Owners say one thing and do another.
The owner of Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles franchise, David Rubenstein, had to approve Pete Alonso’s five-year, $155 million contract. No owner would allow an underling to hand out a contract at that kind of money. A team’s general manager can give out rookie contracts without an owner’s approval as that is standard working conditions for both a club official and a rookie. But the odd thing about Rubenstein handing out the deal to Alonso is this. In 2025 David Rubenstein, the new owner of the Baltimore Orioles franchise, was singing off of the same sheet music as owners who have been around the industry for a long time. MLB needed some sort of cost certainty model.
About a year ago, only five months into his tenure as an owner, Rubenstein sounded a lot like the Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. “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 during the World Economic Forum. “I suspect we’ll probably have something closer to what the NFL and the NBA have, but there’s no guarantee of that.” Reinsdorf has been an advocate of some sort of salary cap or cost certainty for more than four decades however Reinsdorf proved to be a hypocrite when he signed Albert Belle five-year, $55 million contract in November 1996. Reinsdorf was an architect of the 1994 Major League Baseball strike as one of the hardline owners that included the Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad and the officers of the Chicago Tribune Company that owned the Chicago Cubs franchise who pushed for a salary cap. Reinsdorf then handed out a huge contract to Belle. Owners say one thing and do the opposite.
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Pete Alonso
