While Cardinals fans await offseason upgrades, MLB should think about a salary cap
Two and a half months after the Hot Stove was fired up, St. Louis Cardinals fans are still waiting to find out whether their team will re-sign slugging outfielder Marcell Ozuna — or do anything else significant, for that matter.
There has to be a better way.
For whatever reason, the free agency periods for the NFL, NHL and NBA seem to take a couple of days. As soon as players hit the open market, they seem to know where they want to go and teams are able to efficiently put together a deal. There’s no playing hard-to-get and you rarely hear about player lingering on the market as training camp gets ready to begin.
With rare exception, there are no guessing games about what players is going to end up with which team.
I get so tired of waiting on pins and needs for days, weeks and months to find out if the Redbirds are going to make a play for the guy they’ve been linked to all fall. Seeing guys switch clubs and teams trying to fill holes in their roster is supposed to be fun. But nothing that takes three months to pan out is fun.
The common denominator between the other leagues is that they all have a salary cap. And maybe it’s finally time that Major League Baseball gets one, too. It would sure solve a lot of problems, for everyone involved.
Obviously, owners would get a great deal of cost certainty. A salary cap is probably the only thing that can save them from themselves, preventing them from passing out record-breaking contracts year after year.
Is Ozuna worth $45 million over three years or $100 million over five seasons? We’d get a lot of clarity about that if there were only so many premium salary slots for each team.
It would be good for players because, not only could owners not mess around when the musical chairs started at the beginning of the free agency period, a salary cap would offer some economic justice, seeing to it that the most talented athletes were signed first and that they received the most money.
A salary cap basically gives the whole process of acquiring players an injection of truth. The Boston Red Sox couldn’t decide, as they did a few years ago when the Cardinals thought they had David Price signed, that they were going to top the best offer by 10 percent, no matter what it was. If they did, it would create a hole in their roster someplace else.
And it would be good for fans for many reasons.
Hopefully, there would be some control in the inflation of ticket prices and other costs associated with going to the ballpark. A change in the way free agency works could stimulate interest in the game by reviving the excitement of trades that was slowed down to a trickle by the addition of wild card playoff berths that convince general managers they’re still in the race when they’re really not.
And, as previously mentioned, it would stop all this nonsense where we’re sitting here in January as players are starting to make their travel plans to spring training and we’re still waiting to find out where the heck Marcell Ozuna and Josh Donaldson are going to play in 2020.
Something that would be good for fans, players and owners would be a salary cap that also had a salary floor which kept teams from tanking either to rebuild or from being high-priced parasites like the Miami Marlins, who collect revenue from other teams’ television contracts. There would be more good jobs if everyone had to spend enough money to be competitive.
Instead of wasting time discussing pitch clocks and batter minimums, it would be nice if MLB did something to actually make the sport better. The easiest way to do that is a salary cap.
