White Sox would stand to benefit if MLB capped front office spending

While Major League Baseball won’t be getting a salary cap for payrolls anytime soon, they’ve managed to implement ceilings in other key areas, with slot values for the amateur draft, and hard, punitive limits for the international market.

Now Evan Drellich says the league is looking at leveling the playing field in front offices by seeing if they can crack down on how much teams spend on technology, player development, scouting and health.

A league spokesperson said MLB’s focus has been on technology vendors, rather than staffing.

“There is nothing happening on that front,” the spokesperson said. “What we are focused on is gathering information on vendor costs to find potential cost savings through efficiencies and to ensure equal access to all technology.”

But multiple officials who have been briefed on or participated in some of these conversations said the thinking extends to personnel, as well. At least some clubs would enjoy seeing caps on spending in any area that can influence on-field success, player salaries or otherwise. Executives with smaller-market teams have long lamented the task of keeping up with the spending capabilities of larger market teams.

It was helpful to see Driveline’s Kyle Boddy agree with the league’s stated rationale, as he said the league has successfully achieved data standardization with PITCHf/x and Trackman data, making it easier for teams to get involved, and for systems to talk to each other.

And as somebody who celebrates the adoption of USB-C as the default method for charging devices, I get that part. But when it comes to limiting the amount of personnel teams can carry, you’re probably free to maintain your skepticism and expect MLB to govern down to the level of its cheapest teams.

This news broke as the White Sox prepared to open a series against the Dodgers, and the two teams provide a study in contrast both on and off the field. Their front office directories provide evidence of the sizable investment gap in non-playing personnel and tech, which you’ll see below.

I had to exercise some editorial discretion in the following tale of the tape because the White Sox and Dodgers format their front office pages differently. The White Sox divided theirs into a few departments, and they also listed multiple people under the same job title. The Dodgers did the opposite: no subcategories, but every employee got his own listing. I started with everybody underneath the chief baseball officer — Ken Williams for the White Sox, Andrew Friedman for the Dodgers — and tried to filter out some inconsistencies toward the end (the Dodgers incorporated their clubhouse attendants, the White Sox did not).

Just about all of these changes favored the White Sox in terms of reducing the gap, so I suppose you can credit them for some level of honesty. They did not try to change the font size or expand the margins to meet the page count quota. But even after making these changes, the Dodgers’ list just keeps going.

“Of course the Dodgers have a huge front office,” you might say, “because they spend on everything.” And you wouldn’t be wrong, but one look at the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office page shows it’s not specifically a lifestyle of the rich and famous. I’d do the same exercise with a side-by-side comparison except they use completely different formatting that would take too long to amend, so just click on the link and put some miles on your mouse scroll wheel. Deep pockets help everything, of course, but it reflects priorities more than resources.

Jerry Reinsdorf’s White Sox have tended to only invest in the things they can see. They were among the league’s lowest spenders in the draft and international markets when both were unregulated, but the league bailed them out by instituting budgets with punitive overage penalties. It’s likely that a cap on front office spending would be the only way to pull the White Sox up to league-average levels in this area. Rick Hahn has maintained that the White Sox’s front office listing doesn’t reflect everybody doing work for them, but their “quiet” approach has generated equally faint results, so there’s no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Watching MLB continually implement rules that bend markets toward the White Sox’s will brings to mind the old quote that Reinsdorf rehashed at the Milkin Institute conference last month, in which he said teams are “at the mercy of your dumbest competitors.” It’s hard to know if he realizes which side of that the equation the White Sox fall, or if he just doesn’t care.

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