Cody Snavely
The 2025 Major League Baseball offseason is finally just about over. The Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers are set to begin a two-game series in Tokyo, Japan, as part of the league’s World Tour program, which the league has adopted over the past several seasons to promote the game of baseball.
The Dodgers, coming off their eighth World Series title in franchise history last season with their five-game series win over the New York Yankees, did not become complacent in the offseason, spending roughly $450 million, pushing their 2025 luxury tax payroll to approximately $390 million.
This is also coming off the previous winter, when after their second consecutive first-round postseason exit to divisional rivals, the Dodgers spent over $1 billion, albeit $700 million, on two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani.
Regardless, the Dodgers’ spending spree and title contention have been the talk around baseball, gaining criticism and praise for putting together what is, by most accounts, a modern-day super team.
One topic that multiple fans have thrown around, members of the media, and even Major League owners has been the incorporation of a league-wide salary cap, and most recently, that sentiment has been shared by Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort.
In an interview with Mark Kiszla of The Denver Gazette, Monfort, 70, shared his desire for the league to integrate a salary cap.
“Something’s got to happen. The competitive imbalance in baseball has gotten to the point of ludicrosity now. It’s an unregulated industry,” Monfort told The Denver Gazette.
“The only way to fix baseball is to do a salary cap and a floor. With a cap, comes a floor. For a lot of teams, the question is: How do they get to the floor? And that includes us, probably. But on some sort of revenue-split deal, I would be all-in.”
Monfort took it a step further, attacking the Rockies’ National League West foe, the Los Angeles Dodgers, saying their spending has ruined the parity of the sport, giving them an unfair advantage.
“The Dodgers are the greatest poster children we could’ve had for how something has to change; sports are supposed to have some sort of fairness, right? There’s got to be some purity.”
The angered claims are not new for the Dodgers, who, since being sold in 2012 to Guggenheim Partners, an investment firm worth well over $300 billion, have been consistently in the top five of league payroll. This, in turn, has brought great success to the franchise, including four National League Pennants and two World Series Championships.
One of the louder arguments from people against what the Dodgers are doing is the way the team has deferred over $1 billion in player contracts until the 2040s, but even the Arizona Diamondbacks owner, Ken Kendrick, stated the team is not gaming the system.
“All of us have done deferred contracts. So under the CBA you’re required to set up an account, you can’t access that money; So there’s value, but it’s being overplayed at this point to create the viewpoint there is an economic windfall for them beyond what they will be getting.”
While Monfort is fixated on the Dodgers, perhaps he should look inward at a larger problem: Major League Baseball teams making bad decisions with their money.
Monfort has owned the Colorado Rockies since the team’s inception in 1992 and, in that time, has not won the National League West once. Despite making the postseason five times in franchise history, including a World Series appearance in 2007, each berth to the dance was via the Wild Card.
The same Rockies who traded arguably their greatest player in their franchise history, Nolan Arenado, but paying down $50 million of his $199 million remaining to actively play elsewhere during his prime just to then sign an aging and inconsistent Kris Bryant to a 7-year, $182 million contract to play all but 159 games across the last three seasons.
The Rockies are coming off back-to-back one hundred-loss seasons, and being in a competitive National League West with the San Diego Padres, San Fransisco Giants, Arizona Diamondbacks, and, of course, the Dodgers won’t help the Rockies improve that win total.
Still, it seems that Monfort doesn’t care about his team’s present success, as he has considered selling the team.
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