If you polled 100 baseball fans about just who is to blame for the sport's ever-widening wealth gap, you'd get the same response 100 times: the Los Angeles Dodgers. You know who else agrees with that assessment, apparently? The Los Angeles Dodgers — or at least their owner, finance titan Mark Walter.
"Here's what the problem is: Money helps us win," Walter told the Los Angeles Times this weekend. "We can't win all the time. We've got to have some parity ... So we've got to come up with something that will give us some parity."
If your response to reading that is to roll your eyes, I don't blame you. After spending somewhere north of two billion dollars on everyone from Shohei Ohtani to Yoshinobu Yamamoto to Blake Snell to Kyle Tucker over the last three offseasons, the two-time defending World Series champs have become the face of everything wrong with MLB today. They spend beyond all reason, in ways that not even other billionaires can match; the only way to stop them, to create a level playing field, is to institute a salary cap.
It's no surprise that teams like the Pirates and Marlins would be on board with Rob Manfred's push to radically reshape baseball's business model. But if even the Dodgers are willing to publicly wring their hands about competitive balance, then a lockout in a few months time seems even more likely.
Why Dodgers' stance on salary cap matters — even if it's ironic
In order to lock out the players when the current CBA expires this winter, Manfred needs to the approval of at least 75 percent of the league's 30 owners. Don't get it twisted, though: MLB is not actually a democracy. Every team technically has equal say, but all you have to do is follow the money to figure out who's really in charge here. MLB's revenue-sharing system is such that its richest teams have long subsidized its poorest (well, "poorest"). The latter category — your Marlins, your Brewers, your Guardians, etc. — understand where their bread is buttered, and certainly aren't in the business of getting on the big guys' bad side.
So the fact that even the Dodgers 1) believe that the sport has a parity problem and 2) appear to believe that something significant has to change to address it is significant. One of the biggest causes for optimism among those hoping to avoid a lockout was simple dysfunction, that Manfred's coalition of owners would fracture along class lines. But if Walter is ready for a fight here, maybe that coalition isn't so fractured after all. That would provide cover for the other big markets like the Yankees and Cubs, teams with owners who have already signaled that they're sick of having to keep up with L.A.
Which begs the question: What's in this for the Dodgers, exactly? Why would they go along with a system that artificially limits what they can put into their team in order to soothe the egos of a handful of teams whose budgets they're floating to begin with? The answer, like all the others, comes down to money — and goes a long way toward explaining what this lockout is really about.
Why even the Dodgers stand to benefit from a salary cap
Do I think that Walter is actually too concerned with parity? No, not really. He's not a stupid man; he knows that MLB has about as much parity as every other major American sports league. But he also knows that the institution of a cap is a great way to keep your costs in check, and that, like any business, keeping costs in check is good for the bottom line — and, more specifically, the value of your franchise.
While the effects of a cap on competitive balance are mixed at best, the effects of a cap on an owner's net worth are crystal clear: With annual spending largely fixed, the line basically only ever goes up, which is why owners from the NFL to the NBA to the NHL have seen their investments multiply in value over the years. Walter wants some of that for himself; the arrival of a salary cap in baseball means a rising tide that will lift all boats, and fatter profit margins against the next round of broadcast rights agreements. Whether it's actually good for the game or its fans is an afterthought, at best.