By Jon Paul Hoornstra0ShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberSee more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.The title "commissioner of baseball" presents the veneer of impartiality. The man or woman who holds the title should, ostensibly, be partial primarily to the interests of the game and its fans.
Rob Manfred, the current commissioner, had a chance June 3 at the MLB owners' meetings to put his loyalty to the game on display. Instead, he conceded that labor negotiations with the MLB Players' Association might result in the longest work stoppage the game has seen since 1994-95.
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Asked if he worries that 1994-95 will repeat itself, Manfred told reporters in New York "of course I do."
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"We want to make an agreement," Manfred continued, via ESPN's Jorge Castillo. "We made a proposal on one set of topics. At the outset of negotiations, I went and said myself, ‘We’re open to whatever ideas people have, but we need a realistic framework that addresses the fans’ concerns about competitive balance.’ You just can’t ignore that financial penalties have not gotten it done for us."
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In November 2015, the Kansas City Royals were fresh off a World Series title, the last won by a team in the bottom half of market size. Manfred said at the time that the correlation between winning and payroll was "down under three." Recently, former MLB general manager Zack Scott calculated a 0.32 correlation between payroll and winning from 2022-26.
...If not the correlation between payroll and winning, what's changed?
Last year, the Los Angeles Dodgers became the sport's first repeat champion since 2000. Now, the Dodgers are a focal point of Manfred's contention that spending in the game is out of control — in spite of a competitive balance tax that MLB owners ratified in the 2022 and 2017 collective bargaining agreements.
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Regardless of whether teams are beholden to a hard salary cap or a soft cap in the form of a luxury tax, MLB already possesses the best competitive-balance measure of any of the four largest North American men's professional sports leagues: a 162-game season.
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The amount of luck introduced over the course of each game, week, and month from March to October helps small-market teams compete beyond their payroll size. Through June 2, three of the six first-place teams (the Tampa Bay Rays, Milwaukee Brewers and Cleveland Guardians) also had the smallest payroll in their division.
Baseball's 162-game season is sacred in another respect: more than a Dodgers championship, fans fear losing games to a work stoppage in the year to come. Manfred's comments didn't downplay that fear.
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