And yet, the NBA is arguably the number two sports league in the world, probably after the English Premier League. Inarguably number two in this country, at least. And no one has mentioned it here yet, but the NFL also has a hard floor requiring teams to spend 89%-90% of the league cap across a four-year period.
I’m not sure whether managing a 90% cap situation at a 26- or 40-man roster would be impossibly more complex than at 14, but I would think there are systems have been devised to do something similar enough that they could port it over to MLB usage.
One big thing I can see preventing a tight ceiling-floor regime would be active blocking by the Pirates/Marlins/Athletics wing of ownership, the bloc that wants to simply harvest the business and pocket the cash. Their teams may be minnows on the field, but they might be considered whales among owners and able to project their will onto everyone else. Not sure about that either way, but it’s possible.
Another problem might be the requirement to open the books to Players. No owner would ever want to do that. One of the biggest prizes of the Sherman exemption is the ability to operate in secret, yielding the ability to bury the sources of revenue within the business to minimize or eliminate taxes. Agreeing to a cap/floor band might well end that gravy train for them.
One other large problem I see is actually implementing the payroll band among the teams effectively. Suppose they agree to a regime similar to the NBA/NFL in which a salary cap is set at 50% of league revenues with a 90% floor, whether trued up on a season-to-season basis, across a four-year period, whatever. Estimated 2024 MLB revenues that I could find said $12.1 billion. Fifty percent of that is $6.05 billion, and that divided among 30 teams would yield a roughly $202 million payroll cap with a $181.5 million floor.
That sounds fine and all to us fans, but how would they actually manage the payrolls of currently $300MM+ teams like the Dodgers and Mets and Yankees and Blue Jays to bring them into compliance with that payroll band? Grandfathering current rosters and working toward the cap across an X year period sounds like a solution, but there is probably an entire competitive parade of horribles lurking within a solution like that, one that might disadvantage the Dodgers and Yankees on the field for some period of time, and I promise you Baseball would have explicit antipathy for that idea. That itself might be enough for them to continue rejecting the idea as being completely unworkable in the real world.
Someone at a higher pay grade than I could probably figure out it, or maybe not, at least to a degree acceptable to everyone. But looking at it from this standpoint, I could see them never agreeing to a tight payroll band. It might be closer to what ATF suggested, a really loose band where the floor is something like a third of the cap, and maybe across time they tighten that up to something closer. Whether they would get anywhere near an ideal of 90% is anyone’s guess.