Orioles owner Rubenstein: 'I wish' MLB had salary cap

Count Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein among those hoping Major League Baseball adopts a salary cap in the future.

"I wish it would be the case that we would have a salary cap in baseball the way other sports do, and maybe eventually we will, but we don't have that now," Rubenstein told Brian Sozzi of Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week. "I suspect we'll probably have something closer to what the NFL and the NBA have, but there's no guarantee of that."

MLB remains the sole major North American sports league to operate without any kind of salary cap. The league does have a competitive balance tax system that tacks additional charges onto the highest payrolls.

The Orioles were once among baseball's biggest spenders, fielding a top-10 payroll as recently as 2017 under former owner Peter Angelos. However, the team's payroll nosedived in the early 2020s, thanks to a rebuilding process and turmoil during the final years of the Angelos family's ownership, which culminated in the 2023 sale to Rubenstein's group.

Last year, Baltimore's payroll of approximately $109 million ranked 22nd in the league, according to Spotrac. The team's projected 2025 Opening Day payroll of $156 million sits 15th out of 30 teams, per FanGraphs. That increase is thanks to a few free-agent signings, including outfielder Tyler O'Neill on a three-year, $49.5-million deal, and veteran starters Tomoyuki Sugano and Charlie Morton on one-year pacts.

However, the Orioles shied away from chasing the biggest names available this offseason. Two of the most important pieces of their 2024 playoff team, ace Corbin Burnes and outfielder Anthony Santander, left in free agency to sign bigger-money contracts elsewhere.

Rubenstein, who bought his hometown Orioles from the Angelos family for $1.725 billion last year, told Sozzi that he plans to spend more money in the future. Still, his feelings about a salary cap stem from what he believes is a disparity between bigger-market clubs such as the Los Angeles Dodgers that have reeled in multiple superstars over the past several years, and smaller locales such as Baltimore.

"I think the big city teams have some advantages. Now, in Los Angeles, they have another advantage. They have Japanese players, (a) number of them that they got like Shohei (Ohtani), and people in Japan really love watching the Dodgers, and they sell a lot of merchandise in Japan for Dodgers players," Rubenstein said.