&gt;<i>An interesting parallel is baseball.</i><p>It&#x27;s funny you choose baseball as the sporting example, as it&#x27;s without a salary cap.<p>If you look at hockey and basketball, this has been a strategy for a long time because teams <i>have</i> to remain below the salary cap.  As such, bad contracts are traded around all the time to make room for payroll.  Stars sometimes change teams for essentially nothing but cap space.<p>I guess it interesting that a baseball team is doing it in a world where there are no spending caps.