, the Mets, every big spender, kick a chunk of local revenue into a shared pool. That pool gets redistributed to teams like the Pirates, the Marlins, the Rays, the Athletics. The idea is simple. Give the little guy a fighting chance.
Except a lot of these owners don’t spend it on a fighting chance. They spend it on themselves.
The Marlins pulled in an estimated $317 million in revenue in 2024. Their entire player payroll that year was $86 million. That’s 27 cents on the dollar going back into the product you’re paying to watch.
This isn’t a new complaint either. The MLBPA filed a grievance in 2018 against the A’s, Marlins, Pirates, and Rays together, all four accused of the same thing: pocketing revenue-sharing money instead of putting it on the field. They filed again two years later. Pittsburgh’s payroll dropped nearly $20 million and kept declining four straight seasons, but the checks from the other 29 teams arrived the whole time.
And then there’s the Athletics. John Fisher gutted a 97-win team in one offseason, trading Matt Olson, Sean Murphy, and Matt Chapman before 2022 even started. By 2023, they were 37-91, running the smallest payroll in the sport, while their own fans accused Fisher of tanking on purpose to justify relocation. He denied it. He also said the team lost $175 million in “recent years” running a payroll around $50 million.
Out of everything, the one deadline ownership actually treated as urgent was: lock a new stadium in by January 2024 or lose revenue-sharing status. I bet you, right now if you look through the CBA, you’re going to take at least 10 minutes to find it. That money is just to stay eligible for the check.
That’s the real gap in this sport. Too many owners figured out they can make more money losing than they’d ever make trying to win.
A hard cap does exactly one thing about any of that. It stops the Dodgers from spending more. It does nothing to stop the Marlins from banking $200 million plus in pure profit margin. It doesn’t make the Pirates sign a single free agent. If anything, it makes their business model easier, because now everyone above them has a ceiling too, while the floor under them stays wherever it’s always been.
A salary floor is the only thing in this fight that actually points at the real problem. MLB’s proposal does have a floor, which becomes $148 million once you strip out the player benefits every team already owes. They paired it with a hard cap that only constrains the Dodgers, then set the floor so low that twelve teams already clear it without trying.
What I’m trying to say is. Don’t just include a floor. Make it high enough to matter, and drop the ceiling that punishes the one team actually spending.
The union’s ask isn’t difficult to understand. Raise the luxury tax threshold and the minimum salary and actually penalize teams that take revenue-sharing money and sit on it.
LA wasn’t the only team in the room for Skubal. The Yankees were in it. So were the Braves, the Cubs, the Phillies. So were the Rays, who currently have the best record in the American League. So were the Brewers, who by one report were willing to eat money left on his contract just to land him.
And, as I said before. Skubal is just a rental. He’s going to free agency, and he’s going to sign with a team that’s going to pay him a lot of money. So, for teams that don’t want to pay him, what’s the point of spending so much to acquire him? That’s why the Dodgers didn’t need to make a 10/10 offer, because a 7/10 would suffice here.
In the same 48 hours, the Mets, owners of the second-highest payroll in the sport at roughly $358 million, were on the other side of the deadline selling. They traded Freddy Peralta. And guess what? They are outside of a playoff spot with one of the most expensive rosters ever built.
So let’s go back to where I started today, with Manfred. He says it defies human experience to expect a fan in the small market to believe they have the same shot as a fan in LA. He’s right. But a hard cap doesn’t fix that. The Marlins aren’t going to reinvest their $200 million in profit. The Pirates won’t magically sign superstars. It just tells the Dodgers to stop spending so much money on players.
So for all of you people that are thinking baseball is ruined because of the Dodgers, here’s what I have to say. The Dodgers are saving baseball. They’re finally making fans pressure their owners to actually spend and invest in the team, instead of just spending the money on themselves.
This lockout that we’re about to see is for the better.
Hey Rob. You want fans to believe everyone has a shot? Make everyone try. Start with a floor, not a ceiling.
This is according to Rob Manfred himself.
Marketplace? Kai Ryssdal? Anybody?