So it’s the Dodgers and Yankees in the World Series.
The two best teams that money can buy. The Los Angeles Zillionaires vs. the New York Plutocrats.
If you’re excited, you must be:
A matchup between baseball’s two richest franchises simply won’t be compelling for casual fans across the country. Oh sure, the television ratings will rise. That’s an inevitability with North America’s two largest media markets involved. But it’s not like people from coast to coast will be invested.
Why should they be?
Baseball’s steadfast refusal to level the playing field — to impose a salary cap (and floor) — has led to this unhappy event.
The National Football League and National Basketball Association have prospered by spreading the wealth. How else could dynasties have sprung up in small markets like Kansas City and San Antonio over the past decade or two?
But baseball is happy to concentrate its power in a few big-market, high-spending franchises. Just run down the World Series winners since 2016: Chicago, Houston, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston again, and Dallas. Each and every one is a top-10 metropolitan area in terms of population and wealth.
This year’s World Series is particularly egregious, pitting clubs from the two largest markets, each with a payroll in excess of $260 million. (More than half of the other 28 teams were below $150 million.)
The front offices that assembled 2024’s league champions showed no special skill or savvy. They simply had more money at their disposal.
The Yankees needed a front-line pitcher, so they whipped out their checkbook and paid Gerrit Cole $324 million over nine seasons. The Dodgers needed a hitter with power, so they forked over $700 million in a 10-year deal with Shohei Ohtani.
The Oakland Athletics didn’t get involved in the bidding for Cole or Ohtani. Nor did the Miami Marlins or the Pittsburgh Pirates or two dozen other teams. They simply couldn’t afford it.
Not everybody is sympathetic. The noted California economist, Clayton Kershaw, responded this way to critics of the Dodgers’ largesse: “You know, people can get mad or say what they want, and say, ‘They spent all the money.’ Well, why don’t you guys do it too? Being an owner is a lucrative business, I don’t care what people say. Go do it, too.”
Dr. Kershaw seems to be shockingly unaware of baseball’s massive economic gap, a disparity that essentially restricts the World Series to a handful of high-spending, big-market teams.
The latest valuations issued by Forbes magazine confirm that this year’s championship foes are Major League Baseball’s richest franchises. The Yankees are worth an estimated $7.55 billion, the Dodgers $5.45 billion. Those are easily the highest values in MLB. Precisely half of the other 28 clubs — 14 in all — are valued at less than $2 billion.
The chasm between the Yankees/Dodgers and their smaller foes isn’t an offshoot of shrewd management and clever decision-making by the two behemoths. It’s simply a byproduct of demographics.
New York and Los Angeles are the largest, richest metropolitan areas in America, so the older, more established team in each of those markets inevitably prospers.
Don’t believe me? Even the newer, less established teams in those two cities have done well for themselves financially, despite generally poor performances on the field. The New York Mets rank sixth in Forbes’s valuations, and the Angels are ninth.
Size truly does matter in MLB’s survival-of-the-biggest environment.
A new installment will arrive in your email upon posting
Baseball has gone through this before, and it wasn’t pretty.
The Yankees, benefiting from their natural demographic and economic advantages, dominated the American League in the late 1940s and 1950s. New York’s two National League clubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, did pretty well themselves.
The three New York clubs won 17 of the 22 league pennants between 1947 and 1957, and they took nine of the 11 world championships. (The cosmic forces somehow allowed the Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Braves to win the other two world titles.)
Seven different World Series between 1947 and 1957 were intracity affairs, matching the Yankees against either the Dodgers or Giants.
“These were, I believe, equally the most important and the most exciting years in the history of sport,” wrote Roger Kahn, then a New York sportswriter and later the author of a baseball classic, The Boys of Summer.
Kahn’s excitement is easy to understand. He grew up in New York, worked in New York, and routinely traveled to World Series games by subway. What’s not to like?
The rest of the country didn’t share his enthusiasm. It was boring to watch the same deep-pocketed teams win the league pennants and qualify for the World Series year after year after year.
Attendance at big-league ballgames actually dropped 14 percent between 1947 and 1957, a period of unprecedented prosperity for American consumers. The advent of television was certainly a factor, but New York’s dominance was another.
“You don’t have to be any baseball Einstein to analyze the grave situation we’ve got ourselves into,” said Paul Richards, the general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, in 1958.
He was more specific in an article he wrote for Look magazine a year later, after the Yankees had won yet another world championship. Richards predicted that baseball was heading for a crisis: “The cause of the debacle will be strangulation of competition and interest by the overlong dominance of the New York Yankees.”
Calamity was finally averted in 1965, after the Yankees had won a string of five more American League pennants from 1960 to 1964. The amateur draft was instituted, giving every big-league club an equal shot at the best high-school and college talent. The Yankees were no longer able to whisk in and outbid all competitors for the best young players.
“All the known kids will be pretty well picked over when it comes our turn,” groused Johnny Johnson, a Yankees vice president. A reporter asked if the bigger picture — the health of baseball — wasn’t more important. Johnson was in no mood to be magnanimous. “We don’t like it,” he snapped.
Yet baseball entered a new period of prosperity.
The Yankees won only two world championships from 1965 through 1995, while 13 other franchises secured their own World Series trophies. The underfunded Oakland Athletics, who wouldn’t have stood a chance under the old system, won more world titles than any other club during that 31-year span, four in all.
Attendance soared from 13,827 per game in 1965 to 30,964 per game in 1993, the year prior to the players’ strike that temporarily robbed the sport of its momentum. That’s an increase of 124 percent, clear evidence that the nation’s fans embraced a level playing field.
But the balance would soon be upset by a massive upswing in free-agent salaries. The collective payrolls for all major-league clubs would shoot up from $952 million in 1995 to more than $5 billion in 2024. A gap reopened between the rich and not-so-rich franchises, the very chasm that we know so well today.
The National Football League could have faced a similar problem, but it decided long ago to share the wealth. It divides its television revenues evenly among all 32 of its franchises. Is it any wonder that the NFL is booming? Or that small-market teams in Kansas City, Buffalo, and Green Bay are among its best?
But baseball refuses to learn. So we’re stuck with a World Series between the Zillionaires and the Plutocrats. May the richest team win.
You’ll forgive me if I decide not to watch.
