A lady sportswriter in the Washington Post asks some good questions:
Wait, weren’t the Dodgers so unbeatable the sport needs to shut down?
The Milwaukee Brewers swept the Los Angeles Dodgers to advance to the World Series, where they’ll take on another low-payroll team.
October 16, 2026 at 9:00 a.m. EDT1 min
By Stephanie Apstein
The twice-defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers, employers of the best player in baseball history plus two other former MVPs, a half-billion dollar colossus so mighty the sport is about to shut down rather than allow them to continue to dominate,
The baseball franchise owners have been expected to go on strike next year, locking out the players’ union and shutting down the 2027 season. The owners’ chief demand is that labor allow capital to impose a mandatory cartel on itself, a “salary cap” that would prevent ownerships from paying players free market rates.
Even without a salary cap, owning a baseball team is currently a thriving business, with the small market San Diego Padres selling for $3.9 billion this year, up from the $0.8 billion the previous owner paid in 2012, an average annual appreciation of 12%. On the other hand, NFL and NBA franchises are even more expensive to buy, in large part because their owners enjoy a salary cap imposed on their players.
San Diego’s former ownership is the beaux ideal of the baseball players union: they spent a lot on star players and did some moderately expensive upgrades to their 2004 ballpark. The Padres have been second in attendance to the mighty Dodgers in three of the last four seasons.
San Diego County has a population of 3.3 million, while the L.A. Dodgers and L.A. Angels share 16.3 million people in the five counties of greater Los Angeles.
On the other hand, San Diego has a relatively rich fan base, Californians love baseball, San Diego has at present no other pro sports teams in the top 4 sports, and San Diego gets lots of tourists, for whom a baseball game at good-looking Petco Park is an appealing option to go along with a visit to the San Diego Zoo and the Wild Animal Park.
The owners’ plan was to sell their lockout to fans as absolutely necessary to prevent the evil empire of the Dodgers from unfairly winning all the World Series. A salary cap, they argued is the only way for teams in small rust belt cities like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to compete with the Dodgers, New York Yankees, and New York Mets, who are unfairly blessed with more fans. Thus, the owners hoped for the Dodgers’ to win their third straight World Series this year.
finally met an opponent they could not topple: the Milwaukee Brewers, whose entire starting lineup combined makes as much as Shohei Ohtani.
As baseball debates the necessity of a salary cap, its proponents have pointed to the Dodgers’ run as evidence that the sport’s economic system is broken. But on Thursday night, the Brewers (total payroll: $144.5 million, good for No. 19 in the sport) finished off a four-game sweep of Los Angeles in the National League Championship Series.
This was not much of an upset. The Brewers were 103-59 this season, while the Dodgers had the second best record at 100-62. The Brewers took 4 out of 7 from the Dodgers in regular season. The Brewers are really good, even though they have far less star power than the Dodgers.
Milwaukee will play the winner of the American League Championship Series, currently being contested by the Tampa Bay Rays ($96 million, No. 28) and the Cleveland Guardians ($74.8 million, No. 30). No matter the outcome, the real winner will be the salary cap opponents.
Note that this year’s low-payroll World Series will be a bit of a fluke. World Series winners typically come from the top half of teams by spending.
Here is a scatterplot showing average regular season wins (Y axis) vs. team payrolls (X axis) for 2022-2026
Paywall here.
