MLB's Salary Cap Fight Isn't About Competitive Balance, It's About Limiting Labor Costs

Even if a small market team wins the World Series, it won’t stop the owners from wanting a salary cap.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! It's a great week to do something nice for the furry friends in your life.

Let's get into some nitty-gritty about baseball's salary cap fight. We'll dive in with two sections on that, then move on to some new thoughts about an old video game.

Locker Room Links

• "The FTC [Federal Trade Commission] Is Beginning to Probe the Sports Gambling Industry." (But not prediction markets.)
• As a publicly traded sports team, the Braves are about to start paying more in taxes. Sens. Katie Britt (R–Ala.) and Raphael Warnock (D–Ga.) are trying to do something about it.
• A new list of how much each team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS is worth.
• People are complaining about day games in MLB's division and league championship series. I'm old enough to remember when my elders would wax poetic about World Series day games. But it's interesting to see MLB use day games on weekdays to minimize overlap while the NBA and NHL are fine with multiple playoff games at the same time.
• The FBI is hiring UFC "to provide its agents with defense tactical training."
• A Chinese player for Mississippi Valley State was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). His student visa had expired and he was on his way to visit his visa sponsor when he was detained. His lawyer said ICE forced him to sign a form for voluntary departure.
• Elsewhere in Reason: My colleague Tosin Akintola covered the NFL siding against prediction markets in its legal battle (in my opinion, just to side with its sportsbook partners who are competing against prediction markets).
• Thank God for the internet. Even 49ers running back Kyle Juszczyk got in on it.
  

  I made a game where you draft your All 22 Pokemon team from randomly rolled Regions and Pokemon Types and the goal is to finish the season 17-0

  So far my best record is 10-7 lolhttps://t.co/9ht5V4hiuT pic.twitter.com/5XwzOgPcSu

  — Cole (@ColeThereum) October 9, 2026

MLB's Salary Cap Fight Isn't About Balance, It's About Costs

In 2025, baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, were rooting for the small market, small payroll Milwaukee Brewers to beat the goliath Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series (NLCS). The Brewers got swept. Now it's 2026, and guess what? Baseball fans wanting to avoid a lockout, a salary cap, or both, are rooting for the small market, small payroll Brewers to beat the goliath Dodgers in the NLCS. (At least the Brewers aren't getting swept this time!)

But what if none of that matters at all to the salary cap fight?

A small market World Series victory for the Brewers (19th in MLB payroll), the Tampa Bay Rays (28th), or, yuck, the Cleveland Guardians (30th) helps boost the theoretical argument that MLB doesn't need a salary cap for small market teams to succeed. But labor negotiations are not decided by debate club rules—you don't win with a better policy argument. It's all about the power dynamics and leverage of what is essentially a business negotiation between employees and employers. The policy argument might matter to public opinion, but it makes hardly any difference to leverage.

Competitive balance may not matter to the owners at all (in fact, some studies have found that salary caps don't create more balance, but revenue sharing does). The owners are almost certainly focused on keeping down their labor costs. A salary cap would likely give an immediate boost to team values—when Formula 1 teams recently agreed to a broad cap on their expenses, valuations shot up.

The lockout fight will come down to who can endure the pain the longest, and how much the "losing" side is willing to stomach what the "winning" side is offering. The billionaire owners have plenty of wealth and income from their other assets, but also don't want a lockout to crater the value of one of their biggest assets. The players have had years to save and plan for a lockout, and some can still try to lean on endorsements, merchandise, and other nonpayroll income to help them along. The owners will try to say they're showing good faith by combining their salary cap with a salary floor that would force some teams to spend more on players—but that won't appeal much to the union's player leadership, which is largely made up of high-level players who want a big payday coming out of the lockout (I see you, future free agents Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes).

The only way public opinion might matter is if government officials decide to get involved. President Donald Trump has already made noise about taking action, and backs the owners' push for a salary cap, but it's unclear how much he can lean on negotiations. The National Labor Relations Board may end up involved—all four members were appointed by Trump (one is a Democrat who used to work for the players union). Members of Congress could threaten to take away MLB's antitrust exemption, but probably wouldn't have the votes to do it.

It goes without saying all this is incredibly frustrating for fans (as well as players who want to earn a living and teams that want to plan for the future). The lockout is going to hit baseball like a car crash that everyone saw coming from miles away. The basic bargaining positions have not changed in years, but the two sides have made basically no progress.

At least Minor League Baseball won't get locked out, and should get a major viewership boost if MLB ends up losing games.

With All the Salary Cap Scandals, Are They Even Worth It?

What's funny to me is that the MLB salary cap debate is happening in the wake of two of the biggest spending cap scandals in sports history: the Los Angeles Clippers salary cap circumvention scandal and, in soccer, the Manchester City financial scandal. You'd think the difficulty of enforcing these rules would cause some people to think twice about a salary cap, and how cheaters can ruin the integrity of the game for fans.

If MLB owners do manage to convince the players to agree to a cap, the cap's rules will make a big difference in how successful it is.

The NBA had a scandal over fake endorsement deals, the Premier League had a scandal over fake sponsorships, and hockey fans got mad every year about players coming off the long-term injured reserve list just in time for the playoffs, changing their cap hit, until the league finally closed the loophole. In multiple sports, fans from high-income-tax states complain that their salary cap limits are the same as teams in low- or no-tax states, making the latter more appealing to free agents.

Meanwhile, in the NFL—actually, it's somehow been largely scandal-free on the salary cap front for over a decade, except for a couple minor scandals.

I'm not exactly sure how the NFL manages this—maybe it's the hard cap with few exceptions, maybe it's the size of their rosters, maybe it's because many of the tactics teams use to game the cap are legal (for example, converting a "signing bonus" into base salary paid out over five years). Or maybe there is a ton of salary cap circumvention with sham side deals and the NFL just fails to catch it.

Regardless, I'm morally not a fan of teams colluding to avoid paying players their competitive market wage. We're talking about millionaires, so you might not have much sympathy. But if you had the talent and put in the hard work to earn a million fans, you wouldn't want owners to collectively diminish your wage either.

4 Years Later, Gran Turismo 7 Still Slaps

Just when I thought I was out, Gran Turismo 7 has pulled me back in. First released in 2022 (see my brief review from the time here), the game is now my go-to activity when I have free time.

A few times a week, my 2-year-old son will ask to see race cars on TV, and sometimes I will fire up Gran Turismo 7 or the latest Formula 1 game for him to watch me play (he sort of pays attention, but what he really wants is to break small pieces off my Formula 1 Lego sets, forcing me to pause each lap and reassemble them). A few weeks ago, I noticed Gran Turismo 7 has weekly challenges of five races. While working through them, I noticed that—despite having beaten most of the game's most difficult challenges on its hardest difficulty—I'd won less than 40 percent of its races.

That just couldn't stand, and now I'm trying to work through them all. AI has added a new component for me—I've used it to help with car selection, pit strategy, and tweaking of settings.

All this is to say that I'm impressed a 4-year-old video game can still make me obsessed. Kudos to the Gran Turismo 7 team for releasing several updates throughout the year with new tracks, cars, and more.

Replay of the Week

I watched this live and on replay so many times, and still can't figure out what they thought was going on. Was it a designed run play, and with what purpose? Did the players forget they didn't have any timeouts? Were the Commanders coaches running the clock low because they thought they'd have to kick it back to the Giants? I thought maybe they were trying to line it up for the kicker, but that would have involved a quick kneel followed by a spike.

The whole overtime was bonkers, and the Commanders are cowards anyway.

Jayden Daniels thought the clock would stop at 5 seconds out of respect for him pic.twitter.com/CQ16tDxL5o

— NFL Memes (@NFLMemes) October 11, 2026

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real event of the week, as the Grand Slam of Curling Co-op Invitational gets underway.