It doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a salary cap in my lifetime, or yours, when it comes to Major League Baseball. There are way too many things in the way. The players balk at the idea of it. So do some of the owners, both rich and less rich. That leaves many fans feeling like things aren’t fair and that some organizations simply aren’t on a level playing field.
One area where Major League Baseball has certainly tried to level that playing field, though, and at least been successful from a monetary standpoint is amateur player acquisition. A decade ago teams could spend whatever it was that they pleased on the international player market as long as they were willing to pay the overage tax and face the penalties. Players like Jose Abreu and Yeonis Cespedes were signing for tens of millions of dollars out of Cuba. On the other end, the Red Sox signed Rusney Castillo for $72,000,000 and he played more than ten games in a season once and hit seven home runs in the big leagues. Yet Shohei Ohtani, who could have gotten $200,000,000+ when he firs t came to the US had to sign a minor league contract for next to nothing and earn his money through arbitration.
That happened because MLB changed the rules to “even the playing field”. Now teams get a very specific pool allotment that they can spend on international players and it tends to range between $4,000,000 and $7,000,000 total. For a team that’s going to sign 10-30 players. While teams are allowed to trade slot value money to other organizations, you can’t go over what you have (plus acquired). There’s a hard limit on spending.
In the amateur draft where players from the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico are eligible to be selected, there is also a draft pool. That pool ranged from $5,383,600 (Yankees) to $19,144,500 (Orioles) in 2025. How many picks you have and where your picks are located come into play a lot here. The 1st pick in the draft had a value of $11,075,900. That’s more than twice what the Yankees were allowed to spend on their picks in the first 10 rounds (rounds 11-20’s bonus money doesn’t count until a player signed for over $150,000 – then anything over that amount counts). The Yankees pool was small as their 1st pick wasn’t until the 39th overall selection and their next pick wasn’t until the late 3rd round.
One could argue that these were put in place far more to save teams from themselves than to actually make things “fair”. The end result, though, has made things a bit more fair. We can see that on the international side of things where teams like the Reds have actually signed their fair share of players who have been rated among the top five or ten players in a given year and it’s something that never happened before with the exception of when they signed Aroldis Chapman and Raisel Iglesias to big league deals. They were never in on the top teenage prospects. But capped spending means that teams like the Yankees could no longer sign 10 of the top 30 players in a single year (which did happen at least once in the decade before the rules were put in place).
On Monday it seemed that MLB is making another step to try and “even the playing field” when it comes to non-MLB players. The Athletic reported that MLB is going to standardize the analytical data capturing and distribution of data across the minor leagues.
The details weren’t too detailed, but essentially here are the key points:
Teams will only be able to use MLB approved information. And that will be available to every team. No third party cameras, sensors, measurement devices, etc. Not for the players nor for the ballparks.Ballparks that don’t have things that are generally considered to be standard will be upgraded on MLB’s dime. This likely means all stadiums will now get Hawkeye installed, though there aren’t nearly as many without that as their used to be (the Reds have it in Goodyear, Dayton, and Louisville. Chattanooga has a new stadium opening in 2026 – so it’s unknown if it was planned there immediately, but my assumption would be that it is. Daytona was still relying on Trackman, which measures pitch and hit related things, but not player movements and things like that).
In MLB they have always centralized the Pitch and Hit Tracking information and shared it among all 30 teams. That began with the Pitch F/X system and has remained that way through changes to the Trackman system to today’s Hawkeye. That was not the case in the minor leagues, though.
I can’t speak to how things were with Pitch F/X, but when Trackman was taking over last decade and teams were having it installed in the minor league ballparks the data was contracted out through Trackman and most, but not all teams did agree to share that data with other organizations. Once enough teams had it I’d argue it didn’t make sense to not share the data from your park because that team still played road games and everyone was getting it there, but not everyone opted into the deal and kept their park private. That’s no longer going to be the case.
That gets to maybe a bigger point with all of this. Some teams were so far ahead of others with stuff they were measuring. And with that came the potential for exclusive contracts with companies so they would have an advantage in a certain type of data/information gathering process that wasn’t available to other teams because they opted to purchase it first for a large enough sum of money that it wouldn’t be available to others.
What this also can and will do, is limit how much money teams are spending. For the teams who are cheap and well behind, they now get to upgrade on MLB’s dime. For teams who have invested in stuff and paid out of pocket, they have to feel a bit cheated and now limited. Even to the point that some of the stuff they have paid for and are currently using and utilizing could be taken away from them and they will no longer be allowed to use it.
Other Notes
Kyle Boddy, who used to be the Reds director of pitching before leaving the club in the middle of September of 2021 and is the founder of Driveline, had some interesting points about this all after it was announced. You can read his entire thread on Twitter here if you would like to.
But one thing that stood out to me the most is that the players in minor league baseball who are drafted (or ones who have been traded who signed as free agents) don’t have a choice in where they wind up. And simply being selected by the wrong team can alter your career simply because that team is so far behind the times when it comes to development and implementation of data that other organizations could look at and see something and help “fix” something. With everyone having the same data to work with, even if you wind up with the Rockies, you can at least have access to the data and go to a coach or facility outside of the organization and have a chance that someone can see something and help you out.
That kind of gets to another point, though. Even if everyone has access to all of the exact same information, it doesn’t mean there will be 30 teams using the data in the same way. Some teams are going to have larger departments to look at the data. Some will have smarter, more innovated people looking at the data. And some teams will simply ignore some of it for far too long.
