Stop Blaming Owners. Runaway Player Salaries Are What's Wrong With Baseball.
MLB owners finally proposed a hard salary cap to the players' union this year, the first time since 1994. The cap would run from $171 million at the floor to $245 million at the ceiling beginning in 2027. The union called it a non-starter. A work stoppage threatening the 2027 season is now the probable destination.
The coverage will frame this as greedy owners trying to suppress what players have earned. The union is heroically defending its members. Fans are caught in the middle. The chant will go up, as it always does at some point in every sports labor dispute to "pay the man".
Easy for fans to say. They're not the ones being asked to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money for individual player contracts. And if they had the money to do so in theory, nearly all of them wouldn't. It takes an unusually benevolent civic mind to want to be a competitive major league baseball owner these days.
$385 Million. Eight Starts. Four Years of Last Place.
In December 2018, the Washington Nationals signed pitcher Patrick Corbin to six years and $140 million. Corbin had a fine first season, helped Washington win the 2019 World Series, and then became for five consecutive years the worst qualified starting pitcher in Major League Baseball by ERA. He led the league in earned runs surrendered in 2021, 2022 and 2024. He led in hits allowed in 2020, 2022 and 2024. He lost thirteen or more games in each of those seasons. He averaged a 5.71 ERA across the contract's final four years. Washington paid every dollar.
One month later, the Nationals signed pitcher Stephen Strasburg to seven years and $245 million after he was named World Series MVP. He made eight starts after signing. Eight. He underwent surgery requiring the removal of a rib and two neck muscles, never recovered and retired in 2024. They paid him $35 million annually through this year, with $26.6 million annually in deferred payments through 2029. Washington committed $385 million across two pitching contracts in a single offseason and received two seasons of competent performance in return.
The Nationals' payroll is among the smallest in baseball. They are paying a retired man $35 million this year for a career that ended four years ago. When fans chant "pay the man", this is the transaction they are cheering.
It's Not Normal to Pay Players As Much As We Do Now
Sandy Koufax was the best pitcher in baseball in 1966. He went 27-9 with a 1.73 ERA, struck out 317 batters and won his third Cy Young Award. He earned $125,000. In today's dollars that is roughly $1.2 million. He retired after that season at 30 because his elbow was finished, took his $125,000 and left.
Mickey Mantle earned $100,000 through most of the 1960s, the highest salary in the American League for much of that stretch. Willie Mays earned $133,000 in 1966, the highest in the National League. The average MLB salary in 1967 was $19,000, about $185,000 in today's money. These were good salaries. Honestly about right for people who were famous but for a talent that contributed no material value to society outside of entertainment. The players had modest homes and drove regular cars and their children attended regular schools. And the game they played was magnificent, among the finest eras of baseball ever produced.
The apparatus of "exploitation" that the players' union was built to remedy was not that these men were being paid too little to live well. It was that the reserve clause bound them contractually to a single team for life, eliminating their negotiating leverage. What replaced it after free agency arrived in 1976, however, was an entirely different economic structure whose relationship to fairness is more complicated than the union's preferred narrative suggests.
The average MLB salary in 1975, the last year before free agency, was $44,676. Today it is over $5 million. That is an increase of more than eleven thousand percent. Consumer prices over the same period have risen roughly four hundred percent. Player salaries have outpaced inflation by a factor of twenty-five. (!!!) Ticket prices, stadium costs, concession prices, television subscription costs and the broader tax that professional sports imposes on the cities and fans who support it have tracked those salaries upward with reasonable fidelity. The connection is not difficult to trace.
The Fantasy of "Pay the Man"
The "pay the man" instinct rests on the fantasy that player salaries exist in a sealed economic chamber, that what an owner pays a shortstop has no bearing on what a fan pays to watch him and that the money flows from some unlimited reservoir of owner wealth, even when some teams' annual salary totals outpace the literal fortunes some owners have in their entire liquid cash savings. The result is that every dollar to fund those salaries inevitably comes from some combination of ticket sales, television contracts, parking revenues, concession markups and stadium subsidies.
The $515 million payroll and luxury tax the Dodgers carried last year, seven times the payroll of the Miami Marlins, did not come from a vault. It came from the highest ticket prices in baseball, from a regional sports network deal, from luxury suite revenues at a stadium that cost over a billion dollars to build and that the city of Los Angeles contributed substantially to financing. The chain from player salary to ticket price to stadium subsidy to the family that can no longer afford to attend is not theoretical. It is the operating economics of every major professional sports franchise in the country, and it has been running in one direction for fifty years.
The stadium situation alone should give the "pay the man" crowd pause. New stadiums now routinely cost between one and two billion dollars. Cities across the country are still being asked to contribute hundreds of millions in public financing to facilities that serve private franchises, that inflate surrounding real estate, that displace existing communities and that charge the residents who subsidized them prices that make attendance a luxury rather than a pastime. The Buffalo Bills recently received over $800 million in public stadium financing. The Washington Commanders are negotiating a public contribution to a new stadium at RFK site that dwarfs anything a sane public accounting would justify. The costs cascade: owners overpay for franchises at auction, borrow against projected revenues, commit to stadium debt, sign player contracts at the top of a competitive market, and pass the aggregate through a pricing structure that has made professional sport unrecognizable to anyone who attended games in 1975.
At the foundation of all of it are player salaries that the competitive market, absent any ceiling, has pushed to levels that require the entire revenue architecture to escalate around them. Owners bid against each other, commit to guaranteed contracts that transfer all risk to the franchise regardless of performance or health, and then discover that the Nationals are paying $35 million this year to a man who last threw a pitch four years ago. And the fans want more and more and more of it, not realizing it that in doing so they are soliciting a direct transfer from the same ticket prices they complain about into the pockets of millionaire athletes. Owners in fact often lose money each year on operating revenue, as the players collection tens to hundreds of millions. The reflex that locates all the greed on the ownership side of the ledger and none on the player side is a reflex that has not examined the ledger carefully.
We Used To Understand This Better
When players struck in August 1994 and the World Series was canceled for the first time in ninety years, public opinion was not straightforwardly with the players. The average salary that year was $1.2 million, at a time when median household income was around $32,000. Fans who had watched ticket prices rise through the late 1980s understood, without needing it explained, that the money flowing to players was not an abstraction. It was the mechanism by which attending a game had become progressively more expensive for the people who loved the game most.
The players won that strike. They have won every confrontation since. MLB is today the only major North American professional sports league without a hard salary cap, and the result is a $446 million gap between the highest and lowest payrolls, a competitive landscape determined largely by market size, and a cost structure that has made the sport less accessible, less locally rooted and less economically sustainable for the franchises outside the top five revenue markets.
The NFL has had a cap since 1994. The NBA since 1985. The NHL since 2005. In none of these leagues did the cap suppress overall player compensation. It redistributed it more evenly and created competitive conditions in which teams from smaller markets can plausibly compete. Green Bay wins Super Bowls. Oklahoma City makes NBA finals. The cap did not kill those leagues. It made them more competitive and more financially coherent than baseball, where teams like the Reds and their fans know there is little chance to plausibly compete.
The Game Could Be Better If We Paid Players Like Real People
Imagine a version of professional baseball in which player salaries returned to something resembling their pre-free-agency relationship to the broader economy. In which players made salaries that bore even the slightest relationship to the earnings of doctors, lawyers, scientists and other high-paid American professionals, without the grotesque extremes of $245 million contracts for pitchers who throw eight starts and $515 million payrolls for franchises in large markets.
The downstream effects would be significant and almost entirely positive. Ticket prices would follow payrolls downward over time as the cost pressure at the foundation of the pricing structure eased. Stadium construction costs, which are driven partly by the revenue projections that enormous payrolls require, would moderate. The public financing demands that cities face when franchises threaten to relocate without a new building would diminish as the economics of franchise ownership became less leveraged and less desperate. The gap between large and small market teams would narrow, producing genuine competition across the league rather than the predictable dominance of the Dodgers and Yankees that currently passes for a pennant race.
Beyond the economics, there is the culture. The sports industrial complex that distorts youth athletics, inflates the ego of every child who can throw a ball, colonizes university campuses, extracts public subsidies and produces Carson Beck playing football at 24 on a college campus because the money is good: all of it is downstream of a professional salary structure that has told two generations of young men that athletic performance is the path to extraordinary wealth.
Sandy Koufax earned $125,000, retired at 30 with a bad elbow, and went and lived his life. He was the best pitcher in baseball. He was compensated generously by any reasonable measure. The game he played was watched by millions and is remembered as among the finest baseball ever produced. Nobody in 1966 thought the sport was failing because Sandy Koufax could only afford one house.
As baseball heads toward a potential work stoppage in 2027, television and fan complaining will center on why greedy owners don't pay players more money. Before it does, it is worth asking what the game was like when the best player in baseball earned $1.2 million in today's dollars, and whether anything about it was worse.
