The Five: Masters of the Universe (1981)
The Yankees, the Dodgers, and baseball refusing to admit it even has a problem.
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I.
Before I learned to hate the New York Yankees, I learned to love the New York Yankees. It happened, in large part, due to patrimony: My father had spent his early childhood in New York City (just as I had), and the Yankees became his team, and so by default the Yankees became my team. I was too young to comprehend what the Yankees represented; I did not understand why or how Yankee fandom was itself a statement both on the nature of your sports fandom and the nature of your views about capitalism. I did not understand that the New York Yankees represented the one percent and those who feted the one percent: They were a wildly arrogant franchise owned by a comically pompous shipping magnate who had once made illegal campaign contributions to a corrupt politician.
In fact, for much of the time I considered myself a Yankee fan, the Yankees were not very good. This was in the heart of the 1980s; after a loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the strike-shortened 1981 World Series, the Yankees put up consistently mediocre results, churned through managers, and frittered away the career of the man with the most epic mustache in baseball history. By the time the Yankees rediscovered their Yankeedom in the mid-1990s, I had grown up and abandoned my allegiance to them, and moving to New York City for a dozen years only made me despise them more. They represented every element of the city I despised: They were the embodiment of the nakedly capitalistic arrogance of New York, a city whose deck was perpetually stacked against those of us who did not aspire to be Masters of the Universe.
II.
Look, I get it: If you grew up in and around New York City, you may have been indoctrinated into this cult for so long that there’s no way to cleanse yourself. But the rest of us see it, just as we’ve seen how the Los Angeles Dodgers, since absconding from Brooklyn, have essentially become the West Coast analogue of the Yankees, a team that freely spends and spends and spends until it can finally buy itself a championship.
Forty-three years after the Dodgers played the Yankees in the World Series in the aftermath of a bitter strike driven by owners who insisted there wasn’t enough money to go around, we’re getting a rematch. And while there is no strike on the horizon, the very nature of this series raises questions about baseball’s arrogance and exceptionalism, and the sport’s refusal to recognize that there’s anything wrong with its fundamental structure at all.
III.
Now, you can make the case rather skillfully and analytically, as my Substack-mate Neil Paine does here, that a Yankees-Dodgers World Series doesn’t prove that wealth imbalance in the only major American sport without a salary cap is truly fucked up.
But here’s why I’m not sure I’m buying this argument, courtesy of a February column from John Romano in the Tampa Bay Times:
If we divide the 30 MLB teams into three categories each season — the 10 highest spenders, the 10 middle spenders and the 10 lowest spenders — you will see that nine of the last 10 World Series teams came from that high-spending group. To simplify it, if you had a top-10 payroll in the past five years, you had an 18% chance of making the World Series. If you did not have a top-10 payroll, you had a 1% chance of reaching the Fall Classic.
Or there’s this recent note from the San Francisco Chronicle’s excellent baseball columnist, John Shea:
Since the advent of the wild card in 1995, the 2003 Marlins are the only team to win a World Series with a payroll among MLB’s bottom 10.
IV.
Jeff Passan of ESPN wrote in May that “payroll inequality is reaching levels not seen in more than a decade and barreling toward the imbalance of the mid-2000s,” and yet Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred doesn’t seem to consider this increasing payroll disparity to be a problem at all. This is not a surprise, given that Manfred is perhaps the most comically arrogant sports commissioner of the modern age, but it gives off some serious Marie Antoinette vibes.
And as Passan also noted, it’s left us with this weird stasis in a post-Moneyball era, where every advantage teams with lower payrolls once used to compete has now been co-opted by every other large market team. Now, teams with middling payrolls can kind of compete and maybe make the postseason in the newly expanded playoff system, but they have very little chance of actually winning it all. As Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry DiPoto told the media last season, in perhaps the most candid admission any modern-day baseball executive has ever made, the goal for a mid-market or small-market team is to win 54 percent of your games and hope for the best.
And if you’re on the lower end of the payroll spectrum, it now seems clear that anti-tanking rules put in place during the last collective bargaining agreement don’t work. So what’s to stop you from pulling a John Fisher and lying your ass off and getting cheaper and cheaper and screwing over your fans until Manfred bails you out?
V.
Maybe there’s something kind of fitting about all of this. Maybe in a country that’s struggled for decades with income inequality, baseball is making some kind of perverse attempt to reclaim its place as the national pastime. But we can see what’s happening. We can see the way the Ohtanis and the Judges are tipping the scales toward the top. We can see the way the New York Mets, after much angst and $300 million spent, at least bought their way into the National League Championship Series, assuaging a fan base that tempers the Yankees by embodying the ongoing neurosis of New York City. We can see the way that John Romano in Tampa Bay is left with a baseball team that hasn’t won a World Series in its 27 seasons of existence and currently (literally) doesn’t have a roof over its head.
There are, of course, a lot of reasons for this, including the fact that baseball’s player’s union refuses to even consider the possibility of a salary cap, and the idea of a salary floor—the minimum amount a team would be required to spend on payroll so it couldn’t pull a John Fisher—almost feels like it would have to go hand-in-hand with a cap.
And I don’t know: I’m not an expert on the business of baseball, so maybe I’m missing something here. But from the outside, what it leaves most of us with is a cold feeling. I’m not saying this return to a Yankees-Dodgers World Series was founded on some kind of deliberate conspiracy; it was simply a product of top-heavy, unregulated capitalism winning out, as it always does. That’s the reason why salary caps exist in the first place. That’s the reason baseball has lost so many fans in so many cities—because the sport is just too myopic to get the balance right. And for those of us who aren’t blinded by our own allegiances, we can see through it all.
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This encapsulates how I feel about this series--conflicted.