At the end of the day I am a fan of baseball. I LOVE baseball and while I love my team (the Red Sox) I love the sport as a whole. Call me crazy, but I truly do not know what I’d do without seeing a game of baseball for an entire season. The pandemic gave us a glimpse of that, but after the 2026 season, a lockout is not out of question. The MLB will undergo a new CBA and it could get very ugly.

The New CBA Could be a Mess

A salary cap would be the worst thing for this sport. There shouldn’t be a path to basically just allow owners to benefit from all of this. Yes, we have seen some of the biggest contracts handed out. Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers), Juan Soto (Mets), and even Vladimir Guerrero Jr (Blue Jays) and that’s just the tip of the ice berg. Will we see another Soto type of deal? Never say never when Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes will eventually get paid. But all of this points to owners who don’t actively try.

I understand when you are an owner and you maybe don’t have the deep pockets that the Dodgers, Mets, or the Yankees have and you will get outbid for big time players by those teams. But not spending at all is a silly way to operate. The goal should be to win and to do what it takes to win. Instead, looking at you Bob Nutting, you aren’t actively trying to win despite having the best generational talent on your active roster. Who has also spoken out about wanting to win and compete. And his biggest excuse is not being able to compete with bigger teams, so leveling the playing field is the play. A salary cap is just a bad idea for the sport as a whole. And based on this quote, it could get very very ugly.

Union chief Tony Clark on a salary cap: ‘This is not about competitive balance. This is institutionalized collusion.”

Clark believes that if they don’t come to an agreement, there would be a lockout and it would be detrimental to the game of baseball we so love. Fans and owners operate differently in their brains. Fans want to do what is best to put a team out there that can win and compete. Owners are after profits and making the most money and generating revenue. A salary cap would jeopardize that in its entirety.

“A salary cap historically has limited contract guarantees associated with it, literally pits one player against another and is often what we share with players as the definitive non-competitive system. It doesn’t reward excellence. It undermines it from an organizational standpoint. That’s why this is not about competitive balance. It’s not about fair versus not fair. …

Players want their fair share too and to get their best value they can on the open market. But there should at the very least be a path for these smaller market teams to compete and spend money to add to their existing roster. You could possibly implement a salary cap floor that every team needs to hit every season, that way every team is forced to spend.

It almost feels like there is no room for talk and a decision has been made. But oh boy if they can’t come to an agreement soon, a lockout could be coming and baseball would be sorely missed.