Are the Los Angeles Dodgers Ruining Baseball?

Should owners shut down the 2027 season to keep the Dodgers from winning some more?

Major league baseball is a pre-television sport that plays a vast number of regular season games, 2430, about nine times the more lucrative NFL’s 272 regular season games.

It’s hard to care much about the 2268 baseball games scheduled each season that your favorite team isn’t participating in. In contrast, many of the 255 NFL games that your favorite team isn’t in are exciting television spectacles.

So, baseball is mostly a sport for home team fans. Baseball fans tend to be fans of one ballclub not of MLB. In contrast, many Americans are fans of the NFL in general. Hence, the Super Bowl long ago replaced the World Series as the sports highlight of the year.

NFL teams split most of their wealth pretty equally, so any of their 32 teams can win the Super Bowl. For example, over the last decade or so, the top team has been the Chiefs from the small Kansas City metro area.

Bizarre evidence for how the NFL matters more than teams is that for two decades from about 1995 onward, the NFL didn’t bother having a single franchise in the gigantic Los Angeles metropolitan area. Yet, over that time period, the NFL just went from strength to strength.

Baseball teams differ in size and wealth, so the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, and Atlanta Braves have natural advantages over the Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays, and Pittsburgh Pirates. In short, they have more fans, so they have more money to spend on better players.

From CNBC:

From a greatest good for the greatest number perspective, it would seem to make sense for teams with more fans to win more often so that more people are happy. But, the hedonic calculations are actually more complicated than that because lots of people enjoy hating successful teams and are pleased when they lose.

Has any philosopher figured out how to calculate the pleasures of spite?

From the Washington Post sports section:

The Dodgers are winning — again. That just adds fuel to next year’s labor fight.

In this year’s NLCS between the Dodgers and Brewers, much more than a pennant was at stake.

Paywall here.