Posted on 11/02/2025 6:48:08 AM PST by DFG
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Barely satire.
Ever since 1977 (the beginning of the free agency era) the highest bidders for the best players have done well in the World Series sweepstakes. Why bother with good scouting and player development when you can pilfer star players from other teams?
New York Mets: $323,099,999
Los Angeles Dodgers: $321,287,291
New York Yankees: $293,488,972
Philadelphia Phillies: $284,210,820
Toronto Blue Jays: $239,642,532
I liken it to a weekly poker game where three of you show up with $50 every week and two guys show up with $500. Can you win? Sure. And it’s fun to watch a big spender lose. But over time, more often than not, somebody with the $500 is gonna win it all.
In a sense, all baseball teams purchase victory. Did not the Yankee teams of the late fifties buy players from lesser teams? The Dodgers have indeed outspent just about every other franchise, but they have purchased wisely (Ohtani and Yamamoto for instance) and have also stocked themselves with good role players. They won the championship fair and square.
It still needs fixed. Baseball needs a salary cap and salary floor to increase parity. Smaller market teams are now a farm system and “first contract” for developing stars.
Perhaps for the “free agent” era. But in the past, most of their top players would have never been Dodgers. Their old clubs would have never traded them to the Dodgers or anyone else. Today, with free agency, you can develop a young player through the minors, bring him up to the majors and if he's an real star after 4 or 5 years, he's gone to the highest bidder. Good for the player, and good for the wealthy large market teams with money to spend, but bad news for poorer small market teams. IMHO, it is going to kill the game eventually.
Hardly Bee!
Dodgers, Yankees and Mets have had top payrolls for last five years. Add Red Sox and those four teams have dominated spending for a couple decades.
No salary cap will be the death of MLB.
Salary cap? At $400 million can he spend six weeks during the off season to learn the language of the country he’s using?
The Dodgers actually payroll is much higher due to the structure of some contracts. Ohtani, for instance, only accounts for $2 million of that figure, though he’s going to get paid significantly more.
Not really. If you look at one of the best teams in history, the 1961 Yankees, 5 of their 8 regular starters were lifetime Yankees and the other 3 playing for other teams either very early in their careers and at the very end. I was a big baseball fan back then and if you had two or three “new” players from one year to the next, that was a really big deal.
Legalized sports betting will be the death of MLB. And the the NBA. And the NFL. And NCAAF.
Meanwhile...
Keep digging, sportsball, keep digging.
I heard a guy that deals with these salary cap numbers all the time and he made a point during the Brewer series that the disparity between the Dodgers and Brewers payroll was substantial, the truth of the matter is that the Brewers were only using 40-some percent of their total revenue on player contract while the Dodgers were spending 73% (IIRC) on their player contracts. His point was that the Dodgers are investing in their players instead of the ownership’s pocketbook or other aspects of running a baseball organization.
It’s the Players Union that won’t accept a salary cap.
Not the way it works. The highest spending teams also have the best farm systems. They bring them along to compete with vets. If they can make the team, fine. If not they are traded for high value vets from other teams.
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