With the collective bargaining agreement up for renewal after the 2026 season, I wanted to start a discourse about how we can 'fix' (or help improve) baseball in the new CBA.
In this post I want to talk in generalities that I will flesh out in future posts.
So, as young people say, let's gooooooooooo!
SALARY CAP
This is the only non-starter in this discussion. Oh, believe me, this WILL be discussed. However, I don't think you can have it both ways. The can't tell some owners they can't spend all the money they want and then tell other (cheap?) owners they have to spend more than they want...or can afford. So, while other sports have salary caps, I don't see how one in baseball can be implemented at this time...or maybe ever.
Besides, we already have rules in place to discourage teams from having large payrolls. It doesn't stop those teams, but it does penalize them if they go too crazy. I think history shows that those rules are at least somewhat impactful although not totally restrictive. I think it is the best we will get, though.
SALARY FLOOR
I am one of the biggest opponents of a floor for team payrolls. Salary floors, as I see it, will only do 2 things:
(1) Make mediocre players richer as teams try to get above the floor before opening day. This will not be effective at leveling the talent throughout the majors.
(2) Make the fans of teams who have low payrolls feel better.
Neither of those things helps baseball.
A positive that MIGHT come out of a salary floor, if implemented incrementally, would be to encourage teams to sign their own players to longer term deals so they don't have to play mediocre veterans more than they are worth and, by so doing, block their younger players from getting to the majors and getting valuable (and for the teams, cheap) experience.
So, there is some thought that a salary floor, if low and increasing incrementally throughout the life of the new CBA, could prompt teams to lock up their own, young players long term which, in turn, would raise their yearly payroll.
So let's proposes this:
In 2027, implement a salary floor of $100 million in payroll (only 4 teams were below this in 2025) that goes up $10 million every year for the life of the new CBA. To be sure, this is a very low bar, but it at least does work towards removing the most egregious situations of owners not spending on their teams.
MANDATING (AND REWARDING) TEAM SPENDING AND IMPROVING COMPETITIVE BALANCE
I have included these 2 areas together as I think they can work together to get teams to spend money on improving their teams. Here's what I am thinking:
Change how the MLB draft is structured:
(1) Increase the bonus pool disparity between revenue recipients and the remaining worst teams (record-wise) in the league. To do that you would add, on top of their draft pool, $5 million for those teams and make it mandatory that these teams spend greater than 100% pf their bonus pool or risk penalties paid directly to MLB for dispersal to other teams.
(2) Re-order the draft to favor revenue recipients with the highest payrolls. No longer is losing rewarded but, rather, winning is rewarded for teams that have limited resources.
Implement an international draft:
This, to me, is a crucial piece to slowly bring back competitive balance. This would be a 10 round draft with the order being based on reverse winning percentage as was done a while back to determine the order of the domestic draft. This would involve MLB working with everyone to create a pool of draft-eligible international amateur free agents. Each team would have an assigned bonus pool as in the domestic draft that they couldn't exceed without losing access to the international draft for the following year. Like the ML draft, revenue sharers and the worst ML teams would receive extra bonus pool money ($3 million) and they would have to use, essentially, their whole bonus pool in every draft.
In addition to this I would like to modify the R5 eligibility for international signees under the age of 18 to give them one additional year before they have to be rostered. Noel, et al had to be rostered before they even reached AA because of their development pathway. Clogging the 40 man roster with kids who can't impact your ML team for years is counterproductive to competitive balance.
Reward certain teams that increase their payroll from July 15th to August 1st.
The goal here is to incentivize teams to be buyers at the deadline instead of sellers. Potentially this could be a larger piece of the revenue share pie or additional draft picks after the 4th round or, depending on the level of the increase, after the 4th & 5th rounds of the subsequent draft.
SUMMARY
As I said, this is just a first post with some generalities. I will go into more detail on some of these topics in later posts in this series and also suggest things that I think will be better for the games, e.g., in the playoffs revert back to the regular season rules AFTER the 12th inning. More on that later.
