I like the idea of reworking the luxury tax instead. Have a soft salary cap that if exceeded you are taxed on the amount that you go over and then provide redistribution of a portion of that tax back to all of the teams under the soft cap based on something like this "scrooge" index. So those that are spending and just don't have the revenue could get more of this "bonus tax money" to help them out even more. Would provide a lot of owner incentive to put money into their players
That sounds all well intended, but it will never work. The owners would be the ones that need to approve this and there is never going to be owners who will volunteer any of their money be redistributed to other teams.
If you want more of a soft cap, I think the NBA has a pretty good thing figured out. It can be confusing as hell at times, but they have Max and Super Max contracts that are the top salaries players can make, and it's also structured to where the team that already has the player under contract can offer more money than any other team which incentivizes players to stay with their teams and keeps smaller market teams in the mix. They also have a first and second "apron" which is similar to a luxury tax, but also puts restrictions on transactions. Like you can't take on a larger contract than you're sending out in a trade if you're in an apron, or you can't sign certain FA contracts like vet league minimums. Basically, teams only want to be in the aprons if you're a ready built championship contender because you're hampered in other ways.
Like I said, it can be confusing as hell, but it helps keep parity and helps small market teams.
Have any solutions other than a salary cap? Seems the kneejerk solution is always to push the top down instead of to pull the bottom up.
I have to wonder why baseball fans are always so against a salary cap? The quality of play isn't going to go down. If anything it will go up around the league as better players are more evenly distributed on the landscape. Why are baseball fans okay with the yankees and dodgers and red sox and whoever else just blowing all the other teams out of the water financially? Why is suppressing the top always such a bad thing? I think a salary floor would be beneficial, but I don't think it would solve the issues that a cap would.
The NFL has it all figured out and I'm shocked no other leagues have tried to mimic them.
The NFL's salary cap has made it so a team in a smaller market like Buffalo, or Jacksonville, or GB can compete on the same field as the NY teams and the LA teams and Dallas and all the massive markets. The NFL has every other league strung up by the nuts because it's exciting. You have about 6 teams pop up every year and overachieve and play well. You don't get that in baseball to the extent you do in football.
Also, NFL has FA movement that means something. Teams can't afford to keep all their talent so they have to let guys walk. Your most exciting players have a chance to go to a new team and play well and get another contract and maybe play for a different team and move and succeed. In baseball your best players always hit FA, which is fine but then they wait months and months and draw everything out and then on a random Wednesday in December sign a 17 year deal and never hit the market again. Your best players in baseball rarely move or hit FA, which to me is a big part of baseball's boringness. NFL has turned their FA into a media frenzy that dominates a couple weeks in March, months away from any meaningful football.
www.thescore.com
