Second Thoughts?

The free-agent contracts going to pitchers this offseason would drive any decent, rational baseball owner in the direction of a hard salary cap. Too bad owners are anything but decent or rational. Examples of the former I’ll leave to your imagination. As to the latter, you gotta be nuts to sign Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million deal ($37 million a year) or Carlos Rodon to six years at $162 million ($27 million a year). But the Rangers and Yankees, respectively, look to be nuts. Consider that deGrom, who’ll turn thirty-five next June, is eighteen games short of a hundred career wins. Or that the now thirty-year old Rodon is forty-four games short of the century mark. Paying them to be like Justin Verlander won’t turn them into Verlander, who at least can claim the $86.6 he’ll be earning over the next two years ($43.3 million a season) is an accurate reflection of the 244 career wins he has under his belt. So, a salary cap a la football or basketball? If you could argue that it’d benefit fans, I might be interested. But the NBA has a cap, and ticket prices are even worse than baseball’s. I doubt the cost of a beer or a hot dog costs less at the United Center than at Guaranteed Rate Whatever. Would the cost of my cable bill go down with a hard cap? Or would the Marquee Network continue to be the leech on my wallet it has been over the past three years or so? The only thing a cap would accomplish would be to put more money in the owners’ pockets. As I like to say, if no cap on an owner’s profits, then no cap on a player’s salary. But, Yes, danger lurks down the path baseball is headed. At some point, the cost of a brat and a beer, along with a ticket, will cause a sport to collapse, and it may not even be baseball first. According to fatherly.com, the average cost of attending a game for a family of four—back in 2016, mind you—was $502.84 for the NFL, $339.02 for the NBA and $219.53 for MLB. How much do you think those figures have gone up over the past six years? Hard salary cap or soft luxury tax, fans are going to pay to follow their favorite team(s). They just don’t need to be as dumb as the Rangers and Yankees going about it.