Show Them the Money: Why Major League Baseball Needs a Salary Cap

Show me the money!  Those immortal words, uttered famously by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the movie Jerry Maguire, hold quite a bit of relevancy these days when it comes to contracts in Major League Baseball. 

The contracts that are being offered today to professional baseball players are bordering on ridiculousness. Showing them the money is exactly what baseball executives are doing. For this reason, it is obvious that the MLB needs to establish a salary cap. 

Why is a salary cap needed, you may ask, because it seems that baseball is working just fine, other than those All-Star Games, but that is another story. 

Even though on the surface baseball seems to be running quite well, it isn't because the gap between large and small market teams seems to be widening. 

The MLB is the only of the major sports leagues that doesn't have an established salary cap.  This is a problem because it promotes a lack of parity. The same teams are always in the picture, and those same teams are the ones that have more money to spend.

Parity is something that is good, and almost necessary at this point, for a league to have. Take, for example, the National Football League. The NFL has, in all reality, taken over the title of America's favorite sport. What is the reason that it has? One word: parity. 

The NFL, NBA, and NHL all have salary caps in place that allow, for the most part, all of their teams to have an actual chance for a championship, assuming that team actually puts the effort into it. The MLB, simply put, does not.

With the 2008 season done, and free agency started, we will again see this non-parity played out. Take, for example, free-agent pitcher CC Sabathia. Sabathia was offered, according to reports, a deal worth more than $137.5 million. And guess who offered that much money? You guessed it, one of the same old teams, the Yankees.

Although a team like the Yankees, whose payroll was a record $209 million in 2008, didn't make the playoffs, they have the resources to always be able to fix their problems. Case in point, offering that much money to Sabathia.

On the other end of the spectrum there are the teams like the Marlins and Rays. These teams don't have the option to go out and spend money on top flight free agents. They must rely on developing young players in order to win. These teams do have the capability to compete, which happened this year when the Rays went to the World Series.

However, although they can compete sometimes, they usually do not have the capability to keep a lot of the good young players they developed because they can not win bidding wars with teams like the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, or Dodgers when those young players become free agents. 

This is the exact problem with the MLB. The ability of small-market teams to compete with large market teams for the good players who will help is not there because they just don't have the resources to.

A salary cap in baseball could only help. Baseball is still a favorite of ours as Americans, but the NFL is liked more because fans believe their favorite teams actually have a shot every year. 

In baseball, that simply isn't that case. The fans know that if their team is a small market team the only real way for them to win is to rely on young players and retread players.  

That makes it hard to believe. Even harder when your favorite team's payroll is less than a single player's salary.

Just ask Marlins fans, whose favorite team, yes the entire team, made less than Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez in 2008.

Could there be any better evidence for a change?