We’re less than two full seasons into the most recent product of collective bargaining talks between Major League Baseball and the association that represents its player pool, but already we can see the latest sequel is worthy of the same meager Rotten Tomatoes grade as previous editions in the series.
This year baseball gave us the pitch clock and other elements designed to speed up the game, and those changes worked to decide games more efficiently and generate a handsome increase in regular-season attendance.
The failure to install a salary cap system, though, has assured football at all levels continues to rule over the sport that once called itself the national pastime.
As MLB displays its version of the final four – the National League Championship Series and American League Championship Series – the teams still alive again represent exclusively plus-sized markets.
Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia and Phoenix are the cities still alive in the baseball postseason, and it should surprise no one they all represent top-10 metropolitan areas. Because that is how it has been in baseball under the current regime, where small-market clubs content themselves with making money while hoping to get lucky and big-market teams embrace how it all tilts in their favor.
Over the past three seasons, there has not been a single team from outside the top 20 metropolitan areas that has reached an LCS. Over the past decade, 70 percent of all participants at this stage of the postseason have been from top-10 markets, and half have been from top five markets. There have been only six total teams from markets outside the top 20. That’s 15 percent.
This is the residue of baseball’s design. It’s less an athletic competition than a financial one. Those teams with the greatest resources by virtue of local television revenue have an enormous advantage in procuring and securing the greatest abundance of talented players. There is only a modest amount of revenue sharing in baseball, and there is no salary cap system to assure teams succeed based on execution rather than extravagance.
Yankees fans were apoplectic about their team’s ineptitude this season, and it’s understandable why. Given their enormous advantages, Yanks management needs to really screw things up to not make the postseason. In the 24 postseasons since the turn of the century, they’ve made it 20 times. The Royals have made it twice, the Pirates three times, and the Reds four times.
OFFSEASON PRIORITIES: Yankees | Red Sox | Mets
Compare this to the same period of time in the National Football League.
Over the past three seasons, half of the teams participating in the NFL’s final four were from outside the top 20 metropolitan areas. In fact, all of those were from outside the top 30. Only one team was from a top-five market. In the past decade, only 5 percent of conference finalists were from top-five markets, 15 percent were from the top 10. Just under 48 percent were from markets ranked 30th or below.
The fan base of every team in the NFL perceives itself to have an opportunity because the results show they do, so long as their team’s management takes appropriate advantage. And the success of the smaller-market teams has not merely been the product of failing and then drafting an elite quarterback with the first or second pick in the draft. Kansas City got Patrick Mahomes by trading up from the 27th overall pick to select him at No. 10. Green Bay was sharp enough to select Aaron Rodgers after 23 other players were chosen in 2005. The Bills got Josh Allen with the seventh pick in 2018.
Baseball had an open CBA discussion that concluded in March, 2022, and made little progress in establishing a more legitimate competition. Now they’re bound to this lousy system for another three seasons beyond this one.
And it isn’t just a terrible deal for fans outside the largest markets. It’s bad for the players, too. Revenue for the NHL is less than 60 percent of MLB, according to Statista, but hockey players actually have a higher minimum salary ($750,000 to $720,000). NHL teams have a salary floor of $61.7 million; there are two big-league baseball teams that failed to meet that number in 2023. If MLB had a cap system in place and assigned 48.8 percent of revenue to the players, as the NFL does, the cap might be around $167 million and the floor at $133.6 million. In a similar arrangement, overall MLB payrolls would increase and more than a third of the league’s teams would need to increase payroll just to reach the salary floor.
This dichotomy between baseball’s wealthiest teams and the rest could grow more severe in the future, as the collapse of various regional sports networks spreads. RSN operator Diamond Sports dropped its deals with the Padres and Diamondbacks, and it’s unclear what the future of other teams’ telecasts (and broadcast payments) might be as MLB fights in court the company’s requests for extensions of its bankruptcy planning.
Baseball attendance increased in 2023, up more than 9 percent from last season, but still 11 percent down from the record total accumulated 16 years ago. Meantime, the NFL and NHL are setting attendance records. There’s a lesson in that. Baseball refuses to learn.
