Ready to blow up baseball for a salary cap, MLB can’t spin this World Series | Opinion

Ready to blow up baseball for a salary cap, MLB can't spin this World Series Opinion.

Key points

• Milwaukee, Arizona, Atlanta, Washington, the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland, Toronto, the New York Mets and Detroit – they've all created one Fall Classic appearance previously 19 seasons.
• Yet since we're now entering Arbitrary Endpoints Season, here's another – number of World Series appearances since 2008.
• Your three-time league champions since 2008: Tampa Bay, Texas, Philadelphia, San Francisco.
• Far better to consider that the Royals and Reds and Athletics and Brewers are outliers, just as the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets and Phillies are.
• And is that gap in access worth blowing up the salary structure of Major League Baseball, and imperil the 2027 season in service of a salary cap?

Ready to blow up baseball for a salary cap, MLB can't spin this World Series Opinion. Gabe Lacques USA TODAY. How the Brewers reached their first World Series since 1982.

USA TODAY Sports' Bob Nightengale reflects on the Brewers' historic World Series run and what their long-awaited return means to Milwaukee and its fans. There's simply no way Major League Baseball can spin this.

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Brewers and Tampa Bay Rays are in the World Series, directly defying the narrative that small-market teams are bedraggled, woebegone, hopeless entities needing a white knight like Rob Manfred and his 29 billionaires (plus John Fisher) to swoop in and save them.

In practice, the timing is hilarious, coming just six weeks before the commissioner Manfred imposes a lockout that shuts down the industry at a time it is in relative boom mode, what with rose attendance, enhanced access to the playoffs and desperate networks, streamers and monopolists lined up to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to secure a piece of it when the league's TV contracts hit the market in two years.

Instead, for the second time in five years, we will obtain a plug-pulling winter with no transactions, no trades, no hope for fans of nascent teams to see how their club might become the next Brewers or Rays or Cleveland Guardians or Los Angeles Dodgers.

Yes, those were your final four teams standing this autumn, one of them not like the others. Yet in what surely came as a surprise to "Our Fans" that MLB continuously cites from its focus group work, three of them are of the lower-revenue variety.

It will be Milwaukee vs. Tampa Bay in the World Series. The Dodgers are free to join the Yankees and Phillies and Mets at the swankiest resort in Cancun.

If you pay enough attention to the game, this October – and the season at sizeable – only reinforced your priors. Most notably: Spending on your roster helps, of course, but it is no guarantee.

Meanwhile, a resourceful front office is no good, either, minus an ownership group that cultivates a creative, supportive culture within the organization. That is perhaps the biggest reason you see so plenty of repeat contenders in October, the Brewers most notably among them.

Oh, the spin is already beginning and you're bound to hear it a few more times between now and Dec. 1 and beyond: The 2026 World Series winner is the aberration, the first true "small market" team to win it all since the 2015 Kansas City Royals. Just two in 12 seasons. Looks bad!

Technically, sure. Yet since we're now entering Arbitrary Endpoints Season, here's another – number of World Series appearances since 2008.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers have five pennants. The Houston Astros have four, fielding a payroll outside the top 10 both years they won World Series titles.

And then there's a floating mass of franchises that looks an awful lot like parity.

Two-timers? That'd be St. Louis, Kansas City, Boston and the New York Yankees. Yep, both teams from the Show-Me State have created as numerous World Series appearances since 2008 as the vaunted Yankees and Red Sox.

That's 19 of 30 teams. And 12 franchises winning World Series titles. There's a difficulty here?

Here's a crucial bit of verbiage worth parsing: The league insists it must offer greater competitive opportunities to "small market" teams. A more accurate phrase might be "low revenue" teams. Since what, exactly, is a small market?

Since the Marlins have produced one brief playoff appearance since 2003?, is it Miami. Or is that a Marlins difficulty, given that Miami ranks 18th in market size, and eighth if you include the adjacent West Palm Beach market?

Since the Pirates haven't won a division title since 1993 and owner Bob Nutting can't seem to find the cash to pay a free agent more than $39 million?, is it Pittsburgh.

Since Pittsburgh ranks one slot above San Diego in market size, and the Padres have proven both potent and prosperous in signing marquee players to sizeable contracts while making the playoffs five of the past seven years?, or is that a Bob Nutting difficulty.

Is it Tampa Bay, which has long punched above its perceived weight thanks to smarts and resourcefulness?

Well, Tampa-St. Pete is technically the 11th-biggest market in the country, wedged between those barren outposts known as "Boston" and "Phoenix." Certainly, the geographics of the Bay area have been a drag on the Rays' revenue as bodies of water bifurcate the population mass, but a sweetheart accord to build a new stadium in Tampa should solve numerous of those challenges.

We will begrudgingly note that Milwaukee and Cincinnati are pretty small – the only current MLB markets with less than 1 million TV households, per Nielsen. Yet the Brewers and Reds are additionally perfect examples that competence and desire matter almost as much as revenue – the Brewers making the playoffs eight of the past nine years while the Reds mock their fans by noting that they have no choice but to come watch their below-average product.

There simply aren't that plenty of "small-market" teams. This is the major leagues. There are no Mayberrys.

But for the sake of this exercise, let's go ahead and rope the four smallest markets – Kansas City, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Las Vegas (a self-inflicted market wound MLB gladly endorsed) into their own special little bucket. That's just four of 30 major league teams, or 13%.

Well, if Milwaukee hoists the piece of metal at the end of this World Series, that will be two totally "small-market" teams winning titles in our 19-season sample size. That's 10.5%.

Not exactly hopeless. And is that gap in access worth blowing up the salary structure of Major League Baseball, and imperil the 2027 season in service of a salary cap?

Far better to consider that the Royals and Reds and Athletics and Brewers are outliers, just as the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets and Phillies are. No, the wider swath of championships and pennants and playoff berths for these past couple decades have been asserted by what we might call "normal" markets and franchises – San Francisco and Houston, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth, Washington and Boston.

None of those teams have blown up the game's salary structure. Rarely do they dip particularly far over the luxury tax line, and most of them duck back under it shortly thereafter. They can splurge on free agents and win a World Series and then go into the fetal position for six years, should they desire.

Their successes and failures are relatively cyclical. The nature of competition in a free market, you might say.

That's not to say there aren't challenges. The profligate spending of the Dodgers and Mets – spearheaded by two billionaires with boundary-pushing reputations, we might say – rightfully raises eyebrows. In the last collective-bargaining agreement, the league and the union agreed to what was informally known as the "Cohen Tax, " a fourth level of luxury tax aimed to punish extreme spenders such as the Mets owner.

He remarked he'd blow right past it, and he did. Dodgers owner Mark Walter shortly followed.

This is a baseball difficulty that in a sense mirrors a societal one: Extreme income/revenue inequality.

In this arena, it is the 0.1% that's creating the impression the game is rigged, even if Juan Soto can't stay off the injured list and Kyle Tucker looked lost in his first season in L.A.

Yet baseball has some $13 billion flying around annually. This is a difficulty it can remedy, a solution already partway there as luxury tax penalties go toward player benefits and, to a degree, revenue sharing.

If the Dodgers are "ruining baseball" while teams like the Brewers watch helplessly as their best players leave (never mind that Christian Yelich is a Brewer for life and Jackson Chourio and Cooper Pratt are locked up for the long haul), simply eliminate the middleman.

Create another tax threshold – perhaps call it the Bezos Tax, in case he decides to obtain in the game. Funnel that funds directly to whatever MLB wants to call "small market."

And stipulate that the funds must be spent on player retention or acquisition. Since right now, revenue-sharing recipients have significant leeway regarding how they can spend their welfare checks. Somehow it never demonstrates up at the sizeable league level – or perhaps they're serving their minor leaguers caviar every night.

And if "Our Fans" fret regarding their teams losing their favorite players, they ought to take a look at the NBA right now.

For now, ready to blow up baseball for a salary cap, MLB cant spin remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.