Photo courtesy of the Tampa Bay Rays
Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Randy Arozarena
The next few days will feature the crowning of a new World Series champion, but their impact might be greater than just that.
The Dodgers and Rays have played a series for the ages, a battle of contrasting styles that has already produced memories to last a lifetime and added some credibility to the championship of this bizarre season. The winner may leave behind a legacy that lasts well into the future and, depending on the outcome of the next few days, that could take baseball in one of two very different directions.
The Dodgers, of course, are contending in baseball’s most traditional way. They led the National League and were second in all of baseball in player payroll in 2020, a total that would have topped $222 million over the course of a full season. While they haven’t dominated free agency the way some of the game’s past super-spenders have, they came into the spring with four players scheduled to make $20 million or more. They recently acquired one of the game’s best players in Mookie Betts, then signed him to a $365 million extension.
This year the Dodgers had one of the best regular season winning percentages in MLB history. They’ve won the NL West in each of the last eight seasons, and they’ve represented the National League in three of the last four World Series. They’ve been massively successful, but some of their legacy has been tarnished a bit due to the fact that they’ve come up short in the postseason. If they win Game 6 or 7 it will serve as another reminder that trophies and the opportunities to win them are often more accessible to the game’s highest spenders.
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The Underdog
The Rays, on the other hand, are on the opposite end of the spectrum. They had the fourth smallest payroll in all of baseball in 2020, and their most expensive season this century (2017) cost about a third of what the Dodgers routinely spend. Despite the fact that they were easily the American League’s best team during the regular season, the Rays have felt like an underdog throughout this series.
If the Rays manage to dig themselves out of a hole this week and win their first World Series it will be a remarkable story of efficiency. The fact that they’re able to routinely compete with fewer resources than those available to their rivals is remarkable and a testament to the skills of their front office and scouting staff. Their success, however, could provide cover for many of their mid-market competitors to avoid putting money into their rosters.
While the Rays have been extremely successful on the field, they’re also one of four teams to recently face a grievance from the MLB Players Association alleging they kept revenue sharing dollars instead of spending them on player payroll. Their celebrated thrift continues a long trend of teams who succeed with low payroll being treated as plucky underdog stories while generating more profit for their owners.
The “Moneyball” Oakland Athletics of the early 2000’s are perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon. They won with a low budget in those years by building around young, cost-controlled pitching and finding market inefficiencies, players with undervalued skills. There was a best-selling book and a movie written about them. In the end, however, one of the lasting legacies of their success is that other teams recognized one of their own inefficient processes: Signing aging free agents to large contracts. Over the course of the following years, the result was a seismic shift in the free agent market as teams largely stopped giving out those deals. It hasn’t always been clear how or if those savings were reinvested. Certainly, the extra money did not find its way to the sport’s young players.
The Price Tag?
For a segment of fans and sometimes writers, salaries are often treated as a weapon to use to criticize players who aren’t meeting their expectations. This has always been the case: James S. Hirsch’s excellent biography Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend features many recountings of columnists complaining that Mays wasn’t living up to his price tag, even when he was one of the greatest players of all time and was earning less than $100,000 per year until his 16th MLB season.
What those same critics often seem to forget is that the sport of baseball is making lots of money, even in challenging economic times. Revenues that don’t go to the players aren’t returned to the fans, they become property of the owners. The Moneyball A’s and, to a lesser extent, this Rays team made it a trendy thing for teams to follow their model, shy away from spending on players and keep more of the money generated by the sport’s continued growth for themselves. These Rays could be a monument to payroll suppression, an oft-repeated reminder that teams can keep their expenses low to make more money and if they manage to win anyway, they’ll be celebrated for it across the game.
It’s been a longstanding baseball notion that less successful teams look to World Series winners and attempt to emulate their models to rebuild their own franchises. That argument is likely overblown: Most MLB front office executives almost certainly already recognize that the Dodgers and Rays have already both been very successful for a long time. A World Series win would add a level of credibility to their tactics, however, and a win this week by the Dodgers or Rays could tip the scales in two very different directions.
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