The Los Angeles Dodgers fielded over $1.3 billion in pitching arms to secure game seven of the 2025 World Series, a win that suggests money inevitably rules the sport. As Major League Baseball continues to grow, the budget disparity between the top and bottom teams follows suit, forming harmful economic inequity amongst individual organizations.
Salary caps have been a staple in North American sports since the 1980s, but the MLB is different — it does not have any hard or soft caps on salaries. Teams can spend however they please if they are able and willing to pay a penalty.
The problem lies within this system.
Major League Baseball has an established luxury tax that penalizes teams financially if they exceed specific thresholds in collective player salaries. It covers teams spending too much and too little. Owners of smaller organizations, such as the Pittsburgh Pirates and the soon-to-be Las Vegas Athletics, are labeled as “cheap” because of the lack of spending to keep the players that they drafted.
According to Spotrac, the USA Today Sports Media Group, the Dodgers had $350 million in total payroll allocation during the 2025 MLB season. The team with the smallest payroll was the Athletics at $78 million — a $272 million difference between the top and bottom teams. For reference, the average payroll was $175 million, and the median was $161 million.
Part of a salary cap system is a salary floor which creates a minimum total payroll allocation that a team must accumulate for its season. This floor stops owners from refusing to give out large contracts to players that have come up in their organization’s system.
The cap system also encourages organizations to pay their home-grown talent. Teams will be able to dip into the luxury tax if they receive what the NBA calls a bird exception. This exception allows teams to surpass the soft cap decided by the league, improving small market teams’ ability to stay competitive. It also allows organization owners to partially pay for a player’s contract if they were a player who was under contract with the team beforehand.
The MLB has a collective that shares national TV revenue, but local deals and broadcasting rights are strictly reserved for the individual organizations, leaving ball clubs in smaller markets, such as Milwaukee, at a major revenue-generating disadvantage.
During the 2024 season the Milwaukee Brewers TV deal with Diamond Sports Group had an estimated value of $34 million. The Dodgers in that same year had a value of $196 million.
Local revenue sharing has been implemented across all major North American sports to support parity and competitive balance. The introduction of a similar system in the MLB would create possibilities for smaller organizations to consistently compete with the larger ones.
Owners often point towards profit margins to justify reluctance to pay their players. Revenue sharing through a salary cap takes the spending of an owner away and attributes it to the revenue sharing process. An owner will only directly pay the league if they dip into the luxury tax. The fewer opportunities for money to dictate the sport, the purer its integrity.
Parity only enhances professional sports. New teams rise to the occasion while old teams fade out and rebuild. Even mid-tier teams can become impossible to predict. These uncertainties are what makes sports addictive.
A salary cap in Major League Baseball is essential to keep this American pastime exciting and worth watching.
This story was written by a guest opinion columnist, Owen Parker. He can be reached at 0wen.parker@marquette.edu