by Paul Teetor
The Los Angeles Dodgers, riding the tidal wave of two consecutive World Series titles for the first time in franchise history, are heroes to most LA sports fans.
But to the owners and fans of the other 29 Major League Baseball teams, they spend like drunken tech bros who have bought themselves an unfair competitive advantage.
As of Sunday night, the Dodgers had the best record in all of Major League Baseball at 49 wins and 27 losses, a .645 winning percentage. And former LA Angel Shohei Ohtani – the $700 million man — is well on his way to winning his third straight National League MVP award and his first Cy Young award for pitching excellence.
Enjoy it while you can, Dodgers fans. Because next season is likely to be canceled.
Nearing the halfway mark of the season, it is safe to say – barring an epic collapse — that the Dodgers will earn a post-season playoff slot.
As two-time defending World Series champions, the Dodgers figure to win the National League West easily for the 12th time in the last 13 seasons and should be heavy favorites to win their third consecutive World Series.
Of course, anything can happen in playoff baseball. Unlike in basketball or football, the better team does not always win. Upsets abound when a hitter gets red hot or a pitcher suddenly becomes dominant for a couple of starts. After all, the only perfect game in World Series history was thrown by Don Larsen, a Yankee pitcher who was, at best, a mediocre journeyman. But in the 1956 World Series that the Yankees won 4-3 over the Dodgers, that unlikely perfect game was the difference between winning and losing the series.
After the Dodgers make history yet again by hopefully winning their third straight World series with a Shohei Ohtani perfect game and another Freddie Freeman walk off home run in an extra-inning game 7, the outlook for Dodgers fans next season is bleak.
So enjoy this season while you can, Dodgers fans: there almost certainly will not be a baseball season next year, or at least not a timely start to the season.
And it’s all because the Dodgers unprecedented success is driving the other 29 teams – and their owners – well, batty.
It all has to do with the widespread perception that the Dodgers are buying their success. They not only lead MLB teams in winning percentage; they also lead MLB teams in spending on player payroll at $420 million. That figure jumps to $515 million if you include the luxury tax, which MLB calls the “competitive balance tax.”
Compare that figure to the Miami Marlins, who have an $80 million player payroll.
That payroll disparity is what is driving the impending cancellation of next season.
With the current collective bargaining agreement – which does not include a salary cap — expiring a month after the World Series, the battle lines are already being drawn.
This week the owners issued a draft proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement. It includes a hard salary cap of $245 million, with a mandatory salary floor of $171 million – a clause the players union has said it will never accept under any circumstances.
If the players union votes to accept those terms, the Dodgers would be forced to trim approximately $175 million from their payroll, while the Marlins would be forced to add approximately $90 million.
But the players are adamantly opposed to a hard salary cap and say they will never accept it. They say the “competitive balance tax” takes care of the disparity between small-market and big-market teams.
Big spending teams like the Dodgers and New York Mets pay tens of millions in dollars in luxury tax money that is then redistributed to the teams that spend less than them. The idea was that they use that free money to sign better players so as to compete on more of an even field, but most of the teams receiving that money simply put it in their pocket and keep on losing – and complaining about the Dodgers overpaying for players like this past winter’s top free agent, outfielder Kyle Tucker.
Complicating the players position: all the other major sports leagues — primarily the National Basketball Association and the National Football League — have salary caps, and both leagues are doing very well with them. They point to the undisputed fact that the NBA has had a new champion every year for the last seven years – a sign of the “parity” that most owners say they want so that every team has an equal shot at winning.
Meanwhile, no MLB team that plays in the bottom half of the nation’s media markets has won a World Series title since the Kansas City Royals in 2015.
Whichever side you support – billionaire owners who want to be saved from themselves, or multi-millionaire players who consider themselves capitalists entitled to whatever they can make on the open market – the last time this issue raised its ugly head in 1994 it led to one of the longest strikes in pro sports history.
The stand-off turned into a 232-day player strike that cancelled the 1994 World Series. And even when baseball finally resumed in 1995 after the owners backed down, baseball had lost so many fans that it was in danger of becoming a second-tier sport until the summer of 1998, when Mark Maguire, Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey Jr. and a host of other sluggers used performance enhancing drugs to break all the home run records and usher in MLB’s darkest period: the steroid era.
Another complicating factor: the players are convinced the owner’s explanation that they want to increase competition and fairness through the adoption of a salary cap is a cover story for their real reason for wanting a cap: it will increase the value of their franchises if and when they choose to sell them.
Costs will be predictable within a narrow range set by the salary floor and cap, and therefore team owners can control costs, increase profits and maximize franchise values.
So really it comes down to player greed versus owner greed. All Ball’s prediction: neither side gives an inch and the entire 2027 season is canceled.
There’s no one to root for in this game.
Enjoy the remaining games while you can.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
