Who is to blame for baseball's problems?
After the Dodgers' latest signing, MLB players, owners and fans all agree that the sport needs fixing. But no one can agree on who's at fault. Can we?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we discuss the intersection of sports and money—with some extra humor and opinion. Today we’re baking blame pies.
Baseball fans around the country let out a collective groan last week when Tarik Skubal, the best pitcher available at the trade deadline, ended up going to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the sport’s best team.
Skubal is just the latest in an embarrassment of riches for the Dodgers, who have won the last two World Series titles and are heavy favorites to win a third. The team’s full functional payroll this year is $430 million, about $70 million more than the next closet team (Mets) and way more than double the median ($206 million).
The Dodgers’ luxury tax bill—paid as a result of its salary excesses—will alone top the entire payrolls for a dozen MLB teams.
The team’s off-field spending and on-field success have definitely sapped much of the sport’s parity. And that will be front-and-center as owners and players draw their battle lines in what figures to be an ugly labor fight. Owners want a salary cap to fix the current spending imbalance; players want other owners to spend more.
So who’s responsible for baseball’s current situation? The four of us took a stab at answering the question via everyone’s favorite edible accusation, blame pies!
EBEN’S PIE
I’m no baseball expert, but I know enough to know that the eventual price tag for three months of Tarik Skubal—$9.5 million and three mid-tier prospects—is something many MLB teams could afford. The fact that none matched the Dodgers’ offer is either collusion or resignation, but the distinction doesn’t really matter. Both indicate the real problem: that baseball’s other owners are responsible for feeding this ever-growing imbalance.
Los Angeles hoarding talent and World Series rings gives owners the perfect boogeyman to hold up as the reason the sport needs a salary cap. Never mind the fact that there are already plenty of ways MLB supports those very teams. For one, there’s vibrant revenue sharing, a system that the Dodgers alone will boost to the tune of $200 million this year. There are also three-game playoff series, which are highly volatile by design, and so many postseason slots that an 83-win team (!) snuck in last year.1
Owners claim an overwhelming amount of baseball fans want a salary cap, but they seem to be spending a whole lot of time and effort trying to convince a group that they simultaneously contend needs no convincing. At times this season MLB ran ads on MLB.tv, featuring man-on-the-street testimonials, newspaper clippings and data viz all advocating for change.
Breaking something then complaining about the environment in which it was broken is a deeply cynical (and delicate) slight of hand. I’d say it requires a magician’s cape and wand, but since we’re talking about baseball here, maybe it just necessitates a hot dog costume.
JACOB’S PIE
The Dodgers still have a long way to go for a third straight World Series title, but Los Angeles has already succeeded in driving everyone else crazy. Let’s take a step back…
Dynasties are good for sports, but only when they feel earned on even terms. And yet, baseball has always featured structural inequality; five franchises have won more World Series (65) than the other 25 combined (56).
The collapse of regional sports networks has destroyed a key revenue source for mid-market clubs, but we’ve still seen the likes of the D’Backs and Orioles make free-agent splashes in the last two offseasons. The math is mixed on whether the current era is more uneven than past golden ages. And as Kurt recently explained, the Dodgers’ revenue-sharing exception is not as impactful as it might appear.
So, why the uproar now? The hidden culprit I see is the length of MLB’s summer seasons, for two reasons.
1 - It gives LA cause to stockpile ever more talent. Injuries and disappointing performances lent the Dodgers extra incentive to grab Tarik Skubal at the trade deadline. They’re already all-in right now, so what’s another $10 million and a few more prospects out the door?
2 - It’s early August, and after the trade market closed, what else do we have to talk about but the same old arguments about the Big, Bad Dodgers? Seven teams already have a 95+% chance of making the playoffs, and all anyone seems to care about these days are rings, rather than the journey to them. That’s guaranteed to lead to a couple teams spending big to give themselves the best odds in a highly random postseason, while the rest settle for mediocrity.2 The dog days of summer suddenly feel like whine weeks.
LEV’S PIE
There is a team that could, and should, do exactly what the Dodgers are doing. The team in the biggest market in the country 🗽, which is worth more than the Dodgers and makes roughly as much money as the Dodgers. The team that led MLB in payroll nearly every season from 1994 to 2013 💰 and became known as the “Evil Empire” 😈. The team with 27 World Series titles 🏆.
What happened to the New York Yankees of my childhood? The Yankees are not supposed to be merely good. They’re supposed to be the pinnacle of excellence. And they have rolled over and let the Dodgers take over the league. The Dodgers have a better farm system, they defer player compensation, they made the Skubal trade when anyone could’ve offered more, and they attract better free agents. The Dodgers even installed Japanese-style bidet toilets in their clubhouse to lure Roki Sasaki.
The 2024 Yankees-Dodgers World Series renewed a historic rivalry and “brought back” baseball, with the best TV ratings for a non-seven-game World Series since... 2009, the previous time the Yankees were in it. This could’ve been the rivalry of the 2020s, but the Yankees haven’t held up their end of the bargain. They’re currently losing their division to a team with 1/3 their payroll.
I’m also giving 10% blame to the Mets for lighting money on fire instead of getting their act together and posing a legitimate threat to the Dodgers in the NL. Then obviously you have to acknowledge the lack of a salary cap or a salary floor, which every other major sports league has, yada yada...
All I know is Aaron Judge would have hit 80 home runs this year if he had a Japanese toilet 🇯🇵🚽
MATT’S PIE
I would like to caveat this take with the fact that I think that ring chasing objectively isn’t an issue in baseball. It’s also damn near impossible to do in the sport given the complexity of roster construction, the number of at-bats per game, pitchers needing rest days, etc. Not even accounting for the “that’s baseball, Suzyn” effect, i.e. the complete and utter strangeness that is baseball on any given night. There isn’t really a Kevin Durant joining the Warriors comparison. Tariq Skubal joining the Dodgers (via trade) gives them *checks notes* 12 starters that could take the bump for any team in baseball right now. Sure, facing Skubal, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Snell, etc. more than once in a playoff series is pretty hard to beat, but last year the Blue Jays were inches away from winning Game 7 of the World Series.
What baseball needs is more guys like Mike Trout. Some say he’s the greatest baseball player of all time, I’ve only ever watched him play like 5 times (3 of those for USA baseball). He’s played in three (3) playoff games throughout his illustrious career, but his loyalty to the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles will never be questioned. Does this make him… a loser? Depends on your definition of the term. Trout will never be accused of being a ring chaser though. Guys like Skubal who got traded to LA? Sure they had no choice. I’m also sure they’re not mad about it. Probably gonna get a bag never before seen in Major League Baseball. Free agent signings, how can you be mad at a guy for making the most money ever and signing with the best organization in pro sports? You can’t. Still, it kinda sucks. In every other sport, once a team wins the championship (forget back to back), they usually lose 1-2 of their core guys so they can go somewhere else and be “the guy”. The Dodgers are immune to that, they just keep getting better and better and stars seemingly check their ego at LAX to contribute to the newest dynasty in pro sports.
Now, this may seem like I just talked myself into a “this is a salary cap issue”. My counterpoint to that would be: Juan Soto.
Who do you blame for baseball’s current situation? Let us know in the comments!
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
That team, the Reds, was then swept in the first round by the Dodgers. LOL