Jesse joined ESPN Chicago in September 2009 and covers MLB for ESPN.com.
This year in Major League Baseball, almost all the attention has been paid to on-field trends, as a slew of historic rule changes impacted almost every aspect of the game. Now, MLB is turning some of its attention back to the economics of the sport.
It was only 14 months ago that a brutal labor battle between the league and the MLB Players Association ended with a five-year collective bargaining agreement. Once again, the players were able to secure a system without a hard salary cap, and MLB remains the only one of the four major professional North American sports without some form of hard payroll floor or ceiling. It has led to some dramatic differences in team payrolls and some dramatic effects on the standings as well.
And this year, a record amount of spending in free agency pushed the difference in payrolls between the top and bottom teams to new extremes. During the 2022 season, approximately $226 million separated the payrolls of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Baltimore Orioles, the largest gap in the history of the sport — at the time. This season, it’s even larger, with a gap of nearly $299 million between the New York Mets and Oakland Athletics. But they’re not the only outliers: The A’s are one of three teams with an Opening Day payroll under $100 million; the Mets are one of 14 teams with payrolls of more than $200 million (only Steve Cohen’s team crosses the $300 million threshold).
Those differences could be tied to new extremes on the field, too. In 2022, there were a record-tying four 100-win teams, and another with 99 victories. Meanwhile, there were four 100-loss teams — also a record — and another one with 97 defeats. Those 100-win teams averaged nearly $226 million in payroll, while the 100-loss squads averaged just under $87 million.
Last year, the league created an “economic reform committee,” made up of a select group of owners who assess and advise the commissioner on economic issues such as payroll disparity and the regional sports network collapse. MLB has often expressed concerns with the growing chasm in revenues and point to teams like this year’s A’s, who have the lowest payroll and are on pace for one of the worst seasons in baseball history (look out, fans of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders).
But it’s not an exact science: This year, the standings aren’t so clearly tied. If the playoffs were to begin today, three of the top four payrolls would be out, while three of the bottom four would still be playing.
The league still insists it’s worthy of attention.
“Ever since I started in the game, we have struggled with the related concepts of revenue disparity and payroll disparity and competitive balance,” commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN. “The reason for that isn’t about making money. It’s the fact that what we sell in our game is competition and we need to make sure that we have a system in place that fans in all markets believe they have a chance.”
Payroll vs. parity on the field?
In 2000, the league commissioned an economic study and Blue Ribbon report — authored by former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and others — which essentially concluded that baseball was headed toward financial ruin, in part because the gap between the top spender and the bottom one was growing. The difference then was $77 million.
“We believe that current trends cannot continue if the game is to remain an accessible, affordable, competitive national pastime,” the report read.
So claims of competitive imbalance are nothing new — and at various points in the 23 years since the Blue Ribbon report, there have been mixed indications of what growing payroll disparity has meant for the game.
In terms of win totals, the correlation of salary and success seems clear. The top six teams in payroll over the past five years have averaged 91 wins, up from 86 by the top salaried teams in the previous five years. And despite the relative success of small-market, lower-revenue-generating teams like the Tampa Bay Rays, the Kansas City Royals are the only team since 2010 to win the World Series with a payroll in the bottom half of the league.
“You’ve seen teams with low payrolls win, and teams with high payrolls lose, but those big markets have an advantage,” Chicago White Sox left fielder Andrew Benintendi said. “Smaller markets can’t afford some of those players. That divide is growing.”
That said, there’s no monopoly. The Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox are the only big-market teams to win more than one title since the Blue Ribbon report was released in 2000. Since 2015, 28 of the 30 MLB teams have made the playoffs. Since 2010, it’s 30 of 30.
In 2019, Manfred lauded the system, which, that year, produced equal playoff teams from both big and small markets.
“I think we have an economic system that has produced a remarkable level of competitive balance over time,” he said then.
He said something similar just last week, in another season in which so far we see parity working. If the season ended today, only the Atlanta Braves would repeat as division winners.
“Baseball is doing just great,” Manfred said at a recent hearing regarding the regional sports network (RSN) situation. “We’ve had one of the best starts to a season in decades.”
That’s thanks in large part to several surprise teams in the mix this year, but sustaining long windows of contention hasn’t always been easy for a lot of them. For many smaller-market clubs, cycles of rebuilding have become the norm, and those down years lower payrolls for players while widening the disparity between the top and bottom teams. Teams have always gone through rebuilding stages, but it has become more pronounced and strategic over the past decade or longer.
“It’s becoming a little more prevalent,” said Atlanta Braves first baseman Matt Olson, who spent six years with the small-market A’s before a 2022 trade. “It is sad when coming up with an organization you think you’ll undo the cycle, playing good baseball. Hitting the reset button seems to be happening on a decent amount of clubs. It’s OK if you’re not winning and trying to rebuild a little, but when you get to the point of having a good team and recognizing it, it’s a little deflating if you don’t spend.”
Forcing teams to spend even during a rebuild is a hard case to make, though, even for the union. The concept of a salary floor was raised during the most recent labor negotiations, but it was summarily dismissed: Any discussion of increased small-market payrolls would mean implementing a system they believed would curtail big spending on top free agents.
“If you get a floor, you get a cap,” Mets pitcher and former MLBPA executive subcommittee rep Max Scherzer said. “There was a proposal exchanged on that.”
In a perfect world, teams would spend on their own with hopes of fielding a winning team. That’s not always happening — and there’s no easy solution.
“All clubs have demonstrated the ability to compete,” MLBPA executive director Tony Clark told ESPN. “The question is whether they are willing to do so.”
The Orioles, in second place in the AL East, are a prime example of what successful drafting and rebuilding looks like — but the team suffered through years of losing and low payrolls to get to their current competitive level.
“Since I’ve been here, our payroll is what it is,” O’s manager Brandon Hyde said. “I can only control what I can control. Those decisions aren’t up to me. We do the best we can do with the group that we have.
“I’m sure as we get better, our payroll is going to increase. Our players are going to make more, too, as they get to their fourth, fifth and sixth year. I can see it going up.”
Baltimore has surprised fans and pundits alike with its success this year, but the Orioles are the exception, not the rule.
“I hate that in a lot of years, half or at least a third of the league might be out of contention on Day 1,” one executive of a big-market team said. “I like when a team comes out of nowhere and surprises the league. We see less of that now.”
Should the concern be higher this time?
The trends have become more and more pronounced as big-market teams continue to realize revenue streams in and outside of ballparks. VIP seating, team-owned television networks and even bars surrounding stadiums, along with new gambling facilities, have all added to revenues. And while those markets have always spent more on payroll, they’ve also caught up to the smaller markets in other ways, spending more on team infrastructure.
“There was a real shift when the Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox started spending as much attention to scouting and player development and analytics as the small-market teams were,” one small-market AL executive said. “There was a time when payroll disparity was mitigated, somewhat, by systems and internal processes that were better than those teams. There was a time when we were considered farm systems for those bigger market teams. Now, they’re spending 2.5 times on their payroll and their infrastructure.”
In other words, small-market teams previously stood out by drafting and developing players at a highly successful rate. Now, those bigger markets are doing it as well.
“Call it the Andrew Friedman effect,” another executive said, referring to the Dodgers president who took his small-market mentality from Tampa Bay to Los Angeles.
“The Yankees will eventually employ a coach for every player, if that’s what it takes,” another one quipped.
With new revenue streams and more time and money spent on team infrastructure, smaller markets maintain that the imbalance is approaching “unsustainable levels,” according to one executive.
“You’re seeing the commissioner’s office spend a little bit more thoughtfulness on not only the big picture of payroll but also on teams spending a ton of money on other spaces,” Minnesota Twins president Thad Levine said. “Are there ways to regulate some of those things?”
That’s partly what the economic reform committee will be looking into. But there is no clear statistic that proves the system can’t work as is, and the players association is loath to suggest anything that could lead to a full economic restructuring. The players have been clear about wanting to avoid a hard salary cap, while rebuilding teams are always hopeful their organizations will spend when the time comes. Many have — to a point.
Again, Baltimore’s 2023 success stands out. But will a team such as the Orioles be able to sustain a window of winning in the same way the Dodgers, Astros or Yankees have? Or will they go the route of the Rays, in which trading players before they make too much money through arbitration is the norm?
“Sometimes the question comes down to ownership,” more than one executive said.
Motivated ones, such as the Padres’ Peter Seidler, seemingly don’t care about market size or perhaps, in extreme cases, even the bottom line. Over the past five years, 11 players signed deals for $300 million or more, but just three were with a bottom-15 market team. All three were with San Diego.
But even as the Padres help muddy the waters as a small-market team with a massive payroll, they also continue to highlight the disparity among the league. (Their on-field struggles complicate matters, as well.)
Just 18 months ago, the league locked out the players when the two sides stood far apart on topics such as competitive balance and payroll — and the next negotiations are coming up faster than they seem. The MLBPA already suspects the economic reform committee is just another avenue for the league to attempt to suppress player salaries in the next negotiation.
Which way these issues continue to trend will say a lot about how those talks go this time. Like MLB was 23 years ago, the commissioner is concerned.
“We increased in terms of disparity this offseason,” Manfred said. “It’s something we’re going to have to keep an eye on.”
The opening weekend of the 2025 MLB season was taken over by a surprise star — torpedo bats.
The bowling pin-shaped bats became the talk of the sport after the Yankees’ home run onslaught on the first Saturday of the season put it in the spotlight and the buzz hasn’t slowed since.
What exactly is a torpedo bat? How does it help hitters? And how is it legal? Let’s dig in.
What is a torpedo bat and why is it different from a traditional MLB bat?
The idea of the torpedo bat is to take a size format — say, 34 inches and 32 ounces — and distribute the wood in a different geometric shape than the traditional form to ensure the fattest part of the bat is located where the player makes the most contact. Standard bats taper toward an end cap that is as thick diametrically as the sweet spot of the barrel. The torpedo bat moves some of the mass on the end of the bat about 6 to 7 inches lower, giving it a bowling-pin shape, with a much thinner end.
How does it help hitters?
The benefits for those who like swinging with it — and not everyone who has swung it likes it — are two-fold. Both are rooted in logic and physics. The first is that distributing more mass to the area of most frequent contact aligns with players’ swing patterns and provides greater impact when bat strikes ball. Players are perpetually seeking ways to barrel more balls, and while swings that connect on the end of the bat and toward the handle probably will have worse performance than with a traditional bat, that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make for the additional slug. And as hitters know, slug is what pays.
The second benefit, in theory, is increased bat speed. Imagine a sledgehammer and a broomstick that both weigh 32 ounces. The sledgehammer’s weight is almost all at the end, whereas the broomstick’s is distributed evenly. Which is easier to swing fast? The broomstick, of course, because shape of the sledgehammer takes more strength and effort to move. By shedding some of the weight off the end of the torpedo bat and moving it toward the middle, hitters have found it swings very similarly to a traditional model but with slightly faster bat velocity.
Why did it become such a big story so early in the 2025 MLB season?
Because the New York Yankees hit nine home runs in a game Saturday and Michael Kay, their play-by-play announcer, pointed out that some of them came from hitters using a new bat shape. The fascination was immediate. While baseball, as an industry, has implemented forward-thinking rules in recent seasons, the modification to something so fundamental and known as the shape of a bat registered as bizarre. The initial response from many who saw it: How is this legal?
OK. How is this legal?
Major League Baseball’s bat regulations are relatively permissive. Currently, the rules allow for a maximum barrel diameter of 2.61 inches, a maximum length of 42 inches and a smooth and round shape. The lack of restrictions allows MLB’s authorized bat manufacturers to toy with bat geometry and for the results to still fall within the regulations.
Who came up with the idea of using them?
The notion of a bowling-pin-style bat has kicked around baseball for years. Some bat manufacturers made smaller versions as training tools. But the version that’s now infiltrating baseball goes back two years when a then-Yankees coach named Aaron Leanhardt started asking hitters how they should counteract the giant leaps in recent years made by pitchers.
When Yankees players responded that bigger barrels would help, Leanhardt — an MIT-educated former Michigan physics professor who left academia to work in the sports industry — recognized that as long as bats stayed within MLB parameters, he could change their geometry to make them a reality. Leanhardt, who left the Yankees to serve as major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins over the winter, worked with bat manufacturers throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons to make that a reality.
When did it first appear in MLB games?
It’s unclear specifically when. But Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton used a torpedo bat last year and went on a home run-hitting rampage in October that helped send the Yankees to the World Series. New York Mets star Francisco Lindor also used a torpedo-style bat last year and went on to finish second in National League MVP voting.
Who are some of the other notable early users of torpedo bats?
Corking bats involves drilling a hole at the end of the bat, filling it in and capping it. The use of altered bats allows players to swing faster because the material with which they replace the wood — whether it’s cork, superballs or another material — is lighter. Any sort of bat adulteration is illegal and, if found, results in suspension.
Could a rule be changed to ban them?
Could it happen? Sure. Leagues and governing bodies have put restrictions on equipment they believe fundamentally altered fairness. Stick curvature is limited in hockey. Full-body swimsuits made of polyurethane and neoprene are banned by World Aquatics. But officials at MLB have acknowledged that the game’s pendulum has swung significantly toward pitching in recent years, and if an offensive revolution comes about because of torpedo bats — and that is far from a guarantee — it could bring about more balance to the game. If that pendulum swings too far, MLB could alter its bat regulations, something it has done multiple times already this century.
So the torpedo bat is here to stay?
Absolutely. Bat manufacturers are cranking them out and shipping them to interested players with great urgency. Just how widely the torpedo bat is adopted is the question that will play out over the rest of the season. But it has piqued the curiosity of nearly every hitter in the big leagues, and just as pitchers toy with new pitches to see if they can marginally improve themselves, hitters will do the same with bats.
Comfort is paramount with a bat, so hitters will test them during batting practice and in cage sessions before unleashing them during the game. As time goes on, players will find specific shapes that are most comfortable to them and best suit their swing during bat-fitting sessions — similar to how golfers seek custom clubs. But make no mistake: This is an almost-overnight alteration of the game, and “traditional or torpedo” is a question every big leaguer going forward will ask himself.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The once and possibly future home of the Tampa Bay Rays will get a new roof to replace the one shredded by Hurricane Milton with the goal of having the ballpark ready for the 2026 season, city officials decided in a vote Thursday.
The St. Petersburg City Council voted 7-1 to approve $22.5 million to begin the repairs at Tropicana Field, which will start with a membrane roof that must be in place before other work can continue. Although the Rays pulled out of a planned $1.3 billion new stadium deal, the city is still contractually obligated to fix the Trop.
“We are legally bound by an agreement. The agreement requires us to fix the stadium,” said council member Lissett Hanewicz, who is an attorney. “We need to go forward with the roof repair so we can do the other repairs.”
The hurricane damage forced the Rays to play home games this season at Steinbrenner Field across the bay in Tampa, the spring training home of the New York Yankees. The Rays went 4-2 on their first homestand ever at an open-air ballpark, which seats around 11,000 fans.
Under the current agreement with the city, the Rays owe three more seasons at the Trop once it’s ready again for baseball, through 2028. It’s unclear if the Rays will maintain a long-term commitment to the city or look to Tampa or someplace else for a new stadium. Major League Baseball has said keeping the team in the Tampa Bay region is a priority. The Rays have played at the Trop since their inception in 1998.
The team said it would have a statement on the vote later Thursday.
The overall cost of Tropicana Field repairs is estimated at $56 million, said city architect Raul Quintana. After the roof, the work includes fixing the playing surface, ensuring audio and visual electronics are working, installing flooring and drywall, getting concession stands running and other issues.
“This is a very complex project. We feel like we’re in a good place,” Quintana said at the council meeting Thursday.
Under the proposed timeline, the roof installation will take about 10 months. The unique membrane system is fabricated in Germany and assembled in China, Quintana said, adding that officials are examining how President Donald Trump’s new tariffs might affect the cost.
The new roof, he added, will be able to withstand hurricane winds as high as 165 mph. Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest hurricanes ever in the Atlantic basin at one point, blasted ashore Oct. 9 south of Tampa Bay with Category 3 winds of about 125 mph.
Citing mounting costs, the Rays last month pulled out of a deal with the city and Pinellas County for a new $1.3 billion ballpark to be built near the Trop site. That was part of a broader $6.5 billion project known as the Historic Gas Plant district to bring housing, retail and restaurants, arts and a Black history museum to a once-thriving Black neighborhood razed for the original stadium.
The city council plans to vote on additional Trop repair costs over the next few months.
“This is our contractual obligation. I don’t like it more than anybody else. I’d much rather be spending that money on hurricane recovery and helping residents in the most affected neighborhoods,” council member Brandi Gabbard said. “These are the cards that we’re dealt.”
College football reporter; joined ESPN in 2008. Graduate of Northwestern University.
Tulane quarterback TJ Finley has been suspended following his arrest Wednesday in New Orleans on a charge of illegal possession of stolen things worth more than $25,000.
Finley, 23, whose name is Tyler Jamal, was booked and released. Tulane said in a statement that the length of the suspension will depend on the outcome of his case. The school cited privacy laws in declining to comment further.
University police responded Wednesday to an address where a truck was blocking a driveway. After looking up the license plate, police saw it registered to a vehicle stolen in Atlanta. Finley arrived to move the car and informed the officer that he had bought the truck recently. He’s scheduled to appear in court June 1.
Finley transferred to Tulane in December after spending the 2024 season with Western Kentucky. He had been competing for the team’s starting quarterback job in spring practice alongside fellow transfers Kadin Semonza and Donovan Leary.
Finley, a native of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, started his college career at LSU before transferring to Auburn for two seasons and then Texas State in 2023. He started five games for both LSU and Auburn but had his most success with Texas State, passing for 3,439 yards and 24 touchdowns.