MLB owners have, as you know, been pushing the idea that the sport needs a salary cap for teams to have better competitive balance.
You would think, then, that the Brewers/Rays World Series matchup, between two teams with modest payrolls (I’m not calling them “small market” because that term is filled with conditions), would change that mindset.
At The Athletic, Evan Drellich writes that it hasn’t. Commissioner Rob Manfred spoke:
“People can be entrenched wherever they want to be entrenched. We’re prepared to commit ourselves to the process,” Manfred said. “It’s easy to say, ‘I’m here, and I’m never moving.’ That’s not a particularly skilled approach to the process.
“The small markets operate at a disadvantage economically. They just don’t have the resources that our bigger markets do.”
Mark Attanasio, owner of the Brewers and a member of Manfred’s labor committee, said the league’s cap proposal “not only will help us compete, but more importantly, all of the teams with lower payrolls too, which is something also I think the fans want.”
Let’s be clear here. Owners don’t want a salary cap because they want more teams to compete. They want it to increase profits and to increase franchise values. Period, full stop.
You can imagine how that’s gone over with the MLBPA:
Bruce Meyer, the interim head of the union, called a salary cap “a nuclear bomb” and said “there’s no reason whatsoever” that the Pittsburgh Pirates can’t compete the same way the Brewers and Rays have.
“These teams have been successful doing it one way,” Meyer said. “They would be even more successful if they went out and spent more money. Tampa would probably have a few World Series under their belt if they had at any point gone out and signed some free agents.”
Meyer is right, in this sense. The reason the Brewers and Rays are where they are is because both teams have smart baseball management teams. Look at the Brewers: They let top executive David Stearns go to the Mets, where owner Steve Cohen has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into players. For that, the Mets had 74 wins this year and weren’t close to the postseason. They let manager Craig Counsell go to the Cubs, and well, you know that story. Counsell’s done well in Chicago. But the Cubs organization, despite theoretically having more resources, hasn’t put together the infrastructure to win. They could! But they have let scouts go and their pitching development system is, in a word, terrible.
The Rays are a similar story. Executive Andrew Friedman left Tampa Bay after 2014, which started the chain reaction that brought Joe Maddon to Chicago. Erik Neander, Friedman’s top deputy, took over and, as he had worked for the Rays since 2007, the transfer was seamless. The organization kept doing what it had been doing, and Kevin Cash, signed as manager to succeed Maddon, is now the longest-tenured manager in MLB.
Smart baseball management wins. Teams prove that over and over and over. When the Cubs won in 2016, they had it. Now? Not so much.
So Bruce Meyer says a salary cap is “a nuclear bomb,” which is pretty strong imagery, basically saying there’s no way players will go for it. This sentiment appears common among players:
Reliever Aaron Ashby, the Brewers’ player rep, was asked how long players are willing to sit out to avoid a cap.
“I guess as long as it takes,” Ashby said. “We’re gonna have a long season here, and I guess if that means having a longer offseason, so be it.”
In this article posted here earlier this month, I noted some discussion of what a “drop dead date” could be for owners before they blink. The TL;dr version is that about 60 games into the season is when owners could start to lose out on big TV money, because at that point the current TV deals could roll into another year and not expire until the end of 2029. That would delay the big money that owners hope to get from new national TV deals.
So we’re in a holding pattern. Neither side has changed its position, but we might get some more clarity from this, per the Drellich article:
The union holds an annual meeting with players near the end of November, which this year coincides with the final days of bargaining before the lockout. In 2021, the owners met the players where they were holding that meeting, in Texas.
These days, the union holds that same meeting in Arizona, where it opened an office in 2023. Which means this time, Arizona could be the site where Manfred announces that the sport is frozen.
“We’ve told them where we’re going to be,” Meyer said. “They haven’t confirmed, but I expect there’s a high likelihood we’ll be talking and bargaining, and you never know what’s going to happen.”
I am 99.9 percent sure that owners will lock out players when the CBA expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on Dec. 1. After that, it’s anyone’s guess when it will end.
Try to enjoy the rest of the World Series. We might not see MLB players back on the field for quite some time after that.