Baseball is a truly evil sport.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I have chosen to open my column with this sentence for many reasons, which I will try to sum up here in terms of my horrific experience with the 2025 MLB season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reason 1: The bad guys won again. It was close this time, sure, but that doesn\u2019t change the fact that the 25.98 million people who tuned in to Saturday\u2019s World Series Game 7 were forced to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers \u2014 the reigning champions, with the league\u2019s largest payroll \u2014 lift yet another trophy. This is quite disheartening and rage-inducing for me personally, largely due to the following reasons.<\/p>\n
Reason 2: The New York Mets blew it. Again. At some point \u2014 perhaps when we signed Juan Soto in the largest free-agent contract in MLB history \u2014 I had to come to terms with the fact that my favorite team was no longer one of the good guys. Sure, I still have pride in the 2015 team that made it to the World Series while being 13th in total payroll and starting guys like Lucas Duda and Travis d\u2019Arnaud, but it\u2019s no secret that those days are long gone. All that\u2019s to say, watching the \u201cAmazin\u2019 Mets\u201d \u2014 who threw cash like it was Monopoly money, second only to Los Angeles \u2014 miss the playoffs filled my mind with thoughts far too dark to ever be put down on a page.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But even that indescribable level of disappointment may not be as depressing as my third and final reason:\u00a0<\/p>\n
Reason 3: There\u2019s nothing we can do.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Well, that may be an overstatement. I\u2019m sure someone smarter and better informed than I has some brilliant solution that will make baseball fair again, but that\u2019s far above my pay grade. Instead, I\u2019d like to quickly explain why the implementation of a salary cap, one of the more popular proposed solutions to the present issue, would be equally disastrous to the MLB\u2019s current state.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most prominent roadblock to a salary cap are the players\u2019 contracts themselves. The over $700 million deals of Soto and Shohei Ohtani were only allowed to balloon to this status because of bidding wars from top teams, but at this point the cat\u2019s out of the bag. Contracts like Ohtani\u2019s \u2014 which involves $680 million to be paid out in deferred money nine years from now \u2014 would be basically impossible to grandfather into a new system.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Further, with a cap implemented, the next generation of superstars would be forced to take less money, since the cap would be lower than current top-end payrolls in an attempt to allow smaller markets to catch up. Even though these players would theoretically be producing equivalent outputs, they would be forced to take less money, especially if they want their teams to be competitive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Who would benefit here? The owners. I\u2019m no economics major, but it seems like fairly simple math: Lower payrolls equal larger profit shares for billionaire owners, especially in big markets, and smaller markets still fall behind. This is clear in the NBA, a capped league, where teams in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Miami have been perpetually competitive and attractive to superstars, forcing smaller markets to hope they get lucky (or have a wizard like Sam Presti in charge).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Again, I know of no better alternative. It\u2019s rough to see the same team win with no end in sight, but at least this year\u2019s final product was one of the most entertaining in history. Credit to the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Dodgers too \u2026 I guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Baseball is a truly evil sport.\u00a0 I have chosen to open my column with this sentence for many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-270466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}