The Circumstances Under Which I Would Happily Institute a Salary Cap

Those of you who listened to Episode 2351 of Effectively Wild can skip this preamble. You already know where I’m going.

Ben Lindbergh is on vacation, so Meg asked me to keep his seat warm for one episode of the podcast. And she was even kind enough to pick out a listener email that would give us something to talk about. I’ll skip over some extraneous context; if you want to hear the whole question go listen to the episode. The question comes down to this: If I were given the power to negotiate on the MLBPA’s behalf in the next CBA negotiation, what would it take for me to agree to a salary cap?

My answer was extensive and somewhat intemperate, and ordinarily I’d repeat the spiel about how Meg is FanGraphs’ editorial voice of reason, the one sane woman cursed to shepherd a flock of irresponsible lunatics through the workday, protecting us (and the company) from our own worst impulses.

But she knew what she was doing with this. Asking me a hypothetical about a salary cap is like waving a steak in front of a hungry wolverine. And I wanted to do the question justice, so a few minutes before we were due to record I started writing down a wish list: a salary floor, abolition of the draft, a shorter and simpler free agency process, and so on. All the serious proposals that get mooted whenever this question comes up.

A salary cap will never happen, at least not without a sport-threatening work stoppage, but it’s an interesting thing to think about from time to time.

But then, I realized I didn’t have to limit myself to working within the current system. In the real world, teams are owned by billionaire investors, most of whom care little about the on-field product. Access to high-level baseball is made as exclusive and expensive as the market will bear, regardless of how big a share of the pie labor gets. Under those terms, I want the players to make as much money as possible, because every dime that doesn’t go to Manny Machado and Bobby Witt Jr. goes to even richer men who don’t entertain me.

In an alternate universe, in which baseball teams were run as public trusts or government agencies, I’d obviously find it grotesque that the clubs’ highest-paid employees made $20 million a year — or, in some cases, upwards of $40 million a year. From a societal perspective, that’s a waste of money. Unfortunately, in our society, the only alternative is worse.

While I was mulling all this over, Meg sent me another message: Her previous appointment was running long, so would I mind pushing our recording time back?

Which is where this all went off the rails. Because not only had I gotten the gears moving on imagining a world where baseball was operated not for profit but in the public interest, now I also had time to flesh the idea out a little.

Not long after I joined this site, I chased a similar rabbit. With playoff expansion in the news in 2022, and league expansion seemingly on the horizon, I noted that MLB had not grown in accordance with the population it served. In 1910, there was one AL or NL team for every 5.76 million Americans. By 2020, that figure was one team per 11.42 million Americans. The last time that ratio got this far out of whack was in 1960, one year before MLB undertook its first expansion project in the league’s modern history. More than that, even with teams moving around the country and broadly following migration trends, the South remains underserved.

High-level baseball is not only alienating potential fans with high prices and indifferent leadership, taking for granted the civic commitment and solidarity that makes people become lifelong devotees in the first place, it is not where the people are.

The AL/NL baseball duopoly cast an unbreakable mold for the form of professional sports in North America: a centralized, closed league with a fixed number of franchises, which are owned by private interests and protected by the league’s cartel setup.

This is not how it is everywhere. The most famous and widely cited counterexample is European soccer, in which teams are (for the most part) clubs which are tied not only to specific cities, but also to specific neighborhoods. European countries smaller than the United States, but the multi-tiered pyramid system makes professional teams more numerous than they are here.

In the brief time in which Meg left me unattended (the editorial equivalent of leaving a dog alone with scissors) I cooked up the Pan-American Municipal Baseball League.

In this system, a central authority allocates club charters to every city in North America and the Caribbean with a metro area population of 1.4 million or more. In the U.S., at least, the sense of regional community often transcends municipal bounds; the greater New York area includes parts of four states, for instance.

Or, for a better example: Atlanta has the eighth-most populous metro area in the country. Culturally, it’s the cultural capital of the Southeast, and certainly one of the 10 most influential cities in the union. But Atlanta proper is relatively small; it’s the 36th-most populous city in the U.S., one step ahead of Mesa, Arizona.

A 30-team league that allocates one team to each city based on population wouldn’t include Atlanta. Obviously, that’s not what you want.

So that’s not what I’m doing. See, every metro area with at least 1.4 million residents gets a baseball team, owned by either the local government or a nonprofit trust. Every dollar the team makes in profit goes back into the community to fund the arts, youth centers, public health, transportation — anything you could tenuously connect to sports.

Here’s the catch: A city (or region) gets a team once it hits 1.4 million inhabitants. But it doesn’t stop there; it gets another team for every additional 1.4 million inhabitants. This is a hard limit — no rounding up or down. If the 2030 census comes around and Las Vegas only has 2,799,999 inhabitants, tough cookies. Maybe you’ll get a second team in 2040.

Why 1.4 million? Good question. The real answer is that I originally set the bar at 1.5 million, but there are three Canadian metro areas that came in between 1.4 million and 1.5 million in the most recent census, and I wanted to be ecumenical.

Using 1.4 million as a cutoff created an attractive coincidence as well. In the English soccer pyramid, the top four levels are considered fully professional, and by that standard there are 14 professional clubs in London: seven in the Premier League, seven more across the three divisions below.

New York has about the same population as London, with a metropolitan area about 30% bigger. If the greater New York area got allocated a professional baseball team for every 1.4 million residents, it would have — wait for it — 14 clubs. Seems reasonable enough.

One reason I like this setup is that I envy how specific European (and South American, it bears mentioning) soccer fandom can be. The U.S. is so big and so sparsely populated, there was a time when half the country got looped into Cardinals fandom just because that was what was on the radio. I’m a lifelong Phillies fan, but I’ve never actually lived in Pennsylvania; if my region had a proportional number of major league baseball teams, I would’ve grown up rooting for a team from Camden or Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with a local identity totally distinct from what you’d find on South Broad Street.

That’s a fun thing to imagine. And since I’m imagining the current professional baseball structure being torn out root and branch, in favor of a larger, more civic-oriented league, let’s imagine even bigger.

I mentioned Canada before; it’s the only country other than the United States that’s ever hosted a Major League Baseball franchise. But why should these two countries have all the fun? The U.S. and Canada are hardly the only two nations in North America where baseball is played widely. Why not extend an invitation to the other North American and Caribbean countries that 1) put a team in the most recent WBC and 2) have at least one city big enough to support a club.

I said Pan-American, after all. That means Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba as well. (You want to know how powerful my imagination is? I’m imagining a world where American foreign policy is not wantonly antagonistic toward these other four countries. Having an imagination is lots of fun; you should try it.)

Enough with the suspense: Here’s where I’ll be allocating the various PAMBL clubs.

I’ll save you the trouble of counting: There are 150 teams here. Obviously, that won’t do for a league that’s organized the way MLB is, with six divisions of five teams each and plenty of interdivisional and interleague play.

I’m actually agnostic on the best way to organize a 150-team professional baseball league, a league that, by its own charter, would add teams every decade. In fact, the full version of my spreadsheet from Hell includes a 130-team PAMBL Division II, wherein every metro area with between 500,000 and 1.4 million residents is assigned a minor league team for every half million people. This would allow up-and-coming cities to develop infrastructure for professional baseball well in advance of being inducted into the top level of the PAMBL.

Returning to the original 150-team PAMBL, the lack of any history or precedent leaves a smorgasbord of options. We could have five 30-team leagues, or 10 15-team leagues, or three 50-team leagues, with the champions coming together for the World Series. (Or at least the Hemisphere Series.)

We could introduce promotion and relegation, either on a straight ladder system, with every club in the same pot, or with different regional leagues feeding into a top international division. Going back to English soccer, the promotion and relegation system is called a pyramid because at or below a certain level (the sixth division), it branches out into multiple regional leagues at each level. The PAMBL could do something similar.

Here’s a proposal for six leagues of 25 clubs each, with promotion and relegation. The top two leagues span the whole of North America and the Caribbean, with the bottom four teams in the Premier League being relegated every year and replaced by the top four finishers from the second-division Continental League.

The bottom four teams in the Continental League will be relegated to one of the two regional leagues in Tier III. I was originally going to name all 150 clubs in the PAMBL, but after having exhausted all of the real-world MLB team names and most of the real-world Mexican League team names, I realized I was already scraping the bottom of the barrel. Especially because 34 of the 150 teams in the PAMBL come from cities where the primary language is Spanish, which I do not speak. The probability of an offensive team name, at that point, greatly outweighs the probability of a clever one.

While Tiers I and II are continent-wide, Tiers III and IV will be split for geographical ease.

What happens if three or four teams from the East get relegated from the Continental League in a single season? Well, you’ll notice that I’ve split up a few cities that are actually close together: Austin, for instance, is only a few hours from Houston, but they’re in separate conferences.

That’s because I spent — and this is not an exaggeration — about three hours trying to get these 100 teams into some neat, geographically coherent combination of four leagues and I couldn’t do it. At one point my morale was so low I almost hit send on a 25-team division that had Edmonton and Orlando as regional rivals.

Suffice it to say: We can fudge the composition of these leagues if geography demands it.

Obviously, there are unanswered questions in this thought experiment, but the basics are here. If MLB expanded to 150 nonprofit or government-owned teams across 61 metro areas spread over five countries, split them into six leagues with four tiers of promotion and relegation, and abolished the draft and instituted universal free agency from the amateur level… yeah I think I’d be pretty happy with a salary cap under those circumstances. Your move, Rob.