It doesn't involve the New York Yankees, which is my second-to-fourth-most-hated team (The Bastard North Stars is and always will be #1; you might include UCLA and Stanford in some order there), so I should be OK with it, but it's not that. In its place are the New York Mets and the team that is about to be World Series champions, the Kansas City Royals. And it's not as if I have a hate for either team. With me being neutral towards the two combatants in a championship series, I should be watching every game. And yet, besides watching the end of the 14-inning Game 1, I have made it a point not to watch a single game of this series. And that is going to intensify now that the Royals are on the cusp of winning it all for the first time since 1985.
Partly it's because I'm jealous that a fellow American League Central team is going to win the World Series, but it's not all of it. The real reason, and one that is both hard for me to explain and probably difficult for you to understand, has to do with the continuing correlation between a Major League Baseball team's yearly total salary and its record. I grew up watching the New York Yankees outspend all the other franchises by an obscene amount and reap World Series title after title in the nineties. That's when I began to really hate them.
Recently, the teams that have spent the most in a season -- the St. Louis Cardinals, the San Francisco Giants -- have won the Fall Classic. This year appears to be different. The Royals and Mets have only the 14th- and 15th-highest (respectively) payrolls for 2015. Middle-spending teams usually have not won the World Series. That these two teams have broken through is, to some, a signal that spending money on the best pitchers and hitters no longer means you will win championships.
Here's the thing: I don't want to believe the "David" story that's about to happen, that a small-market team like the Royals can win it all. As perverse as this sounds, I don't want a small-market team to ever win the World Series. That would include my team, the Minnesota Twins. Why? Because if a team like that wins, which will happen regardless of whether the Royals close it out or if the Mets come back to win this year, that will prove that the spending-equals-success model in MLB is a relic of the nineties-era Yankees.
I don't believe that there is a true level playing field in baseball. I have come across statistics that, when I interpret it, buttress my point-of-view. First of all there is the data analysis provided by Noah Davis and Michael Lopez of the (still-going, unlike Grantland, cross your fingers) ESPN affiliate site FiveThirtyEight, which shows that the more you spend, the more you win, and that's true of every team. Also, look at the eight teams that "actually" made this year's playoffs (losing the "Wild Card" game, which actually is a play-in game, doesn't count); no, the second-through-sixth-highest-spending teams did not reach the playoffs, but the Dodgers, the team that spent the most, have, and all but one of the teams that made the playoffs are in the top half of payroll.
But my disdain for this matchup, and the reason I'm not watching, is apparent when you look the Opening Day payrolls, whose numbers are a little different from the chart I linked to above. There are still disparities in payroll. They may not be as wide as they were two decades ago, and MLB has done a good job of trying to close the gap between big-spending and little-spending teams. But this is not a salary cap, which is what the NFL, NHL and NBA have. There are exceptions to salaries in those leagues, and historically that hasn't prevented some teams to still have more success than others. But it's those salary cap leagues that make me believe that every franchise truly has a chance to win, and that competence of front office staff, managers/head coaches and players are the reasons your team is or is not successful, not how much money you spend. I still believe that isn't totally the case in baseball.
So how do I explain this year? It's just one year. In the larger scheme of things, you can excuse Royals-Mets as an anomaly, the exception that proves the rule. I think statistics and facts show that we will still see most years where a team with a top-five or -ten payroll will win the World Series. But because we're all focused on how the small-market Royals are about to be champs, everybody is going to breathe a sigh of relief that The Era Of Big Baseball Spending is over and that true equality in the sport has finally come. And that means that no one will push for more meaningful, actual, true salary equality.
What I'm trying to say is, there should be a salary cap in Major League Baseball but there won't be because the plucky Kansas City Royals are about to win the World Series and so everybody is going to think everything is now fine and good. This title, though well-earned, is, in some ways, an illusion. And I don't want to buy into an illusion.
Look, my theory isn't without its flaws. Looking at the chart above, you can say that a middle-market team is about to win the title, and that is a good thing. But how about sustained success? Can the Royals do it again next year? Can they do it with a total payroll that falls around the league average? Are you sure that the players, after this year's ticker-tape parade through the Power & Light District, aren't going to demand $20 million a year? Are the Royals going to spend the money then? Because if they don't, those players are probably going to go to ... the Yankees or the Dodgers, who will spend the money and (probably) win World Series titles. And if the Royals will spend to keep these players, they will have to become the Yankees or the Dodgers, thus proving that might indeed makes right in baseball, and that there has to be spending controls to ensure that all MLB teams have a real chance of winning championships.
Or, and this is where I might really lose you, are the Royals and Royals fans going to accept that baseball is still unfair when it comes to spending money on players but not care anyway. They got theirs, and sure, they might face another decade where they won't even sniff the playoffs (there are still many teams that can't or won't spend money and they, logically, suck), but for one glorious year, they were on top of the world. And that will be enough for that fanbase -- for ten, 20, 30 years, as the Yankees and Dodgers and Cardinals and Giants win two or three World Series between them (ETA on 2:28 a.m. on November 2 that I think I meant to say "apiece" -- the Yanks and L.A. and St. Louis and San Fran will win two or three World Series apiece). I am really paranoid that small-market teams will be OK being small-market teams, so long as they can get a nibble every now and then. In other words, they will accept their role as ultimate subservients -- slaves -- to the big clubs as they get more and clubs like the Royals and the Twins have to settle for less.
See where I'm going with this? That future is what I can't help but think when I know the World Series is on. So I don't want to deal with this collective consent to ignorance and subjugation that's about to happen once this series is over and David is shown to have beaten the Goliaths of baseball. That's why I'm not watching.
Now, saying that, I kind of have to root for the Royals, because a friend of mine is a huge Royals fan. But he doesn't know I feel this way. And please, don't tell him.
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