A little over twenty years ago, I was in University finishing up my business degree when I found an ad for a fantasy baseball league. The ad was short and to the point. A Cubs fan from Chicago was recruiting for his fantasy baseball league, partly because he loved baseball and partly because he had built his own software to run the league and wanted people to help him test it. The ad said that he was only interested in working with hardcore baseball fans who are into deep analysis.
The ad resonated with me, so I emailed him and joined the league. A few years ago, that man passed away. He was acerbic, brilliant and became a very close friend. He knew that he was dying and in the lead up to it, he made some decisions for the league. One decision was that I was realistically the only person who had a chance of maintaining his software, so he transferred it to me before he passed away. Another decision was that our friend RB and I would co-manage the league in his place.
Cubs was brilliant, his code was difficult to understand and he didn't believe in commenting it so our league had to take a season off because we just couldn't run it the way he deserved. But over that year, RB and I were busy. For twenty years, it was a full csv league - Cubs would send us stats packages once a day and we did our day to day management in a spreadsheet. But RB and I wanted to build a web interface and make it fully accessible because one of our friends in the league is blind. And so, our league is now fully run via a web interface.
As part of our move into accessibility, we worked really closely with our friend "No Sight Sox". NSS is an awesome dude who lost his eyesight almost sixty years ago in an industrial accident. One thing NSS talked about was how a lot of baseball sites were so vehement about stopping scraping that they made it quite hard for him to do the levels of research that the rest of us could. And that's when the idea behind my new baseball reports section started. I wanted to start doing analysis but on a page that I built with a screen reader first.
But, then I got busy and it just didn't happen. Until now.
As many of you know, the current collective bargaining agreement between Major League owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association expires this December. As such, the players made their first offer earlier this month. And yesterday, on May 28 2026, the owners came out with their first offer. As everyone expected, the owners' offer includes both a salary cap and a salary floor. The MLBPA has always been strongly against a salary cap. The last time the owners suggested a salary cap, it resulted in the World Series being cancelled. Cancelling the World Series is a big deal for both players and owners; the 1994 World Series was only the second World Series ever cancelled. The World Series wasn't even cancelled during the World War II when rosters were severely depleted by players enlisting or being conscripted.
And... another salary cap.
With the owners' proposal in hand, I decided to take a look at what baseball would look like right now if the salary cap and floor were applied to the current season. This is just a simulation and it doesn't account for all the variables that will be in play. For example, the owners announced there will be time for teams to actually reach the cap or floor and all current contracts would remain guaranteed. None of that is captured in this simulation; it is just a look at what the league would look like today if we apply the cap and floor.
Results were actually a little strange. This is only the end of May so baseball doesn't really count yet. But thus far, teams below the floor are as likely to have a playoff spot as teams above the cap. That certainly doesn't speak well for competitive balance.
The analysis runs smack dab into teams like the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox; two teams that are above the cap but severely underperforming. The New York Mets, as an example are currently ranked 25/30 teams in terms of performance off of the second highest payroll in baseball. To reach the cap, they would have to drop $124.7 million dollars in average annual value of their salaries. If we use their performance thus far as a guide, the Mets could actually improve by cutting money so I don't think this is quite as bad for the Mets as some people think. I believe the Mets could trim some underperforming players, save some money and it may even improve their performance (especially when Juan Soto is back).
The Red Sox though...
Listen, I love the New York Yankees and as such, I feel roughly the same way about Red Sox fans as they feel about me. But I feel very sorry for them this season because Red Sox fans are incredibly passionate just like Yankees fans. I know how heartbroken I would be if my team was performing as poorly as the BoSox are, and I've honestly got to give credit to Red Sox fans for being as positive as they are. But the Red Sox have to trim money under this plan because apparently, they're spending too much.
Do any BoSox fans actually think their team is spending too much?
I don't think we're going to have baseball in 2027. Maybe the league needs another strike, but while the owners and players agree on a floor and hopefully that can turn into something they can work together on, I don't think the players will budge on a salary cap. And honestly, I'm not sure the owners will either. It feels like two unmovable forces are going to collide sometime in early 2027.
And that was the primary reason that I built this report. Rather than trust pundits, I wanted to see the data and see what kind of impact it would really have. And after all that, two statistics keep coming back to me. First, the season is only one third over and I'm not seeing a connection between being above or below the cap and having a winning record. And second, if this cap was applied in 2027, it implies a total salary inflation across all of Major League Baseball of only $3.8 million this season.
Over the next few days, I want to tackle the first point using full seasons' worth of data. So I will be taking the exact same method (and script), changing the data source from the 2026 season to perhaps every season from 2015 through 2025 and let's see what kind of impact spending really has on performance in the modern game.