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A little bit of end-of-season collecting of loose ends here, to start the offseason. We’re entering the final season of the current collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Association, so while there are always trends or happenings to watch out for, that’s even more the case in this scenario — what can be gleaned from the last full offseason before MLB decides to go lockout mode in 13 months?
First, there is going to be a lot of discussion about the Dodgers, and if they are ruining baseball because they spent a ton of money. There is actually some nuance to this discussion — I’ve already seen a whole lot of everything-is-a-nail style arguments about their spending both in terms of those who are against it and those who support it — that is being missed, but here’s where I stand.
The Dodgers’ spending helps them be as good as they are, yes, and their financial resources are a significant advantage. However, money alone is not enough. The Dodgers just happen to be in a position — one they built — where they can provide help from the farm, where they have proven themselves to be an always-in-it competitor that is attractive to free agents, and that — this past offseason full of Michael Conforto and Tanner Scott notwithstanding — one that tends to make great decisions about what to spend on. The Braves didn’t want to give Freddie Freeman an extra year and decided Matt Olson was the better play — the Dodgers were comfortable with the extra year, and he’s now a two-time World Series hero of theirs with a 151 OPS+ over four seasons, and was just worth 3.5 wins with a .502 slugging percentage as a 35-year-old. The Red Sox salary dumped Mookie Betts when he was entering his age-27 season because they didn’t want to pay him $30 million per year, despite his being literally Mookie Betts and their being literally the Red Sox. He just had a down year at the plate that still saw him worth nearly five wins above replacement, and he hit .316/.376/.516 from August 5 onward (though, like most of the Dodgers’ lineup, he struggled in the postseason). The Dodgers have won three World Series in the Betts era in no small part due to Betts himself, and they can thank the Red Sox for that one.
Of course players like Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are going to want to sign with the organization that’s committed to winning more than anyone else in the league, that can also afford to pay them. It’s not just the money — there’s a clear difference in attractiveness and success when you compare the Mets and the Dodgers, for instance, and Los Angeles’ reputation and run is part of why Ohtani chose them over the Blue Jays in the end.
There is also the problem that sure, you could probably count the number of teams that could truly match the Dodgers dollar for dollar on one hand, but the more significant problem is that too much of MLB doesn’t bother to maximize their own spending in a similar fashion, within their own means. This is not a problem with a simple solution, however — the Pirates can afford to do more than they do, sure, but spending $200 million is probably pushing it given how much they have gutted their own support system and infrastructure by being the Pirates for as long as they have been, and teams like the Reds just don’t have the revenue streams or wealth of their owners that basically everyone else does. This is where the plan to pool together broadcast revenue and redistribute it in a much more aggressive form of revenue-sharing can help, though: it’s not as simple as handing Bob Nutting a bigger check and expecting him to spend it on players, but this is how the salary cap is avoided, now and in the future. That’s money to spend on building better player development, better scouting departments and better research, better tools and better systems that all allow an organization to bring in better, more expensive players, while developing better in-house options, too. Imagine the Brewers with a little more money to spend, given all they already have in place?
Watching this discussion play out in the media, and seeing how owners discuss it as bargaining begins and the expiration of the CBA looms, is something we should all be focused on. Dodgers spending bad/Dodgers spending good isn’t nearly enough, whether it’s from fans, media, or other owners.
Second: I’m very interested in seeing what shape this offseason takes as far as free agent contracts go. Are we going to see a bunch of smaller, high-AAV deals? Long-term deals to try to show off how healthy the sport is, especially to potential future broadcast partners? Players just trying to get what they can for 2026 because 2027 is an open question? Will clubs like the Red Sox go back to spending aggressively now that they’ve got a damn fine core to build on, or will they say, hey, this got us to the postseason, our job is done? What do the Cubs do to build on their own success, especially with Kyle Tucker now a free agent? What does year two of Buster Posey’s plan look like? You can ask these kinds of questions for most of the league’s teams, and seeing if there’s some kind of universal (or near-universal) response to the impending CBA expiration, or if we get a range of options that show off, again, that not every team is on the same page about what the goal of owning an MLB club even is. Which in turn tells us at least a little bit about what bargaining might look like and how unified the owners are or are not. They were standing together practically uniformly before the last lockout, but the lead-in to the end of this CBA has been far different.
This is a lengthy profile of Minnesota Lynx superstar Napheesa Collier over at Glamour, but there’s discussion of the current collective bargaining going on between the WNBA and the WNB Players Association within, in addition to details about how Collier got to the point where she was this level of star, a founding member of Unrivaled, a mom, and one of the faces of the union. Choice quote:
“If we give in, we’re not only doing a disservice to us, we’re doing a disservice to where we have gotten in women’s sports,” she says. “We really have no choice but to stand strong again, not just for the present, but for the future of our league too.”
The WNBPA has certainly been one of the most vocal and aggressive unions in pro sports, one the rest could learn from in terms of unity and self-advocacy. Collier’s not wrong that there are much larger implications here beyond just the health of their own CBA — if the WNBPA can be crushed, or come out clearly not having gotten close to anything they want, that signals to other leagues that protracted fights are always going to be worth it to them in the end. Which, of course, is the kind of thing that can fuel MLB’s owners as they debate whether to hit the nuclear option or not in in the coming months of bargaining and potential lockout.
One last item: I wrote up Sega Genesis game World Series Baseball over at Retro XP last week, which actually does have a more relation to this publication than “involves baseball.” That’s because World Series Baseball came out in 1994, and was the first video game to share licenses from both MLB and the MLBPA, meaning, the teams, logos, players, and stadiums were all represented as their actual selves, instead of having just the players, or just the teams and logos and stadiums but fake players. That they could do this at a time when they were at each other’s throats, too, is something, and this partnership echoes into the future, where MLB and the PA both continue to license video games together. Well, video game — MLB: The Show is the only game in town these days. That’s a lament for a different article, though.
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