{"id":270846,"date":"2025-11-04T12:26:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T12:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/270846\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T12:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T12:26:09","slug":"some-fans-think-baseball-needs-salary-cap-after-the-dodgers-back-to-back-titles-heres-the-problems-with-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/270846\/","title":{"rendered":"Some fans think baseball needs salary cap after the Dodgers\u2019 back-to-back titles. Here\u2019s the problems with that"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n It may be easy to look at the Los Angeles Dodgers\u2019 record-setting payroll and back-to-back World Series titles and think that baseball desperately needs a salary cap.\n <\/p>\n

\n After all, the Dodgers\u2019 total payroll of $350 million is roughly double the league\u2019s average and $84 million more than the previous record for a series champ, which was set by the Dodgers themselves just one year earlier.\n <\/p>\n

\n And there are indications team owners will be pushing for a cap in labor negotiations a year from now when the labor deal between the league and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), the labor union representing nearly 8,000 players in the majors and minors.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cNo one argues that the Kansas City Chiefs are ruining football by dominating the sport because the Chiefs didn\u2019t buy their way to a championship, and it\u2019s perceived that the Dodgers did,\u201d said Victor Matheson, economics professor and expert in the business of sports at the College of the Holy Cross. \u201cAnd, of course, it\u2019s perceived that the Dodgers did so because they (spend) about $100 million more on batters and pitchers in their lineup than the (runner-up Toronto Blue) Jays did.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n But the facts don\u2019t back up the idea that money is everything in baseball, or that a salary cap would solve the Dodgers\u2019 dominance. Because despite the Dodgers\u2019 recent success and deep pockets, there is greater competition within the sport than it appears.\n <\/p>\n

\n Had the Blue Jays pulled off the victory over the Dodgers on Saturday, it would have given baseball its 10th different champion in the last 12 years, a period during which the NFL, with its salary cap, has had only six different teams win the Super Bowl, and the NBA, with its cap, had eight champions.\n <\/p>\n

\n But in baseball, only about 10% of the difference between good teams and bad teams is due to the size of their payroll, said Matheson.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cBut there are so many things that you can\u2019t control, like injuries and like, \u2018Is that great player going to perform well at a key moment?\u2019\u201d Matheson said.\n <\/p>\n

\n Some other estimates, such as one from Andrew Zimbalist, economics professor emeritus at Smith College and a leading expert on the business of sports, put the impact of payroll higher, but still only about 25% of the difference between winning and losing.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n The team with the second-largest payroll in the sport, the New York Mets, were beat to the postseason by the small-market Cincinnati Reds, who were 19th on the payroll list.\n <\/p>\n

\n The team with the best regular season record was not the deep-pocketed Dodgers but the Milwaukee Brewers, with a payroll of about a third of the Dodgers\u2019 and No. 18 of the 30 MLB teams.\n <\/p>\n

\n Yes, the Brewers were eventually swept by the Dodgers in the playoffs. But anything can happen in baseball\u2019s postseason format, even when one team is considered vastly superior to another.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cLargely what happens in the postseason is a product of randomness,\u201d said Zimbalist. \u201cIt\u2019s a product of which team is peaking at the right moment, which team gets better breaks, better luck at the right moment.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n A pair of stellar plays in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series by two of the Dodgers\u2019 lower-paid players \u2014 Miguel Rojas, who hit the game-tying home run, and Andy Pages, who made an extremely difficult catch to prevent the Blue Jays from scoring the winning run \u2014 were all that stood in the way of Toronto winning a title.\n <\/p>\n

\n Efforts to bring about a salary cap to MLB might lead to something quite serious: a lost season \u2014 or more.\n <\/p>\n

\n The MLBPA has made opposition to a salary cap the hill to die on and has refused to agree to any deal that includes one. And the union doesn\u2019t appear willing to change that stance.\n <\/p>\n

\"Some<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to negotiate through the media, but I will tell you this: The issues that we see in the system we know can be addressed without (a salary cap),\u201d union executive director Tony Clark said in a press conference on October 24.\n <\/p>\n

\n But the talk in the sport for well over a year is that the owners are more united than in the past in wanting a salary cap and are ready to go to extremes to get one.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Dodgers\u2019 win could very well increase the chance of a work stoppage that wipes out much, if not all, of the 2027 season, said Zimbalist.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think, yes, (the Dodgers\u2019 win) will raise the stakes a little bit, and make the compromise a little bit harder to achieve,\u201d he said. \u201cSome owners have told me they think that it\u2019ll take a year and a half of a lockout before the players accept the salary cap.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It may be easy to look at the Los Angeles Dodgers\u2019 record-setting payroll and back-to-back World Series titles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270847,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-270846","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\/270846","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=270846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270846\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}