Before Congress, in a windowless, wood-paneled hearing room, the reigning American League Cy Young winner made an obvious yet enduring point.
“The number one thing I get from fans,” David Cone explained to senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and other assembled elected officials, “is they want their teams to win.”
The date was Feb. 15, 1995, and MLB was in a dark place.
Five months prior, players had gone on strike, initiating a work stoppage that impelled the dramatic cancellation of the 1994 World Series. Relations between the union and league had never been rosy since the union’s formation in 1966, but a revenue-sharing proposal introduced by owners in January of 1994 — a proposal that, crucially, included a salary cap — became an incendiary rallying cry for players and their representatives.
When the stalemate carried over into 1995, the U.S. government got involved. Congress introduced a handful of bills regarding the legality of MLB’s antitrust exemption. President Clinton delivered a speech imploring the two sides to reopen negotiations. Then Cone and a number of notable baseball people, including future Hall of Famer Eddie Murray, MLB Players Association executive director Donald Fehr and acting MLB commissioner Bud Selig, were called to speak at a Judiciary Committee hearing.
“The bottom line is [fans] want to win,” Cone repeated. “And we think by protecting this free-market system, the fans will have a better chance to have a winning team.”
In early April 1995, the two sides came to an official agreement, one that included a luxury tax but no hard cap. Both sides were frustrated yet reluctantly satisfied. The league had a tool to disincentivize spending, while the union maintained the essence of a free-market system. It is, functionally, the same economic system that governs baseball to this day.
But now, 30 years later, the idea of a salary cap has stampeded back into public discourse. Its impetus: the free-wheeling, cash-flashing Los Angeles Dodgers and their seemingly bottomless pockets. The defending World Series champs have spent $384.5 million dollars in free agency this winter, a figure that doesn’t include a $74 million extension for utilityman Tommy Edman or the signing of vaunted Japanese hurler and international amateur Roki Sasaki.
In response, frustrated fans are clamoring for change.
In an online poll conducted by MLB Trade Rumors on Jan. 19, more than two-thirds of voters — 24,409 people — were in favor of a salary cap being included in the next collective bargaining agreement. Shockingly, 50.18% of participants — that’s 13,757 fans — said they would be willing to lose the entire 2027 season in exchange for a salary cap.
Those numbers, while far from definitive, are representative of a growing dissatisfaction among fans, particularly those of small-market teams. The gap in payroll between the Dodgers ($379M) and the Miami Marlins ($67M), MLB’s lowest spending club, is eye-popping. Only nine teams are projected to open the season with a payroll more than half the size of Los Angeles’ ($189.5M). And while the Dodgers have been spending freely, four teams — the Cardinals, Brewers, Marlins and Twins — have yet to sign a single free agent this offseason. Ten clubs have committed fewer than $15 million on the open market.
There is an indisputable chasm between the spends and the spend-nots.
Understandably, fans are displeased. But their angst about how the Dodgers have conducted business is, in truth, much more related to the frugal inactivity of their preferred outfit. As Cone told Congress in 1994, what ball-watchers really want is an even playing field — or at least the illusion of one. Without the hope that thaws from the earth each spring, born anew, fans will lose interest. Why watch, the thinking goes, if it’s clear the Dodgers are going to win it all?
Legitimate as such frustrations might be, yearning for a salary cap is not a practical path forward. Far from it. That’s because for the MLBPA, the idea of a salary cap is an immediate non-starter, a third rail, a line in the sand. The union’s overarching goal, like that of any union, is to ensure a fair, safe and lucrative working environment for its members. The union wants to help players maximize their earning power; a salary cap would limit that. The group’s aversion to the sheer concept is fundamental, sewn into the elemental threads of the organization.
“No legitimate union could ever agree to a salary cap,” Marvin Miller, the late trailblazing labor leader and first executive director of the MLBPA, told Sports Illustrated in 2011. “In my mind, if a union did that, it would be grounds for decertification, for membership to go to court.”
“That line in the sand was a salary cap,” Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine recounted to The Athletic in a 2019 oral history of the strike. “And we were fighting for a salary cap vs. no salary cap. That was an easy fight, so to speak.”
Current MLBPA executive director Tony Clark has, during his 12-year tenure atop the union, remained fervently opposed to an artificial spending limit. “We’re never going to agree to a cap,” he told reporters in 2023. “Let me start there. We don’t have a cap. We’re not going to agree to a cap. A salary cap is the ultimate restriction on player value and player salary.”
For Clark and his union, the solution to MLB’s increasingly stratified financial playing field is, instead, to incentivize spending from the bottom up. The problem is not the teams that spend frivolously; the problem is the teams that don’t spend at all. Closing that gap would come from pushing the floor higher, not pushing the ceiling lower. But while a hard salary floor has been discussed over the years, it is unlikely to come without a cap.
What’s more, a simple cap/floor system, the MLBPA has claimed, would not guarantee an even playing field. Both the NBA and the NFL — leagues that have struggled to ensure competitive parity in the 21st century — have caps. It is an enormous, immovable point of pride for the MLBPA that their league is the only one in major American professional sports without a cap.
Whether or not the idea of a cap has merit is, to some degree, beside the point. The union will almost certainly never accept one, regardless of how hard MLB and its owners push. Proposing a cap is at best a negotiating tactic and at worst a monumental waste of time.
It is increasingly likely, however, that resentment over the Dodgers grows enough over the next two years that owners are compelled to propose a cap when the next round of CBA negotiations begins after the 2026 season. A cap was proposed early in the last round of negotiations but tabled soon thereafter. The league, more emboldened by recent events, could cling more tightly to its decades-long goal of instituting a cap — theoretically to increase parity and more practically to limit spending.
Such a strategy would no doubt increase the discord between the two sides, amplifying the likelihood of a work stoppage, something many industry insiders already see as inevitable. But the league — and the billionaires it represents — might see this moment as a rare opportunity to push a cap, an opening worth the risk.
During the most recent CBA negotiations in 2022, public opinion in the union’s favor was at an all-time high, particularly compared to the acrimonious battles of 1994 and 1995. But the Dodgers might have changed things with their spending, convincing scores of fans that a salary cap would be beneficial to small-market teams. How much of an impact that shifting sentiment has remains to be seen, but in the minds of ownership, this could be their best chance in a generation to institute a hard spending limit.
Still, it’s difficult to imagine the union entertaining any proposal that involves a hard cap.
“The salary cap ruins free agency,” former Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser said in December 1994. “And there’s no price on freedom.”
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