Baltimore Orioles owner and billionaire Carlyle Group (CG) co-founder David Rubenstein is hitting the yes button on a salary cap for Major League Baseball.
“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 Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I suspect we’ll probably have something closer to what the NFL and the NBA have, but there’s no guarantee of that.”
The free-spending Los Angeles Dodgers barreled through the luxury tax this offseason, with a payroll estimated to exceed $370 million. It would top the payrolls of other big spenders in the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies.
The Baltimore Orioles payroll is in the middle of the pack in MLB at over $150 million for 2025, projected by Fangraphs. Rubenstein — who purchased the team as part of a consortium for $1.725 billion — says he will up the team’s payroll and is renovating its home ballpark Camden Yards. However, he says a larger discussion needs to happen to close the gap between big- and small-market teams.
“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,” explained Rubenstein.
