Major League Baseball appears to be at a tipping point.
The Collective Bargaining Agreement expires at the end of the 2026 season, and negotiations between ownership and the MLB Players Association are expected to be contentious, to say the least. Fans are ready to burn the system down, based mostly on an inaccurate assumption of competitive balance, thanks mostly to spending from the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Dodgers are coming off back-to-back World Series wins, then added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Diaz this offseason on expensive contracts few other teams could match. For some opposing fans, it was another sign that the game is “broken” because of LA’s inherent financial advantages.
Opposing players though? They love it. Literally.
San Diego Padres star Manny Machado, who has a contentious relationship with the Dodgers, said “I f****** love it. I love it. I mean, honestly, every team should be doing it. They figured out a way to do it and s*** is f****** great for the game, honestly. So I think every team has the ability to do it, so I hope all 30 teams could learn from that.”
Phillies superstar Bryce Harper said something similar, “I love what the Dodgers do, obviously,” Harper said. “They pay the money, they spend the money. I mean, they’re a great team. They run their team like a business, and they run it the right way.”
With prominent veteran players coming out to defend LA’s spending, it raises the most obvious issue with a salary cap: the union doesn’t want one and won’t agree to it. So what other options are there?
Jan 21, 2026; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder Kyle Tucker (23) is introduced to the media during a press conference at Dodger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
Can MLB Fix Revenue Disparities Without A Cap?
There are obvious reasons why players don’t want a cap: they view it as a restriction on what they can earn. Despite what owners and media members might say, that’s the point of salary caps, to ensure that ownership retains as much of the revenue as possible. In the NFL for example, players get roughly 48-48.8% of league revenue. But without a cap, individual players like Patrick Mahomes or Josh Allen might get even more money. Or bidding wars for key talent might push overall salaries higher. The cap system prevents that from happening. Which is why owners love it.
Machado, Harper, and many more players do not want that system in MLB. Yet the disparity in revenue makes some fans, and maybe even owners feel, inaccurately, that they can’t compete with LA. How do we fix that?
Well, there are plenty of ways. The league already has revenue-sharing agreements. Large market teams give hugs sums of money to small market teams, which small market teams promptly pocket. Ken Rosenthal reported recently that “some small-market clubs are estimated to receive an amount approaching $200 million a year.”
That’s an incredible amount of money. There are even rules in the league requiring teams to carry a luxury-tax payroll roughly one and a half times higher than their revenue-sharing income. Yet the Marlins, Guardians, Tmapa Bay and likely others simply ignore it. Big market teams might be willing to give more revenue-sharing money, if small market teams were actually required to spend it.
The league could also more severely punish big spending teams by removing draft picks, or reducing international signing bonus money. While also rewarding small market teams for spending successfully.
One of the biggest bones of contention among fans is that retaining star young players is too difficult for smaller payroll teams. That’s not necessarily true, with several examples of big extensions for Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll, Julio Rodriguez, Jackson Merrill and others showing that teams outside LA and New York are capable of spending money. But if the league created some incentive structure for retaining young talent, while penalizing bigger market teams for signing them, that could solve some problems.
There’s also plenty to play with in terms of years of control. Players reach free agency usually around the time they turn 29-30. If that extended another year or two, it would give small market teams even more opportunties to build around young talent. And they get a disproportionate amount of young talent by picking higher in the draft.
The top nine prospects in baseball right now? Here are their organizations:
Pirates
Tigers
Brewers
Orioles
Mariners
Cardinals
Tigers
Twins
Make it easier to keep those top prospects, and those teams might be willing to spend more around them.
Even a cap system wouldn’t stop the Dodgers. Or the Mets. Or the Yankees. But some smart, targeted changes could go a long way towards the (inaccurate) perception of imbalance that the league is facing. And there could actually be some meaningful changes to force small market teams to stop crying poor while raking in hundreds of millions a year in free money.
