Floor, No Cap

By Mike Rifkin

The 2025 Major League Baseball season ended the same way the 2024 season did with the Los Angeles Dodgers hoisting the World Series Trophy. Now while teams can start thinking about what their 2026 rosters can look like, let’s look after the 2026 season where there might be a work stoppage. Why might there be a work stoppage, because the small market teams are upset about how much the big market teams spend. 

While this is true and two of the top five payrolls in Baseball played in the World Series, of the final four teams the Dodgers and Blue Jays were the only two in the top 10 of payroll. The Mariners and Brewers ranked 16th and 21st respectively. So, it is possible to have a lower payroll and win. Are the Dodgers bad for baseball? No, honestly if you want to be mad at something they did look at how some of the deals are structured, not the deals themselves. Were the Yankees bad for baseball when they spent money? No, baseball doesn’t need a salary cap. 

What Baseball needs is a salary floor.  A salary floor would institute that every team spends up to a certain number. And if you look at 2025 payrolls five teams spent under 100 million dollars. Those teams being the Pirates, White Sox, Rays, Athletics, and Marlins. The team I’m going to leave out for a moment is the Rays, mainly because they just got sold and hopefully the new owner steps in and spends some money. Before last season MLB made the Athletics spend money before they got their cut from the luxury taxes, as for the Pirates it wasn’t long ago where they were benching players who were due bonuses, and the Marlins are the Marlins. 

The problem isn’t big market teams spending a lot of money, it’s the small markets not even trying and then complaining about how they’re out on deals before they happened. There are also major market teams that don’t want to spend, look at the current rumors around the Tigers and Tarik Skubal. One of the best pitchers in the game and the reigning CY Young award winner was offered 78 million dollars over four years. Detroit is not a small market, and big market teams acting like a small market is not good for the game. 

A lot of people want to talk about competitive balance, but to set that up these teams need to spend money. Or when you have a superstar being able to keep them, because there’s no reason for teams to be talking about a Paul Skenes trade right now.