In interview, Rockies owner Dick Monfort calls for salary cap, floor in MLB

Dick Monfort eschewed any predictions for the Colorado Rockies this spring.

Instead, when the Rockies owner sat down with Mark Kiszla of The Denver Gazette, he suggested a plan for the future of Major League Baseball in the wake of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ budget-blasting, competitive-tax-threshold manipulation to build its Southern California superteam.

And he said the words:

“Salary cap.”

“The only way to fix baseball is to do a salary cap and a floor,” Monfort told The Gazette. “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.”

The Rockies rank 22nd in payroll at $111,224,285 — nearly $210 million below that of the Dodgers. They have the lowest payroll in the NL West by a little over $46 million.

The floor is a key component of such a proposal, because the current spread from the top payroll — the Dodgers at just over $321.04 million — to the bottom — Miami at $47.13 million — is a whopping $273,913,853.

Clubs like the Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays and the Athletics — who don’t even have a city name attached to their moniker anymore — are famously reticent to put together payrolls beyond the bare minimum. When the Marlins did spend to win a World Series in 1997, they promptly tore down the team in a fire sale within months.

To put that in perspective, the difference between the Dodgers and Marlins is larger than the entire payrolls of 27 MLB clubs.

Nine MLB teams have payrolls that are not even one-third the size of the Dodgers, who can tap into the revenue from a 25-year, $8.35-billion local-television revenue stream, the type of financial influx of which most clubs can only dream.

The Rockies, by comparison, lost their local-television deal after the 2023 season when AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain folded. They were left to cobble together Rockies.TV which places their games on a collection of local cable and satellite providers, while providing a streaming option at $19.99 per month and $99.99 per year.

“Sports are supposed to have some sort of fairness, right?” Monfort said to the Gazette. “There’s got to be some purity.”

The Dodgers won their second World Series in five years last fall. There’s nothing unusual about that.

But in the previous offseason, they signed Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a $325-million contract and former Angels star Shohei Ohtani to a $700-million deal that included $680 million of deferred payments.

In the offseason that followed the World Series win, the Dodgers added two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell on on another deal that included deferred money — $66 million of the $182 million.

The deferred contracts allow the Dodgers to circumvent the full penalties of going over the competitive-balance tax threshold of $241 million. For example, if Snell’s contract were simply valued over the five years of the deal, it would count as $36.4 million toward the tax calculation. But because $66 million of ithe salary is deferred, the Dodgers shave $5 million off the luxury-tax valuation.

In all, the Dodgers have over $1 billion of deferred payments on contracts.

“The Dodgers are the greatest poster children we could’ve had for how something has to change,” Monfort told The Gazette.

Deferred payments have been a part of baseball throughout the free-agency era; the contracts for Bruce Sutter and Bobby Bonilla are two of the most famous examples.

Even the Rockies have deferred money on their books. Former Blake Street Bomber Vinny Castilla still draws a deferred salary.

But with the Dodgers running circles around most of MLB — plus the impact on their payment regarding the competitive-balance tax, as it drops the amount they put back into the pool for the rest of MLB — the tone of the conversation changed.

Perhaps the final straw might have been the Dodgers’ January addition of widely coveted Japanese pitching prospect Roki Sasaki. When he chose the Dodgers in January, it seemed a fait accompli; but in that case, he signed for $6.5 million, a cost brought down by MLB’s artificial deflation of salaries for incoming international amateur players.

It was the sort of contract any club could have afforded. But instead of Sasaki being guided through the draft system to a struggling team, he landed in L.A., and the rich got ever richer.

The Dodgers are further proof that when you establish systems without enough guardrails — whether sporting, economic or otherwise — inevitably, someone exploits them.

“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 Gazette.

And as Monfort sees it, it’s not sustainable — even for the major-market clubs.

“Like one of my fellow owners said: The problem is ourselves,” Monfort told The Gazette. “You’ve got 30 owners and they’re all diverse. This system works for the big markets. But it’s gotten to the point where the big markets can’t make any money, because they’re shelling it all out in payroll.”

And at some point, the bill will come due in even Los Angeles — to the tune of over a billion dollars.