NIU Sociology of Sports Spring 2013: The Price of Fixing Baseball: What's Your Cap Size?

Major League Baseball is no stranger to controversial topics from the designated hitter to instant replay, from broken collarbones in April to interleague games in September. However, no other idea is more hotly debated than placing a salary cap on America’s pastime. Should a hard or soft cap be utilized? Would it make any difference whatsoever?

Forbes prices Alex Rodriguez at roughly $29.5 million this year making him the highest paid player in the game. Oddly enough, Rodriguez alone is paid more than the entire 25-man roster of the 2013 Houston Astros and quite possibly all Single-A ballplayers (the minimum salary is $1,110 per month). Fans claim that a hard cap would successfully curb the buying power of owners like George Steinbrenner. A hard cap, such as the system used in the National Football League, mandates that no team can exceed a predetermined budget for player salaries. In reality, it is more likely the Cubs make the World Series this year than a hard cap ever being installed due to the organization that holds the most power in the debate: the Players’ Union.

Out of a potential drop in salaries, the Union has avidly fought against any and all forms of budget limitations. MLB currently has two methods of (somewhat) limiting owners’ spending. The luxury tax, a version of the soft cap, states that any team must pay a fine should they exceed an agreed upon budget with heftier fines for repeat offenders (the Yankees paid a 40% tax after recidivating for the third time in 2005). The effects of the luxury tax are minimized by a continually increasing budget ($117 million in 2003 to $136.5 million in 2006). The other method, revenue sharing, entails that teams get to keep about 60% of every dollar earned, which thereby affects an owner’s willingness to pay a player large sums of money, so this tactic has been contested by the Union.

Despite these strategies, the Union has successfully kept a hard cap at bay while avoiding drastic drops in salaries leaving owners free to do as they please. Dave Zirin's book Bad Owners points out all of the various ways owners exploit the fans and the city to further increase their wallets, such as Steinbrenner’s game of chicken to get New York to build him a new $1.3 billion stadium lest he relocate the team and the creation of the YES Network which forces fans to purchase premium cable packages to watch games, which is almost as cruel as late Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz’s decision to not televise home games. With the Players’ Union defending the ever-increasing salaries of its members, owners will carry on spending at will.

Cubs fans like myself have experienced disappointment with both large and small salary rosters, proof that owners cannot simply buy championships. There is already parity within the league as only one team has won the World Series three times or more since 1985 (the Yankees at 5 times) so a salary cap makes no sense, at least for the reasons many fans offer. Installing a (hard) salary cap would do relatively nothing to change the game or the owners’ wallets. When it comes to “fixing” the game of baseball, putting a financial leash on the big spenders is, despite my personal angst, not the solution.