The collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball’s players and team owners expires in less than a month, and a lockout in early December now appears all but certain.
For months, the league and its owners have argued that a work stoppage is needed to address what they describe as a competitive-balance problem. Their proposed solution is a salary cap. The argument is that teams in smaller markets can’t keep up because of the gap in payroll spending.
But the 2026 season has made that case harder to sell. The Milwaukee Brewers, who ranked 19th in payroll, put together one of the most dominant postseason runs in baseball history. They went 11-2 in October, with their two losses decided by just two runs combined. They swept the Los Angeles Dodgers, and rarely looked in danger of losing a game, much less the series.
The Brewers came within three outs of sweeping the World Series and becoming the first team to go unbeaten in both the NLCS and the World Series. They gave up that lead with Shane Drohan on the mound, but then comfortably won Game 5 behind Jacob Misiorowski, a likely Cy Young Award winner.
The team they beat for the title was the Tampa Bay Rays, who had the 28th-highest payroll. Tampa Bay had reached the World Series by defeating the Cleveland Guardians, who finished last in payroll.
Meanwhile, the big-spending New York Yankees didn’t make it to the ALCS. By October 2027, it will have been 18 years since their last World Series championship. The Mets missed the playoffs, despite having baseball’s highest payroll under owner Steve Cohen, and Philadelphia lost in the wild-card round. Toronto finished last.
The timing is awkward for owners who want to make the case for a cap. On Tuesday, they released another proposal, this time suggesting that a salary-cap and salary-floor system begin in 2028, a year later than previously proposed.
MLB spokesman Glen Caplin said the change would give clubs a full offseason to prepare. The league says the proposal would also preserve other planned changes, including earlier free agency, a $1 million minimum salary, a larger bonus pool for pre-arbitration players and measures intended to reduce roster turnover.
Caplin also said the proposed cap and floor would put more money in players’ hands, give more teams a chance to compete for free agents and help clubs keep their own stars. In the league’s view, that would leave fans everywhere feeling their team has a fair shot at winning.
That’s a difficult claim to square with what just happened on the field. The players’ union has rejected a cap, arguing that it would mainly increase owners’ profits. The details of the proposal are complicated, but the league’s case for tying it to competitive balance is not especially convincing.
The proposed floor is $180 million. That figure points to how little some lower-payroll teams are spending now: reaching it would mean increases of tens of millions of dollars for clubs such as Cleveland and Tampa Bay, and potentially much more. MLB has said 12 teams would need to raise payroll by a combined $636 million to meet the floor. More revenue sharing could help, but it’s hard to see how payments from the Dodgers or Mets alone would cover that gap.
That suggests some owners are spending well below what their clubs can afford. Rather than do more themselves, they can point to the difference between large- and small-market teams and argue for a cap.
The 2026 postseason also undermines the idea that a cap is necessary for competitive balance. The Dodgers have lost 14 of their last 17 attempts to win a World Series. No New York team has won a title since 2009, and the Mets’ championship drought has reached 40 years. The Padres have paid the luxury tax for years and have one NLCS win to show for it.
Baseball’s outcomes are difficult to predict in a way that makes payroll gaps less decisive than they are in some other sports. In the NBA, the better team wins a best-of-seven series about 80% of the time. In MLB, a series would need to last 75 games for the better team to win at a similar rate.
The Dodgers had a roughly $250 million payroll advantage over Milwaukee, yet pre-NLCS projections gave them only a 58% chance of winning the series. They would have had a similar financial edge over Cleveland or Tampa Bay. In baseball, spending more can help, but it can’t reliably buy a series.
A more practical approach would be to require high-revenue teams such as the Dodgers, Mets and Yankees to contribute more to revenue sharing, while adding firm oversight over how smaller-market clubs use the money. Some teams have found ways to avoid spending on players. The Marlins, for example, have used a loophole that allows money to go toward things such as facility improvements. The Pirates went a decade without signing a free agent to a multiyear deal, and their first such contract in that stretch was for only two years.
Instead of addressing those choices directly, the sport risks slowing its growth to increase the value of the Pirates franchise from $2.4 billion to $2.57 billion. That hardly seems like a compelling reason to impose a salary cap.
