By Mark Halpern
For years and years many different sports teams are controlled by the use of a salary cap. A salary cap is a total amount a team is allowed to spend on their professional roster. The NFL, NBA and NHL all have salary caps but, the one that doesn’t is Baseball.
Now you are probably thinking that I am a fan of a lower scale ball club that can’t even win 60 games and doesn’t spend a wooden Nickel on a player. No, I am a die-hard New York Mets fan so my team would be greatly affected but not as affected as some teams like the Dodgers, Yankees and Padres just to name a few. The question becomes how to create a salary cap on a game that has 162 regular season games and then playoffs added on. That’s a lot of time on and off the field playing and whatnot. Its hard to compare and contrast all the leagues that have salary caps and how they managed to keep the needle balanced. The big difference in Baseball compared to the other sports is that they play 5 out of every 7 days where as the NFL each team is 1 game a week, NBA 2-3 games a week, NHL 2-3 games a week so it’s kind of hard to put a monetary number right now.
The reason for this article is that we just saw the Los Angeles Dodgers spend $1 billion dollars on just two players. Where do we draw a line in the sand where there are teams not just the dodgers that have spent like this (not eclipsing the billion mark) but coming close. There are top financial teams and then there are teams that are looking to get away from their fan base to start a new era. When I see that teams are able to afford this money (and with no issue) and then the fans that are able to attend are the Rich because to take a family of 4 to a game these days with food travel its over a $500 day and for better than 70% of families in this country can’t afford to attend because of they way tickets have to be priced so that the “Business” end of baseball is never in the red ink because if they were there would be no team.
I see the need for a salary cap not to control teams spending but finding a way that every demographic can take their family and enjoy a game at the stadium that they are playing. As teams spend more the cost for fans goes through the roof where most people say these days “I’ll watch them on TV.” And that is the trend we are leading up to. IN my humble opinion no fans at the stadium then there will be no team to play there. The number of huge contracts of Guaranteed money is horrendous in the league. However, its not against the rules so you have players who have 8-10 deals over 300 million fully guaranteed and yes, the clubs pay them but, in the end it’s fans $$$$ coming in that keeps them. If a salary cap were to be implemented or even discussed it wouldn’t happen until the next CBA is do and we might not here about it then. You have to begin to think when is enough, enough.
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