With only about a week until pitchers and catchers report to spring training camps, we are starting to see the beginning of the end of this offseason free agency window and, with it, the potential beginning of the end of this version of the MLB itself. We’ve seen wild budgetary moves by the Dodgers, and the talent gap between the top five richest teams and the rest of the league is widening. The MLB’s flawed free agency system, and the realization that some teams are simply not trying very hard just puts even more of a focus on the “haves” and “have nots” of Major League Baseball.
And, to be clear, we’re not going after the Dodgers here. However, there is a great piece that Ben Lindbergh wrote at The Ringer that sums up the problem MLB is running into here:
MLB’s disparities in market size and spending aren’t perfectly paralleled by disparities in either regular-season standings or postseason results. More so than a leaguewide competitive-balance problem, what MLB has is a handful of teams that aren’t trying hard, and a couple of teams—if we credit the deep-pocketed Mets for their attempt to be Dodgers East—who are acting as if money is more or less no object. Are the Dodgers bad for baseball? Maybe. More accurately, though, they’re becoming a bad look for baseball. And they don’t seem to care what they look like, as long as they win.
In other words, the Dodgers are optimizing the disparities and competitive flaws of the current CBA.
Returning to the video game world, a flawed free agency system has always created unique problems for the MLB The Show franchise. The disparity between the experience of big-market teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets and small-market teams like the Athletics, Twins, and Marlins isn’t necessarily reflected in the game. For instance, the Marlins budget in MLB The Show 24 is $122 million, but in reality, it is only $67 million this year.
On the high end of the market, MLB The Show does a better job of accurately portraying salary space, with the game accounting for the Dodgers’ massive $355 million budget and the Mets’ slightly smaller, but still atrocious, $280 million budget. With the numbers technically accurate, it becomes less so as you progress through the franchise mode, with the high market teams losing revenue year over year as small market teams make giant leaps forward in that regard. After two years, my Mets franchise has lost around $30 million in revenue, going from $280 million to $250 million, and my A’s franchise has gone from a $90 million budget to a $125 million budget. It’s San Diego Studio’s attempt at fixing the MLB’s problem, and I’m salty about it.
The game creates an unrealistic revenue trend to, I guess, make it “fair,” but that’s where they go wrong. The MLB isn’t fair! It never has been, and until they implement some sort of salary cap with a salary floor attached to it, it probably won’t ever be fair — even if we can point to competitive balance not being that bad. It actually creates a unique landscape for nerds like me, who love the MLB offseason often more than the regular season. The way small market teams have to develop in-house prospects and make the most out of bargain-bin players on tiny contracts is fascinating. It’s an objectively bad and broken system that inherently benefits the biggest and wealthiest cities while punishing smaller cities (with the caveat being this applies to the small-market teams actually trying). Still, it creates a fun challenge for anyone who has ever imagined themselves as a GM for a professional sports team.
That challenge is what initially attracted me to franchise mode many years ago, trying to recreate the magic of Moneyball on my PS3. Building up my Twins roster by trading aging stars like Joe Mauer and Brian Dozier for prospects like Austin Meadows, Ian Happ, and Jack Flaherty. Together with Byron Buxton and Jose Berrios, I had a young core of stars on which to build a team. I used what little cap space I had to add veterans. The experience was thrilling. I was living out the fantasy of turning an underdog team into champions.
That thrill has diminished over the years, and indeed, the fact that I’ve been playing iterations of the game for a decade now has contributed to it. It’s also because player acquisition and development has changed massively in MLB over the last 10 years, and MLB The Show hasn’t kept up. It doesn’t feel realistic, nor does it reflect the actual nature of the MLB offseason, and I think that’s a shame.
Say what you will about the MLB free agency system (I think it is inherently flawed and has to change), but as a fan of true-to-life simulations, I think MLB The Show should stop trying to make it “fair” as well. Get rid of the $40 million-a-year cap on salaries — we now have 3 separate players above that number, including Shohei Ohtani’s crazy 70-million-a-year deal (even if we know a bunch is deferred), and we know that will grow exponentially in the years to come. 99 overall players should be demanding at least 50 million dollars a year, if not more, depending on position. And two-way players like Ohtani should demand 1.5X whatever their overall suggests they’re worth.
The Show must also adjust their free agency logic for mid-to-upper tier players. I signed Willy Adames to one of my franchises late last year for a 3-year, $33 million deal ($11 million a year) only to learn the next day that he was signed by the Giants to a 7-year $182 million deal ($26 million a year). I also have Walker Buehler signed to an $8.2 million-a-year deal, while in real life, he got a $21 million deal. This discrepancy makes the game feel unrealistic and too easy. They need to make the free agency market more competitive, and they need to increase player demands.
It’s also critical for salary demands to inflate as time goes on, just like in real life, and they need to stop reversing revenue trends. There is no reason why the Yankees and Dodgers revenues would decrease by $30 million after adding superstars like Soto and Ohtani, while the Athletics — whose best players are Zack Gelof and Brent Rooker — would be gaining 30 million in revenue. If you ask me, the team revenue increase/decrease should be tied directly to the team’s overall ratings. Because in real life, if your team stinks, fewer people show up to games, and when fewer people show up to games, you make less money. In short, no amount of “revenue sharing” can make up for the fact that you make six times less money than the richest teams.
The gap between the rich and poor in baseball is growing fast, and while I would love for that to change at some point, it would be easier for MLB The Show to simply adjust to reflect real life, at least for the fans that want that. I would love a slider for offseason competitiveness and revenue realism so players like myself can fight and claw our way to a World Series championship with a Moneyball roster strategy, while more casual or gameplay-focused players can relax and enjoy a fun game.
I want to crank that slider up to maximum and suffer through a grueling rebuilding process as rich teams with five separate former MVPs absolutely rip us to shreds! I want to be forced to start an outfield consisting of Mike Tauchman, Jake Cave, and David Peralta. I want to build up a young corps of superstars just to trade them away once they’re in the final year of arbitration. Ya know, MLB things.
We all know that the MLB payroll structure is fundamentally broken, and I haven’t even discussed the Dodgers deferred payments concept very much. But it also makes the MLB, and specifically MLB The Show’s franchise mode, so unique. In no other sports game will the salary cap allow you to sign Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes, and Blake Snell in one offseason. But if you take the Dodgers or Yankees, you might be able to pull that off. In no other sports game can you spend next to nothing on payroll and still win a championship, but as the Athletics or the Marlins, you certainly can. MLB The Show needs to give us the broken system that we crave.
We know it’s terrible, but please don’t try to fix it, let MLB the Show 25 be bad, Sony, please!
Published: Feb 5, 2025 03:23 pm