The winner of the National League Championship Series could determine whether Major League Baseball will be played in 2027.
This may seem far-fetched. It’s not. What looks like a seven-game baseball series, which begins Monday as the Milwaukee Brewers host the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1, will play out as a proxy for the coming labor war between MLB and the MLB Players Association.
Owners across sports want a salary cap — and if the Dodgers, with their record payroll of more than $500 million, win back-to-back World Series, that will only encourage the league to regulate salaries. The Brewers, consistently in the bottom third in payroll, emerging triumphant would be the latest proof that winners can sprout in even the game’s smallest markets and that the failures of other low-revenue teams have less to do with spending than with execution.
The truth, of course, exists somewhere in between. But it’s not between the two that the two sides will define their negotiating positions in what many expect to be a brutal fight to determine the future of the gaming economy. And that’s why whoever emerges victorious will likely be used as a stick when formal negotiations begin next spring for the next version of the collective bargaining agreement that expires on December 1, 2026.
If it comes to the Dodgers, MLB owners — who have already been vocal publicly and even more vocally privately about Los Angeles spending as high as the bottom six teams in payroll combined this year — will likely cry foul even louder. MLB is already expected to cut players when the deal expires. Back-to-back Dodgers championships could embolden MLB and add to a chorus of fans who see a cap as a panacea to the scourge of big-money teams monopolizing championships over the past decade.
Such a scenario would not scare the union away from its half-century-old anti-capping stance. The MLBPA has no plans to negotiate if a cap remains on the table, and given that MLB was poised to lose games in 2022 because of a negotiation that didn’t include a cap, players have already talked among themselves about how to overcome the missing time in 2027. Granted, the Brewers’ victory wouldn’t guarantee avoiding that, but if in a debate over the need for a cap, the union may retort that the juggernaut Dodgers lost to a team of self-proclaimed Average Joes with a payroll a quarter the size, it reinforces the point that the meaning of team building can exist regardless of financial might.
The Brewers joined the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians as vanguards of low-income success this decade. Over the past eight years, Milwaukee has won five NL Central titles and made the playoffs seven times. At 97-65 this year, the Brewers had the best record in baseball. And they did it with a unique mix of players.
According to ESPN Research, of the 26 players on Milwaukee’s NLCS roster, 15 came via trade, including a majority of its top players (slugger Christian Yelich, catcher William Contreras, ace Freddy Peralta and Trevor Megill, the closer for most of the season). The Brewers drafted four (Brice Turang, Jacob Misiorowski, Sal Frelick and Aaron Ashby, all major contributors), signed three as minor league free agents, signed two via international amateur free agency (their best player, Jackson Chourio, and closer Abner Uribe) and landed one in the minor league portion of the offseason rule 5 draft.
That leaves one major league free agent. One. And that’s left-hander Jose Quintana, who signed a one-year, $4 million contract in March.
Think about it: The MLBPA, which has fought for free agency since its inception, would announce a team that doesn’t spend on free agents. Strange bedfellows, sure, but it reinforces the union’s position: If the current system is beyond repair because of money, how could a no-spending team win a championship?
The Dodgers, on the other hand, are not as plentiful in free agents as one might assume. They’ve also acquired the most players via trade, even though there are only nine, and several of them — from Mookie Betts to Tyler Glasnow to Tommy Edman to Alex Vesia — play important roles on the team. Los Angeles signed five major league free agents (including Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and Blake Snell), as well as two professional international free agents (Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Hyeseong Kim), two amateur international free agents (Roki Sasaki and Andy Pages) and two minor league free agents (Max Muncy and Justin Dean). They drafted five of their players – one more than the Brewers, whose development system is considered one of the best in baseball – and rounded out their roster with Jack Dreyer, an undrafted free agent.
Dreyer highlights what the Dodgers and Brewers do exceptionally well: extract talent from players through systems that value a combination of scouting, analytics and superior coaching. It doesn’t matter whether you spend half a billion dollars or the roughly $115 million currently on the Brewers’ books. If you can become an organization that gets the most out of its players, victory will follow.
Perhaps if they weren’t stationed at opposite ends of the continuum, the league and union might agree that it’s unwise to start an argument over a single playoff series. Both sides need to understand that, overall, a seven-game series doesn’t say much, especially when it comes to the complex economic system of $30 billion corporations competing in the same space.
But this battle is as much about narrative as reality, and if MLB is going to push for a salary cap, it needs as much evidence as possible, and the Dodgers becoming the first team in a quarter-century to win back-to-back World Series would provide another nugget in addition to the oars the league is already citing. The last team to do this was the New York Yankees — and the competitive balance tax, the proto-cap that currently penalizes big-spending teams, was created specifically to check what other owners thought about the Yankees’ out-of-control spending.
The Dodgers are the new Yankees, richer and willing to spend than anyone else. They have won the NL West 12 in the last 13 years and won championships in 2020 and 2024. And despite their seeming inevitability, baseball is not suffering in most areas important to the league. Television audiences are on the rise. Attendance has increased. The implementation of the pitch clock ahead of the 2024 season modernized the game and is now almost universally loved. The addition of an automated ball-striking challenge system next year will only add to the game’s appeal.
This NLCS is baseball at its best: a well-oiled machine of superstars, peaking at the right time, looking to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions since 2000, against a team that plays a delicious brand of baseball, is extremely likeable and always seems to succeed, too. The Brewers have yet to win a championship – not just during this recent run of excellence but in their 57-year history – and derailing the Dodgers en route to that would make the story of triumph even greater.
And yes, despite the higher win total, the Brewers enter this series as underdogs, and that’s a fair designation. Even though they swept the Dodgers in all six games they played in July. Even if their enclosure is full of blazing nastiness. Even though they hit as many home runs in the postseason as Los Angeles, despite the fact that the Dodgers hit 78 more during the regular season.
There will be plenty of big baseball games played in Milwaukee and Los Angeles over the next week, as well as fan cups filled with games that make October the most special month of the year. Ohtani, Betts and Freeman try to catch Misiorowski’s fastball and read his slider. Chourio, Contreras and Turang try to solve Snell, Yamamoto, Glasnow and Ohtani. The Brewers’ terrifying bullpen, with five relievers throwing over 97 mph, against the team that hit high-octane fastballs better than anyone this year. The Dodgers are trying to determine whether they can rely on a reliever other than Sasaki, and the Brewers, who have been the fifth-hardest team to strike out this season, are trying to hit the Los Angeles bullpen with a barrage of balls in play.
While baseball itself will be undeniable, this NLCS is bigger than the game. Its tentacles will extend into the future, with an unintended but undeniable place in something much more substantial. It’s just a series, yes. But it’s much more.
