Before we get going, here’s a video of the folks back home at Holywood celebrating Rory McIlroy winning the Masters yesterday.
Now.
Salary caps are evil.
1. The WNBA’s salary cap is bad. Others are worse.
The WNBA Draft is tonight, and assumed first overall pick Paige Bueckers is set to earn less than eighty thousand dollars when the Dallas Wings call her name. The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement allots a $78,831 salary to each of the first four picks. By their fourth year, those four players can narrowly make six figures. As you would guess, all the other picks make less. Contrast this to the NHL, where even the minimum salary is $750,000, almost ten times what Bueckers will make. The NHL is the smallest Big Four league economically.
Bueckers wasn’t involved in the collective bargaining process. Neither was Caitlin Clark. The process happened a long time ago, and as it goes in all pro sports labor negotiations, the players union—made of veterans—made veterans its priority. Even so, Jackie Young only makes a little more than $250,000 this season. She’s the highest-paid player in the WNBA. The problem is not the rookie contract scale. The problem is the salary cap.
We’re accustomed to salary caps in American sports, to the extent that a lot of the “pay the players!” people are clamoring for one in college basketball and football. This is bad. We shouldn’t be ok with this. All a salary cap does is limit how hard owners can try.
Sure, the investments can go elsewhere. They can go to facilities and trainers and charter flights, a recent addition to the WNBA’s routine (they flew commercial until shockingly recently). But none of those things directly impacts winning as much as landing better players. Salary caps are an excuse to dampen competition. Making the whole thing worse, salary caps are justified through the opposite argument, an argument that they promote competition. Leagues tell fans that without the salary cap, all the best players will end up on the Lakers, and that teams like the Cleveland Guardians—the fourth-winningest team this last decade in Major League Baseball, which doesn’t have a hard cap—will get smoked.
To be fair to the WNBA, salaries are naturally going to be low in a league which has by some accounts never recorded a profitable year. But at the same time: They’re expecting the next WNBA expansion franchise to come with a $250 million price tag. The NFL’s salary cap is something like 3% of the value of its most valuable franchise. The WNBA’s is something like 0.5% of the value of an expansion team.
Thankfully, the CBA’s getting renegotiated this year. The cap will rise, as will the rookie scale. But the cap’s still going to be there, and that’s messed up. Paige Bueckers would go for a lot more than $78,831 in a free market.
2. I was wrong about the torpedo bats.
The final numbers are in from this past week, and whatever we saw offensively from Monday through Thursday did not stick around. That, or players figured out their new torpedo bats really fast.
I think the real explanation for that offensive dip was probably the cold snap, and if you’re a gambling type, I’d guess this isn’t any help to you. (I think weather’s pretty accurately priced into MLB totals markets, though I’d be happy to learn I’m wrong.) My favorite conspiracy theory, though, is that Major League Baseball got spooked by the torpedo bats and introduced some deader balls. I don’t really buy that MLB is intentionally tinkering with baseball liveliness, but if they are, it’s funny to imagine the meetings. “Ohtani’s great, but let’s aim for 75 home runs. 85 would be way too many.”
3. Losing Justin Steele might end up helping the Cubs.
As longtime readers know, I’m a Cubs fan and used to blog a decent amount about the Cubs. I’d love to do that again. It’s not in the cards right now. But! The Cubs just took two of three from the Dodgers, Pete Crow-Armstrong is a terror to opposing managers, and Justin Steele’s out for the year.
Wait.
Crap.
There were supposed to be three good things in there.
The deal with Steele is this: It sucks, because we all (“we” being “Cubs fans”) love Justin Steele. It also sucks because Steele’s probably the Cubs’ best pitcher. At the same time, it might work out ok?
Steele’s been great these last three years. Over 82 starts, he’s got a 3.18 ERA and a 3.22 FIP. He strikes out more than a batter an inning, and he averages almost five and a half innings per start. He’s a bulldog, a fun guy to watch pitch. He’s a great story. It was really cool in Tokyo that three of the four starters were from Japan and one was from a small town outside of Lucedale, Mississippi, which itself has a population under three thousand.
Those numbers, though, are not Cy Young numbers. They’re not Playoff Number 1 Starter numbers. Preseason, FanGraphs projected 28 pitchers to contribute more significantly than Steele. Among those: Sandy Alcantara and Pablo López, each of whom comes with injury concerns but each of whom could be available in a trade at some point this year. Alcantara’s already available.
For all our beef with how the Ricketts family spins its numbers (sparknotes: The Cubs are worth more now than what they’ve invested, and Wrigley Field makes them a lot of money that doesn’t show up on the Cubs’ books), the Cubs have occupied a tough position the last five-plus years in that they’ve consistently been more than two pieces away from forming a contender. Now? They might be only two pieces away from forming a contender. The bigger of those pieces is an ace, and it was an ace even before Steele went down.
Ideally, the Cubs would have made runs this winter at Corbin Burnes and Max Fried. But they didn’t, and starting pitching was a weakness on paper entering the year, and it’s been a weakness on the stat sheet so far. Obviously, we’d rather Steele be perfectly healthy. But if this results in an upgrade from Steele to Alcantara, that would be an upgrade. It would suck that it took Steele missing the whole season to make the move happen, but it would at least build a better baseball team.
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