Christmas came early: Trump endorses an MLB salary cap
His historic unpopularity is good for us fans
Major League Baseball’s players union, as expected, offered tweaks to the sport’s existing economic model. Team owners, as expected, countered with a hard salary cap. Then the first grenade of MLB’s epic labor showdown rolled into the room. This week, President Donald Trump endorsed a hard salary cap. Good.
MLB is the only major American league without a hard salary cap. There are several reasons for that, but more or less it’s because of the players’ enduring solidarity. (A satisfying corollary to this is MLB owners’ unique ineptitude. “Gentlemen,” past Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner once said to his colleagues, “we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.”) Now, with the league’s collective bargaining agreement expiring after this season, team owners are again pushing for a salary cap.
The owners are sure to lockout the players the minute the agreement expires, preempting the players from striking, at which point there will be plenty of time to dive into the many salient and consequential issues of baseball’s work stoppage. For this piece, I take at face value that a salary cap would be bad for fans.
I’ve written about it before (see story linked above), and I will write about it again, but the gist is that a salary cap or any “artificial” control on wages decreases talent on the field. In other words, lower wages equals worse baseball. MLB’s arbitration system, which grants a team control of a player for their first six years of service in the major leagues, is essentially a salary cap for young players. This means we often get players on our favorite teams who don’t belong in the Bigs. They’re there because they’re cheap.
Take my nemesis Alec Bohm, the Philadelphia Phillies’ third baseman. In his first three full seasons, he accrued 0.9 fWAR per season. If the Phillies had replaced him with a league-average player, then they wouldn’t have lost much. Why didn’t they do that, to see if they could get more production from someone else? Because Bohm earned an average salary of just $679,333 in those three years.
Fangraphs found that, since 2020, the average cost of a 0-1 fWAR in free agency was nearly $7.4 million. Despite atrocious defense and underwhelming power, Bohm kept his starting job because his contract was a screaming deal, but one only made possible by MLB’s stringent control of young players’ salaries. To put a finer point on it, MLB made me yell at my television every time Bohm grounded into a double play because the league despises labor making fair wages.
Owners want to expand that control across all players, and Trump supports the owners’ cause. “If you don’t have a salary cap you don’t have a sport, because they can’t help themselves,” Trump told reporters. “They should have done it a long time ago.” To the first point, Trump is obviously wrong. MLB has never been more popular or lucrative, and it has never had a salary cap.
To the second point, he’s presumably referring to owners’ not being able to stop themselves from spending, which is an incorrect sentiment. He must not know the Miami Marlines and Pittsburgh Pirates exist. Lastly, he’s presumably referring to the cataclysmic labor battle in 1994 and he presumably thinks the owners can unilaterally impose a salary cap. That’s exactly what they tried in ‘94 and it shut down the sport for almost a year and required federal intervention.
The players union offered no comment in response to Trump’s remarks, but I welcome them. Trump is incredibly and by some metric historically unpopular. If he takes a stance, then at least 60% of the country opposes it just because. This is important because the owners are trying to make a salary cap popular by couching it in fans’ interest. Salary caps do not result in parity, and anyway, parity is boring. Trump’s unpopularity is undercutting the owners’ rhetorical dance.
This is not to say Trump will make labor negotiations easy for the players. Trump controls a federal apparatus that is virulently anti-labor, and many MLB owners are major Trump donors/supporters. In the most corrupt administration in modern times, that’s not an insignificant consideration. The union will have to tread lightly.
But it was not for nothing that Republican senators rebelled at Trump’s $1.8 billion fund for political allies, and that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives voted for a resolution to reign in Trump’s war-making in Iran, and that state legislators across the country are resorting to extreme gerrymandering to protect Republican majorities. Americans have soured on Trumpism, and that’s good for baseball.
We need a cap on HIS spending. MLB needs a salary floor.