The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Idea of a Salary Cap

Nov 1, 2024; Los Angeles, CA, USA;  Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Miguel Rojas (11) and first base Freddie Freeman (5) during the World Series Championship Celebration at Dodger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
Nov 1, 2024; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Miguel Rojas (11) and first base Freddie Freeman (5) during the World Series Championship Celebration at Dodger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images / Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images

With the Los Angeles Dodgers signing seemingly every free agent this winter (along with Shohei Ohtani a year ago), the chatter on social media has been that MLB needs to implement a salary cap. While the Dodgers may need to be stopped, a salary cap would actually hinder other team's ability to do so.

The NBA and NFL each have caps, and even with the limit on spending, there have been dynasties in each league in recent years. The Golden State Warriors won four titles in eight seasons and represented the Western Conference in all but two of those seasons (2020-21).

In the NFL, the Kansas City Chiefs have won two straight and are looking for a three-peat as we speak. They have also won three of the past five. The New England Patriots won six titles from 2002-2019 and also made another three three Super Bowls in that same span.

Meanwhile, baseball hasn't had a repeat champion since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees, who also hoisted the trophy in 1996, giving them four in five years. The Boston Red Sox won four titles from 2004 to 2018, but they also shipped off Mookie Betts to the Dodgers, so they seemingly get a break from the public.

The Dodgers are going to be a good team. They've been a good team for over a decade now, winning the NL West in 11 of the past 12 seasons, and the one time they didn't was when the San Francisco Giants won 107 games. In this same span, the Dodgers have won two World Series titles, and one of those was in the Covid-shortened 2020 season, which fans like to call a "Mickey Mouse championship."

It's likely that the Dodgers will win the West yet again, but it's not like signing Roki Sasaki, Blake Snell, and Tanner Scott are the reason for this. They've been winning the division just fine without them. These additions were made to give themselves the best chance at winning in October, and it's important to remember that Los Angeles was actually down two games to one to the San Diego Padres in the NLDS. One more loss right there would have made the 2024 season just like all the rest of their early exits, even after the addition of Ohtani and all of that deferred money.

Baseball is a hard sport, and the postseason is arguably the toughest tournament since the sport itself is fairly unpredictable in a small sample size.

The reason that a salary cap works in other sports is because one player can make a huge difference on the field and turn around the direction of an entire franchise. In baseball, the Draft doesn't have as big of an impact. Even the top players selected aren't likely to see the big leagues for at least a couple of years. Teams don't get an immediate impact, and the impact they do get is also smaller when comparing it to adding a Steph Curry or Patrick Mahomes.

The Detroit Tigers selected Spencer Torkelson with the first overall pick in 2020. After three seasons in the big leagues, he is a career .221 hitter with a .300 OBP and there is no certainty that he'll stick with Detroit.

The MLB Draft is hard, and it's more of a puzzle than a full-fledged draft. Teams are given bonus pools each year with which to sign all of their draftees, and if they take a player that will take a large portion of that pool early, then they'll have less to spend on subsequent rounds.

Some prospects don't pan out, while others turn into the best player in baseball and still can't get their team to the postseason. That's what happened with the Los Angeles Angels and Mike Trout, who has played all of three postseason games in his career while also being a no-doubt Hall of Famer. From 2018-23, Trout and Ohtani were on the same team, and they never finished with a record above .500. They finished as high as third in the AL West just once, in 2022, and they were still 33 games back of the Houston Astros.

That's why the salary cap doesn't work in baseball. It takes an entire collection of players to make a difference, not just one or two players.

The Washington Commanders selected QB Jayden Daniels with the second overall pick in the Draft, and now they are playing in the NFC Championship game. This is a team that hasn't had much success in recent decades, but one pick really changed the direction of the franchise.

The other factor here is the years of not spending by other MLB teams, while the Dodgers kept building their roster and becoming a desirable place to play. That has been the biggest difference of late.

Sure, they can splash money around with the best of them, but the Toronto Blue Jays have been in a lot of these same discussions and have fallen short for all of the big free agents the past two years.

If the money is the same or comparable, then the difference has to be the team that Los Angeles has already assembled through years of drafting and development. They flex their money in free agency, but also in creating a great place to go watch a game, scouting players, and coaching them up into useable parts for their roster. That's the real secret sauce for how to build a winner.

Signing all of the best free agents will work for a little while for any team, but at a point the roster will get older and less productive, and without a young group of players to take over the whole ride would stop.

The Dodgers have more money available to them than seemingly any other franchise, thanks in part to their lucrative TV contract, but again, spending in free agency is not how you build a consistent winner. It's best used as a tool to supplement a roster with key upgrades that take a team to the next level.

Then there are times when a deal like the one they handed out to Tanner Scott (four years, $72 million) should have been available from numerous teams after the run he's had the past two seasons. The Red Sox were one of those teams that offered more money and more years, but Scott picked L.A. instead. Again, this is because of what the Dodgers have already built over the past decade. Signing with them means pitching in the postseason, at the very least. Who wouldn't want to sign there?

There is also the Betts trade, which gave the Dodgers a big-time superstar in his prime on their roster, followed by the signing of Freddie Freeman, that really started to change things in recent years. But even then the Dodgers were beatable, losing to the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres in the NLDS in 2022 and 2023.

The A's and Red Sox not wanting to spend money on players also played a role in how the Dodgers got to where they are. Boston didn't want to shell out the money to extend Betts, so they traded him in a pretty lopsided deal.

The A's knew they weren't going to bother offering Olson a contract, so they traded him to Atlanta, where Freeman had been, and the Dodgers took the proven talent, a five-time All Star and former MVP. Everyone knew that the A's would be looking to move Olson when they did, which destroyed any leverage they had in a deal, and made Atlanta the preferred trade partner.

The Dodgers are willing to spend, but they've also been aided by other team's lack of desire to do the same. If Boston had been willing to shell out money for a future Hall of Famer, then Betts isn't in Los Angeles, and if the A's hadn't telegraphed that they'd trade Olson, perhaps the price would have been too much for the Braves to even consider not bringing Freeman back.

Without those two pieces, the Dodgers aren't the same team that they are now, and they landed them because other teams aren't playing the same game as L.A.

A salary cap would just limit how much money the players can make, and they would be the ones facing the penalty for ownership around baseball being unwilling to spend. The owners would continue to make money, while keeping more of it for themselves in the process.

There are a few clubs out there that have loosely threatened relocation, which is a way for them to pressure their fans into supporting the club, despite their lack of spending on the product they're selling, so that the fans don't see their team ripped away like what happened in Oakland. It also makes it difficult for the fans to voice their displeasure with ownership in any way.

Implementing a salary cap would be tying one arm behind the Dodgers' back, and what's the fun in that? Just so that some random team can win the World Series every now and then and the fans can complain about the ratings instead? We did that in 2023.

Teams need to up their game, not force the Dodgers to lower theirs.


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Jason Burke
JASON BURKE

Jason has been covering the A’s at various sites for over a decade, and was the original host of the Locked on A’s podcast. He also covers the Stanford Cardinal as they attempt to rebuild numerous programs to prominence.