The last two offseasons have left some fans of small market teams truly feeling the need to take their “MLB needs a salary cap” complaints to the next level. With Shohei Ohtani signing for $700,000,000 – where much of the salary is deferred – last offseason, and then this offseason seeing Juan Soto sign for even more, small market clubs are left with plenty of fans who believe that there is no way their team can truly compete with the big market teams. They feel that is something that other sports don’t face thanks to salary caps and salary floors that mandate spending.
The Athletic’s Evan Drellich wrote about whether or not ownership may push, once again, for a salary cap in the next negotiations for a collective bargaining agreement following the 2026 season.
There’s a lot of stuff that would be in the way of a salary cap. The first thing is the players association, which has been quite firm since the very beginning of their existence: They won’t accept one. But there are also some owners who aren’t likely to be on board, either. Steve Cohen, for example, represented such a threat to some of the other owners that they tried to put in rules they believed would keep him from using his massive wealth to just pay to bring in whoever he wanted without regard to the luxury tax, so another penalty was put on the luxury tax and it changed nothing.
There was a proposal in the last negotiations of a salary cap that also came with a salary floor. That didn’t remain on the board for very long before being scrapped. More ownership groups may be more willing to fight harder on it the next time around as more and more teams are losing money that the previous television contracts guaranteed them now that what is now FanDuel Sports Network has gone through much of it’s bankruptcy and has walked away or renegotiated their broadcast deals with much of the league’s teams. Only the teams who own their own sports networks, which is limited to the big market clubs, are likely to still be raking in money from television broadcasts like they were a decade ago.
Rob Manfred has been trying to get back the rights from regional sports networks for a few years now. With the last year seeing most teams get out from those deals with Bally Sports and now FanDuel Sports, the plan to be able to sell directly to the consumer for streaming as well as being able to sell a national package much like the NBA and NFL do, is the next part of the plan. Getting the big market clubs on board for that could be tougher, though, because a part of that plan means everyone pools together their television revenue and shares it evenly rather than getting what they can get in their market.
While there has always been a little bit of fighting amongst the owners, it seems that in the next round that there may be a big enough fight between them that it could be something that slows everything down when it comes to negotiating with the players, too.
A team like Cincinnati is going to be in favor of a salary cap, floor, and centralized revenue sharing (far more than what is already shared). A team like the New York Mets or Los Angeles Dodgers are likely to push back against that some as they have built in advantages right now that allow them to keep far more revenue than they would under the plan that Manfred seems to want to get in place.
Cincinnati’s ownership is often cited as “Bob Castellini”, but he’s just the face of ownership. Yes, he put in plenty of money to help buy the team, but he’s one of 19 individuals and or LLC’s in the ownership group and if we are to believe what the internet tells us about his net worth, his net worth is nowhere near the top of the group. One owner, Harry Fath, has donated more to various schools and charities over the last eight years than the reported net worth of Bob Castellini, and Fath is just a minority owner in the club.
There’s nothing wrong with what Fath is doing with his wealth in terms of giving some of it back. The point was more that there are people out there who talk about small market owners of teams like the Reds and point to the internet saying Castellini is only worth $400,000,000 and that’s why the team can’t spend, but it ignores that he’s just one of a large group of incredibly rich people in ownership, of which we don’t really know just how much “ownership of the Reds” is actually “worth”.
What we do know is that Bob Castellini has said repeatedly that he will not ask anyone in the ownership group to put in more money to the team. That, not his or the ownership group as a whole, is one of the limiting factors for the Reds. Because of this stance of not investing further into the product with the hopes that the investment brings rewards in the future, Cincinnati has hamstrung itself. If the club were to get more revenue sharing money because the entire television situation were altered and all of the revenues were shared equally, it would allow them to have more to work with as a share of the entire MLB revenue pie than what they have now.
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