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The Brewers won; a “small-market” team is once again World Series champion, and it all happened without a salary cap in place. Imagine that: Milwaukee spent a little bit — not a lot, but more than a third of the league — and invested heavily in player development and analytics, and it paid off in the form of the franchise’s first title.
The Brewers had been knocking on the door for years, too: this is a team that has been a mainstay since 2018, missing the postseason just once in that stretch and winning the NL Central outright more often than not, while setting franchise records for wins in back-to-back seasons, too. Commissioner Rob Manfred blamed the lack of a salary cap on Milwaukee’s 44-year absence from the World Series, but as I wrote for Baseball Prospectus, that’s just not an accurate picture being painted.
Is it the lack of a salary cap that held the Brewers back from a World Series championship? Or was it an owner who wasn’t as invested as he needed to be in making the Brewers a competitive team? Was it CC Sabathia going from legendarily untouchable to not making it out of the fourth in his one postseason start in 2008? Was the lack of a cap responsible for Albert Pujols slugging .913 against Milwaukee in the 2011 NLCS? How about David Freese’s 1.091 mark? Freese was making $416,000 that season, by the way. Is it the absence of a cap that caused the Brewers to lose in the postseason all of this time, despite making it constantly for most of the last decade? Seems unlikely, considering.
Every team just needs a chance to win, but not every team will actually win. There’s a cap in the NFL and NHL and NBA, and that’s the truth of things there, too.
A salary cap won’t make it so that 30 different teams win in 30 different years. A salary cap won’t make it so that we have more than one champion in a given season. A salary cap will do nothing to level the playing field that simply rearranging revenue-sharing so that more of it heads to the Brewers, Guardians, Pirates, and so on, giving them additional resources to work with would do. It took the Brewers 44 years to get back here more because that’s baseball, Suzyn, than because there were no hard restrictions on what the Dodgers were spending. If anything, Milwaukee’s constantly making the postseason and then not winning a title resembles the path of the Dodgers themselves: it took Los Angeles eight seasons of making the postseason in a row to finally win a World Series, and it took Milwaukee eight postseason berths in nine years to do the same.
Sometimes the other team is better, even if it’s only for one series. Most of the time that’s how it goes. The Brewers are proof of that in more ways than one — not proof that the league needs a cap.
Over at Extra Points, Matt Brown detailed why the recent lawsuit the NCAA is dealing with, regarding athletic scholarships for Division III schools, is an actual “existential threat to college sports”.
Here’s the core issue. Division III schools do not offer athletic scholarships; if anything, athletics are used as a way to get students to stay enrolled and pay tuition. Most D-III schools are private, as Brown pointed out on Bluesky on Wednesday — these aren’t state-run institutions and massive universities with millions of dollars, they’re often smaller colleges funded by the students who attend them.
As Brown also mentioned, the revenue streams of Division I and Division II schools don’t exist for D-III, and I can attest to that myself: when I go watch Bowdoin’s women’s basketball team, entry is free, and the college even sometimes pays to have a food truck out there at no cost to attendees. I also go to University of Southern Maine women’s basketball games, and those cost basically the same as when I attend girls’ high school basketball. Which is to say, I can take my daughter to one of these and get her some food, too, and not even spend $20 between us.
So, without the major revenue streams of the higher divisions — be it ticketing, sponsorships, broadcast rights, whatever — D-III sports don’t have the same big pile of money that’s being hoarded and kept from the players. The money is used for very different things. Or, as Brown put it:
Let me give you some examples. According to the most recent data from EADA and IPEDs, a whopping 85 D-III colleges list more than 40 percent of their student body as varsity athletes. For a few schools, like Southern Virginia, Brevard, Alma and Pfeiffer, more than 60 percent of enrolled students are varsity athletes. Across all of D-III, the median is 27.6 percent. Across D-I, it’s less than 15 percent.
If D-III schools were legally compelled to offer some level of athletic scholarships, then the operating “profit” margin per college athlete would decrease, sometimes to negative numbers. For a school whose enrollment is more than half athletes, a decrease in operating margin could very well be the difference between being open or closed.
The sports exist because there are students to play them, basically, who are attending school for academic reasons — the relationship is far more mutually beneficial than that of the pre-NIL Division I landscape, since both sides need each other lest neither exist in their desired state, and there isn’t obvious exploitation happening in this regard. (Well, outside of the basic cost of a college education in general, but non-athletes are paying those costs, too.) Consider: the Big Ten is a D-I conference with a $7 billion media rights deal that could double or even triple when it needs to be reupped. Meanwhile, Division III schools might not even be open if they don’t have athletes paying tuition. These are completely different worlds, and should be viewed as such.
It’s a fascinating case with potential for enormous repercussions, basically, and one worth keeping an eye on for that reason even if it might never actually go anywhere.
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