The Dodgers are flying first-class
Status envy, the salary cap debate and fans
Today, I went long on a thought I think is important, as a fan, in 2026. Tomorrow, I’ll send out a bonus Bandwagon with bits and bobs on all the other things happening in baseball.
I.
The sticker shock was real. Everyone had to take a moment. The number didn’t quite compute. Sixty million dollars — wait, annually? For Kyle Tucker? As the news rippled around the baseball internet, the reaction was less about Tucker, a great-but-not-generational talent who fills an actual corner outfield hole, and more about the purchasing power.
The Dodgers — two-time defending World Series champs, employers of Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and, of course, Shohei Ohtani — did it again. Andrew Friedman’s front office, funded by the Guggenheim group fronted by Mark Walter, spends more money than other teams, yes, but they also leverage it in more ways.
They ponied up a record-breaking average annual value (with a relatively small deferral, the present day AAV comes out to $57.1 million) to snag Tucker’s services for two to four years of his prime while guaranteeing him less in total than experts expected would be required. The Dodgers can spend a lot now, they can spend a lot later. Soon enough, the initial shock curdled into something more judgmental. Something must be untoward, the gut reaction went.
We tend to think things are worth what they cost. Plane rides, meals, housing, Tucker’s services. Must be, right? And they are, technically speaking. What we don’t always factor in is how much of a product or service’s worth is secondary to what’s actually delivered, the additive or exponential cost a buyer can take on to bend the world to their whim.
What would it cost to only have the top free agent’s prime years? How about to board the plane first? To have the plane to myself? To just own the plane?
In that gap between attaining something and making it unattainable for everyone else, you find luxury.
II.
Think about the airport for a second. About the lines and the gates and the doors that remind you where you stand. You are doing great, you’re heading off to some far-flung destination for your own enjoyment and fulfillment. You’re flying instead of driving or taking a train. You are a cut above just for being here. And as you sit in one uncomfortable seat, waiting to squeeze into a different uncomfortable seat, you leer at the people who make you feel a cut below.
Your life could be easier, nicer, smoother. See? All it takes is money — who knows how much money? You don’t want to know. Maybe 10 times as much, for everything, every time. Theoretically a cost-benefit decision, it starts to feel more like a delineation of personal status. You end up feeling bad about yourself by comparison, and then you think maybe it’s the lines and the gates and the doors that should feel bad. Maybe this place is rigged against you. Everyone should be able to sit in your barely cushioned seat, everyone should have to sit there. Even and especially the other people who aren’t in the airport, the people out there on the tarmac — probably famous, you couldn’t quite zoom in enough to identify them on your iPhone — just hopping onto their jet and taking off as they please.
Sports, like airports, can condense the abstract reality of inequality into this innate, almost physical heat of playground grievance: Hey, they got something I didn’t, something I feel like I couldn’t have gotten. That’s not fair.
It’s human. It’s the little things in front of our face that get us, even though the boring details of the big systemic things got us there. Backlash to inequality (real and perceived) is the driving force behind all sorts of political movements, but to really grab people you have to show those huge forces in microcosm. The price of gas. Free buses. The Rent Is Too Damn High.
If a preponderance of Ks was the last crisis that would supposedly kill baseball, pondering the K-shaped economy might be the new one.
For all the gawking at $60 million and the $396 million payroll estimate for 2026, baseball’s freer market is not nearly the same glide path for the rich as our actual economy. The Dodgers will pay far, far more for the privilege of employing Tucker, and that will theoretically go directly toward bolstering their competitors’ prospects. When a team exceeds set payroll thresholds, it pays the competitive balance tax, or luxury tax. In this stratosphere, the Dodgers will pay 110% of the overage into MLB’s coffers for distribution. So the present day value of Tucker’s salary, plus the tax, brings the total cost of his services to $119.9 million per year.
Last season, Los Angeles paid $169.4 million to the league in luxury tax; this year it will be more. They were one of nine teams to pay some amount of tax last season. But as Joe Sheehan has pointed out, we don’t fret over that money because the league keeps its destinations somewhat obscured:
If net local revenue-sharing transfers were public knowledge the way the details of Kyle Tucker’s pay package are, we’d have much different conversations. We have estimates, coming up on a decade old, that the top teams put in maybe $80 million a year, the bottom teams collect about that much.
We know a lot of the funds go to teams generating less revenue, a group that now includes some carveouts for regional TV network chaos. What we don’t know is how much goes where, and how much of that those owners are putting back into being competitive.
What allows the Dodgers to be the Dodgers, beyond the baseball savvy every team envies, is the willingness to chase excellence at the cost of money. It’s fair to presume the Pirates and Marlins can’t prudently spend like this, but we have little evidence to suggest they are throwing their full financial capabilities into the sports bubble’s suspended reality where they are so thoroughly supported — by baseball’s system, and by the fans whose enthusiasm funds it.
At some point, the teams looking to restrict the flow of money toward competition should be asked to answer some questions between sticker shock and systemic change. Are they priced out? Or are they just too comfortable to pay for an upgrade?
Do we actually care about the provenance of success? Or does luxury we’re not capable of attaining inherently sting?
The Dodgers’ signing of Tucker stirred rage for baseball fans who put their usernames and social handles behind it, and sure enough, for team owners whose fits were relayed only anonymously.
Maybe, to hear Jeff Passan tell it, some players bristled as well.
Out of all these, the fans deserve the most leeway to vent. Their emotion, their enthusiasm, is the raw commodity that the heat of Kyle Tucker’s talent smelts into U.S. currency. The ones who aren’t Dodgers fans, who can’t imagine the experience of being mid-2020s Dodgers fans, want to express their frustration. They want to yell something that might change their fortunes.
Many gravitate to the most familiar, concise supposed solution on offer: Salary Cap Now.
III.
I can’t decide if this is exactly what sports are for, or everything they shouldn’t be for.
If you’re going to grapple with the plight of Haves and Have Nots anyway, maybe it’s worth having one outlet to fully wallow in the swells of envy, to let the vitriol course through your lungs or your typing fingers. Maybe a sports bubble that’s neither ideal nor important is a perfect space to explore reality for what it is.
On the other hand, would a total escape from reality be preferable? Would it be nice to watch games without economics or power dynamics or corporate maneuvering crossing your mind even once? It would. It was, a long time ago.
I think most fans recognize that identifying with their team is not the same as identifying with the billionaire who owns it. When it comes to devising the economic rules that govern the world inside the bubble, though, threads of logic often wind up understandably tangled.
American professional sports leagues are set up to keep the drama of winning and losing within certain bounds of consistency. It’s a model you can really only call socialist. This has a lot of positives. The leagues are collectives designed to keep everyone on the same playing field, so that the same 30 or so teams can stage the same number of games at the same level of competition with the same general trappings, year after year. The trick is: The owners are the constituents, and thus the beneficiaries. Those who can buy in to one of these clubs can’t really lose. The citizens of Oakland can; John Fisher can’t. Dodgers fans of the 2000s can; Frank McCourt can bungle the team’s finances amid a messy divorce and nonetheless exit with a golden parachute.
Something you’ll hear a lot, at least twice per comment section, is that Major League Baseball is the only major American sports league without a salary cap. This is supposed to make baseball fandom seem disadvantaged; it’s supposed to evoke the land of total escape where you can just watch the games and everyone lives happily ever after behind the scenes.
Like a lot of effective campaigns, the push for a salary cap crushes and hides details and origins with the big, bold hammer of messaging. Small, complex choices that actually shape the state of things hide under the blanket of a big leading question.
Do you want your team to have a better shot at beating the Dodgers?
Or: Do you want your team to be able to sign the top free agent?
Fans are going to answer those questions in the affirmative. Of course they are! They should! Fans associate themselves with their team. They see the Dodgers deploying the advantages of wealth to win championships, and that bursts many, many bubbles.
The conversation around baseball’s recurring economic showdown has evolved to be much more intelligent, even-handed and labor-friendly since the owners’ attempt to implement a salary cap in 1994 and the ensuing strike that wiped out the World Series. There are still a lot of misconceptions and strange bedfellows. Redistribution of wealth means free markets in baseball — because they empower the players to earn their value and encourage competition among the super-wealthy owners. Tight regulation of financials means salary caps — because they insulate owners from the expectations and costs of truly expensive ambition.
Nothing in that dichotomy accounts for fandom, though. A Pirates fan who can’t force Bob Nutting to sell the team to someone more eager to spend might just favor a system that could make their summers more interesting, labor considerations be damned.
Inside the specialized, pressurized tube of caring about baseball, it’s easy to shroud yourself in a sweatsuit, pull your team’s cap down over your eyes and leave the outside world behind. If you’re flying in first-class, you’re happy to keep things as they are. If you’re slumming it in Zone 8, you are ready for the revolution.
IV.
The fact that a lot of fans want something to change does matter, but so do the details.
You can tell it matters a little, because MLB is spending a smidge of executives’ time talking to a committee they assembled called the fan council, aka people who run social fan accounts with some degree of following. As Evan Drellich reported last year, the league made a presentation to these fans about competitive balance that had a particular effect on most.
“The Cowboys are like the most recognized fan base or recognized sports team in all of sports,” Reds fan Kuffner recalled of the points MLB made. “They have to play by the same rules basically as everybody else in the NFL, whereas the Dodgers can go spend more money than the (Colorado) Rockies or the Reds. And they showed some slides of, over the last however many years, this is how many small-market teams have won, and this is how many big-market teams have won.”
A Rockies fan on the council went ahead and declared herself “Team Salary Cap” in the story. “How much money is enough?” she asked. “I mean, some of these salaries are getting insane.”
So you had Rob Manfred, commissioner and negotiator for the owners, recently telling a radio host, “We try to listen to our fans, and we do hear from fans in a lot of markets that, ‘Gee whiz, when we look at the resources they have compared to the resources that are available in our market, we don’t feel like it’s quite a fair shake,’ and that’s an issue we’re going to have to deal with.”
Fans don’t get an actual vote in baseball’s labor negotiations, but their interpretation of the sport thrums under everything. The MLB Players Association is the strongest union in sports, and it will fight back against the idea of a cap, but it might take some cues from fan sentiment.
If (most of) the owners wants to talk about competitive balance, it’s worth emphasizing the first word of that phrase in questioning them. Who isn’t competitive and why?
What percentage of league payroll spending is too much when concentrated among the top three teams, or 10 percent? How about for the top 10 teams, the top third?
Last year, the top three teams spent 18.4% of MLB’s payroll dollars. The top 10 teams spent 49.6% of the payroll dollars. And a team outside those groups, the Milwaukee Brewers, had the best record in baseball.
Drilling down beyond Team Salary Cap and Team No Salary Cap, there are a lot more interesting questions. About what we mean by fairness. Do you mean totally equal?
Do you want to address:
Teams’ opportunity to … spend or win?
Are you thrilled by teams … acquiring top talent or keeping top talent?
Within each of those answers, then ask yourself, do you want the playing field to be:
Equal or Fair
And then … equal or fair for whom?
The owners? The best players? The average major leaguer? You?
Beyond the dizzyingly complicated matter of accounting for baseball revenue that owners absolutely won’t want to do fairly, there’s the matter of how complicated a salary capped version of baseball would be, and how much it could alter the strategies of player movement.
My answers would be full-throttle against equal, because I can’t get around the thought that so much of what makes baseball’s transactional and strategic intrigue captivating is the variance. It’s the teams finding different ways to compete with each other in a vast universe of players.
To really oversimplify things: MLB owners vie to secure best players for their teams, and the market totally sets the price. If they want to go above and beyond, they will pay with a compounding wave of hefty taxes and draft penalties.
NBA owners, with a revenue split salary cap example, have a set number of seats and a tightly bracketed range of money they must spend filling those seats, with a bevy of rules governing how they can divvy it up. If they have top talent on their roster, they can offer more money than anyone else to keep that talent; otherwise, they can offer a “max” contract to lure a new star. But the rest of the spots become musical chairs with limited spots for other players worth spending on. Transacting becomes a complex machine often greased by hypothetical draft picks.
I think it makes baseball interesting, but still fair, that the long-powerful Cardinals stumbled into mediocrity for the first time in decades and now will reportedly receive revenue sharing money because the Best Fans In Baseball also vote with their feet. I think it makes it interesting, but still fair, that the Padres hooked their franchise up to a car battery and gave it a jolt with a rebrand and huge free agent signings, then figured out the competitive part to keep fans filling a great ballpark. I think it’s interesting, but still fair, that the Orioles and Royals can literally just move walls in their ballpark to better suit their teams.
I guess I don’t mind my baseball mirroring the possibility — in both its glory and infuriating guts — of the world outside the bubble. But I won’t begrudge fans who want to sort out these questions for themselves.
I just hope they do ask the questions before they buy a one-way ticket to somewhere different.
My emotional response as a fan is that I'm entitled to this era of dominance because I lived through the NewsCorp and Frank McCourt ownership eras of the Dodgers where they shipped off beloved players for scrap, didn't win a playoff game for a good 25 years, and were bankrupt to the point they weren't sure they were going to be able to pay player salaries.
My intellectual response to this is the same as the emotional one. (I'm kidding, but very good analysis and piece.)
14 teams have an expected payroll under $150M. Even with a 50% floor with the cap at $250M, more than a third of teams are under. I've been afraid of a salary cap but I find it unlikely those 14 principal owners are going to want to increase their payroll (at least half by >$50M).
At least I don't see them pushing for a slary cap over keeping the sub-$150M payroll.