Rob Manfred wants you to believe the Chicago White Sox, the Cleveland Guardians, and the Tampa Bay Rays cannot really compete without a salary cap, and the three of them are busy making him look like a liar in October, the exact month he picked to start telling that story everywhere.
I’ve been annoyed at commissioners for a lot of reasons over the years, but rarely at a contradiction this specific. MLB’s collective bargaining agreement expires December 1st, and the two sides are already girding for a lockout that could cost the sport real 2027 games, the first labor dispute to do that since 1995. Manfred’s entire case for why a salary cap is necessary rests on one idea: cash-poor franchises cannot win. He’s not shy about saying it out loud, comparing the Dodgers’ payroll, inflated past $440 million by Shohei Ohtani’s deferred money, to the Marlins sitting around $81 million:
“It defies human experience to ask a franchise to think that the bottom end of that gap has the same opportunity to win [as] the top end.”
That’s a tidy argument. It’s also bullshit, and three of the league’s biggest bottom-feeders by spending are proving it this week on national television instead of waiting for the offseason to make the point politely. The Guardians carry the lowest payroll of any team in baseball, dead last among all thirty teams, no dispute about the number. The White Sox and Rays aren’t anywhere near the top half of the sport’s payrolls either. Right now, those are the three teams standing between the field and the World Series.
The Rays already swept the Yankees out of October, clinching the AL’s first ALCS berth. Tampa Bay’s budget roster did that to a payroll built like New York’s, which is exactly what Manfred’s salary cap argument says shouldn’t be mathematically possible. The Guardians and White Sox are still deciding who joins them. Cleveland forced a decisive Game 5 by beating Chicago 9-5 on Thursday, a game where Jose Ramirez hit a two-run homer off a 99.9 mph fastball and drove in three runs total, then watched the White Sox bullpen hand him a six-run sixth inning on three straight bases-loaded singles. Gavin Williams and Sean Burke start Saturday night in Cleveland, and the winner gets Tampa Bay in the ALCS. Nobody on either roster is cash-poor in talent, whatever the owners’ math says about their checkbooks.
Bruce Meyer, running the union’s side of the table, wasn’t exactly diplomatic about any of this:
https://twitter.com/BNightengale/status/2077037871995760688
Meyer’s framing lands harder with three low-spending teams playing deep October baseball while he says it. The owners’ actual salary cap proposal doesn’t stop at a hard number, either. It pairs the cap with contract limits capping any single deal at six years and 16% of the cap, which is a strange thing to call competitive balance when it’s also a ceiling on what a well-run front office can do with money it already has.
The players countered with something narrower: a 28-man active roster in a club’s first 15 days, aimed directly at the service-time maneuvering that keeps a rookie’s free-agent clock running a few weeks later than it should. One side is proposing a scalpel. The other is proposing a wall and asking everyone to call it fairness.
My brother spends his days in Trenton building a city budget out of whatever revenue actually shows up, and he’s told me more than once that “we can’t afford it” is usually a choice wearing the costume of a law of nature. Baseball’s owners are making the same move, at the worst possible month to make it, with three cheap rosters currently doing the opposite of what the argument requires on live television. The White Sox and Guardians play Saturday for the right to keep embarrassing it. Manfred will still be making the case Monday morning, because that’s the one part of this entire sport that never adjusts for the standings.
