After Dodgers’ win, a salary cap is looming large over baseball. Here’s why that might be a bad idea

By Chris Isidore, CNN

(CNN) — It may be easy to look at the Los Angeles Dodgers’ record-setting payroll and back-to-back World Series titles and think that baseball desperately needs a salary cap.

After all, the Dodgers’ total payroll of $350 million is roughly double the league’s average and $84 million more than the previous record for a series champ, which was set by the Dodgers themselves just one year earlier.

And there are indications team owners will be pushing for a cap in labor negotiations a year from now when the labor deal between the league and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), the labor union representing nearly 8,000 players in the majors and minors.

“No one argues that the Kansas City Chiefs are ruining football by dominating the sport because the Chiefs didn’t buy their way to a championship, and it’s perceived that the Dodgers did,” said Victor Matheson, economics professor and expert in the business of sports at the College of the Holy Cross. “And, of course, it’s perceived that the Dodgers did so because they (spend) about $100 million more on batters and pitchers in their lineup than the (runner-up Toronto Blue) Jays did.”

But the facts don’t back up the idea that money is everything in baseball, or that a salary cap would solve the Dodgers’ dominance. Because despite the Dodgers’ recent success and deep pockets, there is greater competition within the sport than it appears.

Dollars don’t equal wins

Had the Blue Jays pulled off the victory over the Dodgers on Saturday, it would have given baseball its 10th different champion in the last 12 years, a period during which the NFL, with its salary cap, has had only six different teams win the Super Bowl, and the NBA, with its cap, had eight champions.

But in baseball, only about 10% of the difference between good teams and bad teams is due to the size of their payroll, said Matheson.

“But there are so many things that you can’t control, like injuries and like, ‘Is that great player going to perform well at a key moment?’” Matheson said.

Some other estimates, such as one from Andrew Zimbalist, economics professor emeritus at Smith College and a leading expert on the business of sports, put the impact of payroll higher, but still only about 25% of the difference between winning and losing.

The team with the second-largest payroll in the sport, the New York Mets, were beat to the postseason by the small-market Cincinnati Reds, who were 19th on the payroll list.

The team with the best regular season record was not the deep-pocketed Dodgers but the Milwaukee Brewers, with a payroll of about a third of the Dodgers’ and No. 18 of the 30 MLB teams.

Yes, the Brewers were eventually swept by the Dodgers in the playoffs. But anything can happen in baseball’s postseason format, even when one team is considered vastly superior to another.

“Largely what happens in the postseason is a product of randomness,” said Zimbalist. “It’s a product of which team is peaking at the right moment, which team gets better breaks, better luck at the right moment.”

A pair of stellar plays in the ninth inning of Game 7 of the World Series by two of the Dodgers’ lower-paid players — Miguel Rojas, who hit the game-tying home run, and Andy Pages, who made an extremely difficult catch to prevent the Blue Jays from scoring the winning run — were all that stood in the way of Toronto winning a title.

The possibility of a lost season

Efforts to bring about a salary cap to MLB might lead to something quite serious: a lost season — or more.

The MLBPA has made opposition to a salary cap the hill to die on and has refused to agree to any deal that includes one. And the union doesn’t appear willing to change that stance.

“I’m not going to negotiate through the media, but I will tell you this: The issues that we see in the system we know can be addressed without (a salary cap),” union executive director Tony Clark said in a press conference on October 24.

But the talk in the sport for well over a year is that the owners are more united than in the past in wanting a salary cap and are ready to go to extremes to get one.

The Dodgers’ win could very well increase the chance of a work stoppage that wipes out much, if not all, of the 2027 season, said Zimbalist.

“I think, yes, (the Dodgers’ win) will raise the stakes a little bit, and make the compromise a little bit harder to achieve,” he said. “Some owners have told me they think that it’ll take a year and a half of a lockout before the players accept the salary cap.”

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