{"id":896212,"date":"2026-10-27T09:30:30","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T09:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/896212\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T09:30:30","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T09:30:30","slug":"the-world-series-no-one-wanted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/896212\/","title":{"rendered":"The World Series No One Wanted"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do we want from a World Series? Or, maybe more existentially, what do we want from baseball? The sport has seemed to be in a perpetual state of crisis for as long as I\u2019ve been alive: labor disputes, performance-enhancing-drug and sign-stealing scandals, widening payroll disparities, the complicated intrusion of sabermetrics<\/a>, declining television ratings, games that take five hours to finish. Somewhere along the line, the national pastime, as it were, lost its grip on the American imagination. And what, or who, was to blame? The M.L.B. cracked down on steroid use, punished teams accused of cheating, and added measures to speed up the pace of play, instituting a pitch clock and limiting mound visits and pickoff attempts. Perhaps because of these interventions, baseball has enjoyed a recent surge of renewed enthusiasm. The past two World Series\u2014between the Dodgers and the Yankees, in 2024, and, last year, between the Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays\u2014saw a spike in ratings, and a more inspired cultural reception. I\u2019m prone to thinking it\u2019s the stars: tuning into a Dodgers game means watching Shohei Ohtani<\/a>, the greatest ballplayer to ever live, play alongside future Hall of Famers Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Clayton Kershaw. The Yankees\u2019 run to the World Series, in 2024, saw them trot out a revamped murderers\u2019 row of Aaron Judge<\/a>, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton. These were titans of the home run, outlandish talents whose bats looked like toothpicks in their hands. Maybe it was the cities they played for, too, the major metropolitan areas that made the pageantry feel that much more grandiose. You didn\u2019t need to understand what OPS or WHIP meant when you watched last year\u2019s Game Seven masterpiece between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays. You just needed to behold the go-ahead home runs and diving grabs from the stars whose names even your co-workers knew.<\/p>\n

But this concentration of top-level talent in the league\u2019s biggest markets has beget another apparent crisis for baseball. Unlike the other major American sports, the M.L.B. imposes no cap on team spending, making it so that monoliths like the Los Angeles clubs can shell out several times as much for their players than smaller budget teams like, say, the Brewers or the Rays. Ohtani, of the Dodgers, earns about three times as much annually as the entire Rays starting lineup; Juan Soto, of the Mets, makes roughly the same as the Brewers\u2019 nine-man group. Mark Attanasio, the Brewers owner, is one of the many team governors who believes a salary cap \u201cnot only will help us compete, but more importantly all of the teams with lower payrolls, too,\u201d as he argued at a recent press conference. With the league\u2019s collective-bargaining agreement set to expire in December, owners like Attanasio will contend that a revised revenue-sharing system will promote parity and level the playing field, whereas the players, represented by their union, are willing to strike\u2014even for an entire season\u2014if their billionaire bosses continue to insist on a salary cap. \u201cThe opportunity for players to get paid is what this is all about,\u201d Bryce Harper, of the Philadelphia Phillies, said in July. Cody Bellinger, of the Yankees, put it more pointedly: \u201cIf the billionaires are wanting it, they\u2019re billionaires for a reason.\u201d He went on, \u201cThey want to continue to enhance their portfolio as much as possible. Us players understand that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It can certainly be argued that the Dodgers are bastardizing baseball\u2019s competitive balance<\/a>, gleefully outbidding every team during free agency because, well, they can afford to. (This was once the domain of the Yankees, who, compared with the Dodgers, now seem thrifty.) Their big-money strategy has undoubtedly worked: they have won three of the past six World Series, and will likely be contenders for years to come. But spending money is not a surefire path to success. The Los Angeles Angels have repeatedly lapsed into losing seasons despite doling out huge contracts to big-name free agents, and the San Francisco Giants have suffered several consecutive below-five-hundred seasons after investing in a slurry of high-priced talent. (I\u2019ll spare you, Mets fans\u2014finishing last in the N.L. East, with the highest payroll in baseball, surely hurts enough.) Baseball rosters are large and unwieldy; the margins between success and failure are slim and hard to control for. There is no equivalent to a LeBron James shaping every possession of an N.B.A. Finals game, or a Tom Brady dictating his team\u2019s every offensive drive. Baseball is an ensemble game, a wildly erratic sport to predict. As Roger Angell wrote<\/a>, for The New Yorker, in 2011, the sport \u201calways remains a fraction beyond our reach.\u201d An extra left-hander in the bullpen might determine whether a team advances in the playoffs; a scrawny kid taken in the twenty-fifth round of the M.L.B. draft, earning the league-minimum salary, might make a game-saving play in the World Series. After the Brewers swept the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, the Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said, in a postgame interview, that the Dodgers \u201cmay have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we have a bunch of gamers.\u201d Because that\u2019s how baseball goes, doesn\u2019t it? Slumps and funks come for everyone, and a five-foot-nine right fielder for the Brewers named Sal Frelick might launch a home run in Game Two of the World Series to cap off a thrilling late-game comeback. Sometimes a sacrifice bunt and a sturdy bullpen can make up for hundreds of millions of dollars in salary disparity. Sometimes the money only takes you so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do we want from a World Series? Or, maybe more existentially, what do we want from baseball?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":896213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1558,130270,13090,363,99,19632],"class_list":["post-896212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-baseball","tag-m-l-b","tag-major-league-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-sports","tag-world-series"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896212","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=896212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/896213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}