No. No. No

I read an op-ed in the Sun-Times yesterday written by a Chicken Little of a lawyer who fears the end of professional baseball is upon us. Why? No hard salary cap. Chicken Little sees billion-dollar ballplayers on the horizon if something isn’t done. And, as Robert Preston used to warn in “The Music Man,” that spells trouble in River City because inflated payrolls “may not be supported by ticket sales, sponsors and television deals.” Wait, there’s more. “If baseball does not intervene with a real [as in hard] cap, small-market teams like the Twins, Reds, Guardians and others may falter.” So, the solution is to prevent hundreds of players from a shot at getting filthy rich—Chicken Little seems to be particularly upset with Juan Soto’s $765 million contract—by ensuring that a handful of owners get to earn obscene profits at the time of sale of their teams? No, no, no. No hard salary cap without a hard windfall profits’ tax. Failing that, let the magic of supply and demand work itself here. If costs go ever higher until fans and broadcasters balk at covering them, the market will adjust. If the contracts for Soto and Alex Bregman bring us one step closer, so be it.