Former New York Yankee and Hall of Fame closer Mariano Rivera said he believes Major League Baseball should adopt a salary cap in its next collective bargaining agreement.
“Yes, there should be one, because it has to be fair to everybody,” Rivera said during a Latinos in Sports event in Miami on Friday. “It makes the competition better.”
The MLB CBA expires at the end of this season, setting up negotiations between the league and its players. Talks are expected to begin in the coming weeks.
It’s notable for a player — even a retired one, like Rivera — to publicly support a salary cap. Rivera, himself, made about $170 million over his 19-year career, according to Baseball-Reference.com.
Former New York Yankee closer Mariano Rivera.
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MLB is the only major U.S. league without a salary cap. The delta between teams that spend the most and those that spend the least has grown in recent years as the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers and the Yankees, among others, continue to expand payroll.
A record 11 teams opened the season with payrolls of at least $200 million, according to a USA Today analysis.
Rivera said any salary cap should include provisions that the lowest spending teams also invest in improving competition in some other way. MLB currently has a revenue sharing program that distributes local media money equally to all 30 teams.
“If I’m giving you money — from my pocket to you — to make the team better, I believe you should do that and not pocket it,” Rivera said.
Subscribe to the CNBC Sport podcast to listen to the full interview with Mariano Rivera. New episodes drop Thursday at 6 a.m. ET.
The 10 lowest-spending teams in MLB have increased their payrolls by just 1.7% annually on average since 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. This has led many to believe that the fix for an uneven league isn’t a salary cap, but rather a salary floor that would force small-market teams to spend.
The MLB Players Association has long fought a cap in an effort to maximize player salaries, including during a 1994-95 strike.
But current MLB rules allow for massive variation in team spending. And, there have been a number of studies supporting a correlation between spending and winning.
“We have a significant segment of our fans that have been vocal about the issue of competitive balance,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said earlier this year. “And in general, we try to pay attention to our fans.”
There have also been credible studies that say the competitive balance issues in MLB aren’t worse than any other sport. In the past 10 MLB seasons, there have been seven different World Series winners, 13 different teams have reached the World Series and 18 teams have advanced to the semifinals. Those figures suggest a league that has even better balance than the NBA, NFL or NHL.
